Predictions of failure littered the life of Michael Parkinson. When he was a pupil at Barnsley Grammar School at the start of the 1950s, he was thrashed by his headmaster for a minor misdemeanour. “Unless you buck up, Parkinson, you’ll never add up to much,” said that cane-wielding head.
After an early screen test as a newsreader, Parkinson was told by one senior executive at ITN: “If you take my advice, you’ll forget about television.”
Even at the height of his fame, reports that he had been offered the job as host of the BBC Radio 4 series desert island discs prompted the widow of the show’s creator, Roy Plomley, to declare: “I don’t think he’s civilised enough.”
But Parkinson, who died after a short illness at the age of 88, proved all his critics wrong.
In a stellar career that lasted decades, he became an icon of British broadcasting. His face and voice were cherished fixtures on the airwaves; his very name was synonymous with the best in entertainment.
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He pioneered the chat show in Britain, bringing phenomenal popularity to the genre through his ability to engage with an extraordinary range of guests, from Hollywood legends, including Jimmy Stewart, to intellectuals such as Jacob Bronowski.
Parkinson joked that the talk show is “an unnatural act between consenting adults in public”, but, in the course of interviewing around 2,000 people on air, no one ever did it better.
In some respects, he was an unlikely television star. the son of a coal miner who grew up in a village near Barnsley, he had neither a smoothness of manner nor conventional good looks.
His thick Yorkshire accent was matched by his craggy appearance, which once caused him to lament: “I was born looking middle-aged — I had bags at 23.”
Nor was he renowned for his sartorial elegance. the imperious actress dame edith evans, who made her debut on his show at the age of 85, told him: “Get rid of that brown suit. It neither fits nor flatters.”
Moreover, Parkinson was a prickly, proud figure with a short temper and a streak of impatience. despite the enormous success of his chat show, he fell out twice with the BBc, the first time in 1982 when he became demoralised at planned changes to its format, the second in 2002 in a scheduling row after a much-acclaimed comeback.
After transferring to ITV, he clashed badly with the station’s boss in another dispute. “I said to him that unless he took the contract away, he’d find it shoved somewhere he didn’t like,” recalled Parkinson, whose avuncular screen image was often at odds with his demanding style.
“We have a fairly high attrition rate when it comes to researchers,” said one of his producers.
Yet his quest for perfection is what drove him to the top. Parkinson himself said the secret of his enduring success lay in the strength of his preparation. When asked in 2014 what ”his trick” had been, he replied: “Research, thorough research.
“You must know more about your subject than they have forgotten themselves. You might only use 10 per cent of it, but difference.” But there was far more to it than that. Parkinson had a profound curiosity about people, which meant he was both a natural listener and a probing interrogator.
Although he had left school at 16 with only two O-levels, he was a well-read autodidact with an impressivet 10 can make the breadth of interests, including sport, comedy, literature, music and the theatre.
Crucially, he had also been a successful local and national journalist for almost 20 years before he began his BBC show in 1971.
Having encompassed everything from wars to party conferences, the experience not only honed his gift for language but also enhanced his self-confidence.
Yet he rarely allowed his own ego to overshadow those of his stars. “It’s the guest that matters — not you,” he said.
Indeed, one of his most appealing traits was that he brought the enthusiasm of genuine fans to his TV work, especially when he was interviewing attractive female celebrities such as Shirley MacLaine.
“When I started, I was young enough to flirt with beautiful women and old enough not to be frightened by them,” he recalled, though, happily married, he denied that he ever went further.
“No, I promise you, not at all,” he said in a 2012 interview. His easy rapport with most of his star guests meant his crib sheet was merely an aid — not a script to follow. And sometimes, he did not need it at all.
When the great Orson Welles saw Parkinson’s list of questions just before an interview, he said: “Throw those away and let’s just talk.”
Parkinson did so, and the subsequent programme was one of his most memorable.
Sometimes, though, the magic did not work. He had an awkward encounter in 1975 with a young Helen Mirren when he relentlessly focused on her physical allure. He would later admit: “I blundered on to a point where I could feel her hostility.”
During his second run at the BBC, sex was also the cause of a disastrous 2003 interview with Meg Ryan, during which he questioned her decision to appear in an erotically charged thriller.
Ryan was furious at his tone and, amid growing frostiness, told him to “wrap it up”. She later described Parkinson as a “rude twerp”, adding that he “was like some disapproving father. I don’t know what he is to you guys, but he’s a nut”.
Perhaps even more embarrassing for Parkinson was the notorious moment in 1976 when he was repeatedly attacked by Emu, the manic avian glove puppet belonging to entertainer Rod Hull.
The incident, which culminated in Parkinson lying sprawled on the studio floor, became part of television history, much to his regret.
But, whatever he felt, the antics of “that bloody bird” paled beside his achievements, which brought him fame, wealth, a riverside home in Bray, Berkshire, and a knighthood in 2008.
That was all a far cry from his upbringing in the South Yorkshire village of Cudworth, where he was born in March 1935.
Both his father, Jack, and grandfather worked in the nearby Grimethorpe colliery, which was one of the deepest mines in England and a dominant feature in Parkinson’s childhood.
“Every morning I woke, I could see the pit from my bedroom window. When you couldn’t see it, you could smell it, an invisible sulphurous presence,” he wrote in his autobiography.
Despite the adversity, his was a loving home. In fact, so stable was his family that in 2009 the genealogical TV show Who Do You Think You Are? decided to drop him as a potential subject because, in the words of the production team, he had “the most boring background of anyone we have so far researched”.
More scathing was one of Sir Michael’s cousins, who described Parkinson’s father as “bombastic, ignorant, arrogant, interfering, grumpy, selfish and money-grabbing”.
But Parkinson, an only child, was devoted to both his parents. From his mother, Freda, a refined, intelligent woman whose voracious reading was fuelled by her frustration at the limited horizons of mining life, he inherited a fierce ambition and a thirst for knowledge.
From his father, he was bequeathed a profound love of cricket. Drilled throughout his childhood in the principles of the game, Parkinson was a good enough batsman to keep Geoff Boycott out of the Barnsley team on one occasion in the mid-1950s.
So deep was his devotion to the sport that on another occasion, he turned down an invitation from Hugh Hefner to spend a weekend at the Playboy Mansion because he was playing in a match at Datchet near Windsor.
Given trials by Yorkshire and Hampshire, Parkinson might have pursued a career in first-class cricket. But from the age of 16, he had decided on a very different path. He had never had any intention of following his father down Grimethorpe pit, which seemed to him “a bloody awful life”.
Instead, fired by his dream of celebrity glamour and his fondness for literature, he became a journalist, starting a three-year apprenticeship as a junior reporter for the South Yorkshire Times.
His ascent up the Press ladder looked like it would be interrupted in 1955 when he was called up for National Service, but conscription turned out to be an advantage, for the public relations team of the War Office recruited him. And he even saw active service during the Suez Crisis in 1956, “a frightening and exhilarating time”, he recalled.
His grasp of a story, his self-assurance in a crisis and his empathy with journalists all combined to see him become the then-youngest captain in the British Army.
At the end of his National Service, he briefly worked as a forklift truck driver in a glassworks before renewing his career as a newspaper journalist, working for the Barnsley Chronicle and later the Yorkshire Evening Post.
It was during this time that he fell in love with Mary Heneghan, a young primary school teacher who had tragically lost both her parents before she was 18.
The couple met on the top deck of a bus in Yorkshire. Parkinson’s shyness in female company had previously inhibited his relationships, as Mary recalled: “He didn’t have a good opinion of himself at all, physically.”
But after one date, she was captivated: “I always found him exciting. There was a dangerous quality there. Here we were in a small northern town, but he was so well-read that he was already in America, in the rest of the world, in his mind.”
They married in Doncaster in 1959, and it turned out to be a strong union, producing three sons. Mary went on to have her own successful career on TV.
There were some rough patches, particularly in the late 1970s when Parkinson started to drink heavily because of work pressures and the shattering death of his beloved father. But he finally pulled himself together after Mary told him: “When you have a drink, you become ugly.”
His fame and workload meant parenthood was not always easy for him. “If I am brutally honest, I was an absentee father,” he once said, a view echoed by his son, Mike, who became a producer.
“Dad’s work did take him away from us. Even when he was there, he was a rather forbidding presence,” he said. “He didn’t mean to be, but he could be cruel at times.”
Sir Michael’s rise to stardom in the 1970s had been anything but meteoric. Long spells with the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Express as a feature writer had been accompanied by unfulfilling attempts to establish himself as a foreign correspondent, TV producer and sports reporter.
But in 1969, he got his big break when he was recruited by Granada Television to present its Cinema show, where he began to demonstrated his talent for interviewing film stars, among them Sir Laurence Olivier.
The great actor had recalled Parkinson, “a slightly camp manner and fabulous memories of Marilyn Monroe, whom he came to adore: ‘Mind you, she was more a model than an actress, Michael!’”
Cinema led, two years later, to the launch of the Parkinson Show by the BBC. With its glittering line-ups and assured host, it was an immediate hit, quickly becoming part of the national fabric.
The chemistry was potent, the chat compelling, the humour rich. When Parky, as he was soon affectionately nicknamed, asked U.S. comic Joan Rivers what she looked for in a man, she replied: “A pulse.”
Parkinson always said his favourite interviews were with the boxer Muhammad Ali, “the most remarkable human being I have ever encountered”,; but there were numerous other memorable guests, including Pink Panther star Peter Sellers, who came on the show dressed as an SS officer because he was too neurotic to appear as himself.
The first series came to an end in 1982 after 800 shows, but Parky was never out of work. After a short-lived stint on the doomed breakfast show TV-AM, he was a radio host, acclaimed sports columnist, and presenter of such TV programmes as Going For A Song and All-Star Secrets.
“I practised the Michael Caine theory of employment. This involves accepting anything legal that is offered in the certain knowledge that a lot of it will be forgettable, even risible,” he wrote.
He also developed a second career as a revered broadcaster in Australia, a country he loved, not least because of its devotion to cricket. Then, in 1998, after the release of DVDs of his first run proved hugely popular, he was restored to his rightful place as the BBC’s star interviewer.
With a switch to ITV in 2004, the second series lasted until 2007. Featuring a string of A-list celebrities, including David Beckham, Billy Connolly and Dame Judi Dench, the final show in the series was itself a reflection of Parky’s stature.
Even after his retirement, he was rarely out of the limelight. As well as working as a writer and being an ambassador for several charities, he became something of a professional curmudgeon with his withering views on modern Britain, especially the state of television.
He even fell out briefly with his friend Billy Connolly through public comments about the Scottish comedian’s supposed mental and physical decline. But he bore his own ordeal of prostate cancer in 2013 with typical Yorkshire grit and was given the all-clear from the disease in 2015.
Not long before he died, he wrote a poignant, evocative book about his tender relationship with his father. In its humour, charm, humanity and vivid language, it embodied the qualities that had made Sir Michael the king of British television.