The making of a TV icon: How Barnsley coalminer’s son Michael Parkinson left school at 16 with two O-levels defied critics who said he would never make it to become King of the Chatshow
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 will never add up to much,’ said that cane-wielding head.
After an early screen test as a newsreader, Parkinson was told by a 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 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 proved all his critics wrong. In a stellar career 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.
Sir Michael Parkinson (pictured on his sofa), remarked as the raconteur ‘king of the chat show’, has died aged 88
Sir Michael Parkinson was awarded a CBE from Prince Charles in 2000, which he said he received for ‘nothing more than walking down the stairs and talking to people’
Parkinson, sitting in the radio studio after being announced as the new presenter of Desert Island Discs in November 1985
Sir Michael, who was fondly called ‘Parky’ by friends and fans, presented his programme Parkinson from 1971 to 1982 and again from 1998 to 2007
Parky presented more than 2,000 BBC interviews which were beamed into up to 17million homes on a Saturday night
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 like Jimmy Stewart to intellectuals like Jacob Bronowski.
He 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, nobody ever did it better.
In some respects, he was an unlikely television star. The son of a coalminer from 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 and 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, he 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 he transferred 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.
Sir Michael Parkinson pictured with his friend and famous interviewee Muhammad Ali in 1981
Sir Michael Parkinson pictured with Tom Jones who he interviewed on his chat show in 1987
Parkinson pictured at TV-AM studios with his wife Mary, who he married in 1959
Michael Parkinson and Bob Hoskins pictured while filming a sketch shown for the third ever Red Nose Day in 1991
In 1971, he spoke to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in one of his earliest episodes of his chat show Parkinson on BBC1
Yet the quest for perfection is what drove him to the top. Parkinson himself said that the secret of his enduring success lay in his strength of his preparation.
When asked in 2009 what had been ‘his trick,’ 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 that 10 can make the 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 just two O-levels, he was a well-read autodidact with impressive 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 appealing traits was that he brought the enthusiasm of the genuine fan to his television work, especially when he was interviewing attractive female celebrities like 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 he ever went further. ‘No, I promise you, not at all,’ he said in a 2012 interview.
Michael Parkinson, pictured in the middle row below the lightbulb, at a social event for the Barnsley branch of the National Union of journalists in the late 1950s
Michael Parkinson with Irish comedian Spike Milligan, who he interviewed on his BBC chat show in 1987
Young presenter Michael Parkinson fronting Granada In the North in Leeds studio in 1958
Parkinson speaking to fellow chat show host Jonathan Ross when he was interviewed on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross in 2008
His easy rapport with most guests meant that his crib sheet was merely an aid, not a script to follow. Sometimes he did not need it at all.
When the great Orson Welles saw Parkinson’s pile of questions just before an interview, he said, ‘throw those away and let’s just talk.’ Parkinson did so. The subsequent programme was one of his most memorable.
Sometimes 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, later admitting that ‘I blundered on to a point where I could feel her hostility.’
During his second run on the BBC, sex was also the cause of a disastrous 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. It’s crazy. 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 Berkshire and a knighthood.
That was all a far cry from his upbringing in the south Yorkshire village of Cudworth, where he was born in 1935. Both his father Jack and grandfather worked in the nearby Grimethorpe colliery, 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.
Sir Michael was last seen in April with his friend and cricket umpire Dickie Bird (pictured), who was celebrating his 90th birthday in Leeds
Parkinson with the king of Hammer horror films Vincent Price in 1974
Parkinson pictured with guest, revered actor Richard Harris, who starred as Professor Dumbledore in the first Harry Potter film, in 1987
Sir Michael in 1987 with Sir Billy Connolly, who he counted as one of his favourite guests and he praised the comedian as ‘a natural funny man’
Parkinson with wife Mary and their three sons Andrew, Michael and Nicholas
Despite the adversity, his was a loving home. In fact, so stable was family that in 2009 the genealogical TV show Who Do You Think You Are had 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 Sir Michael’s 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 a match at Datchet. 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 never had any intention of following his father down the 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 with a three-year apprenticeship as a junior reporter on 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 be an advantage, for he was recruited by the public relations team of the War Office and even saw action during the Suez Crisis in 1956, ‘a frightening and exhilarating time’, he later recalled. His grasp of a story, his self-assurance in a crisis and his empathy with journalists all combined to make him the 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 he renewed his career as a journalist, working for the Barnsley Chronicle, then the Yorkshire Evening Post.
Parkinson in 1999 with his BAFTA Television award for Best Light Entertainment Performance at Grosvenor House in London
Michael Parkinson presents the programme Scene At 6.30 on Grenada in 1963
Another of Parkinson’s most memorable guests was Dame Edna Everage, who frequently flirted with the TV talk show host
Paul McCartney and Michael Parkinson picturd in 1998. Parkinson was photographed for the cover of McCartney’s 1973 album ‘Band on the Run’ 25 years earlier
Footballer George Best (right) was one of Michael Parkinson’s favourite guests and became a close friend
It during this time that he fell in love with Mary Heneghan, a primary school teacher, who had tragically lost both her parents before she was 18.
Before they met, Parkinson’s shyness in female company had 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.
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. He finally pulled himself together after Mary told him, ‘when you have a drink, you become ugly.’
His fame and workload meant that 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. And even when he was there he was a rather forbidding presence. 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, well-rewarded 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 had his big break, when he was recruited by Granada to present its Cinema show, where he began to demonstrate his talent for interviewing film stars, among them 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!”’
Parkinson was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to television in 2008 which he remarked as a ‘very great honour’
Parkinson’s interview with Helen Mirren in 1975 was famously prickly. In another interview years later the pair laughed about their edgy first meeting
Fashion designer Mary Quant tries out one of her new range of neckties on Michael Parkinson in 1976
Michael Parkinson interviewing Rod Hull and Emu in 1976 where he was famously, and comically, attacked
Journalist David Frost; Viscount Linley and interviewer Michael Parkinson sit on Centre Court for the semi-final match between Tommy Haas of Germany and Roger Federer in 2009
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 the American comedienne Joan Rivers what she looked for in a man, she replied ‘a pulse’.
He always said his favourite interviews were with the boxer Muhammed Ali, ‘the most remarkable human being I have ever encountered,’ but there were numerous other memorable guests like Peter Sellers who came on the show dressed as an SS officer because he was too neurotic to appear as himself.
The first run came to an end in 1982 after 800 shows, but Parky was never out of the public eye. Following a short-lived stint on the doomed breakfast show TV-AM, he worked variously as a radio host, an acclaimed sports columnist, and a presenter of television programmes like 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 land he loved, not least because of its devotion to cricket. Then in 1997, 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 like 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 work as a writer and an ambassador for several charities, he became something of a professional curmudgeon with his withering views about 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 cancer with typical Yorkshire grit, stoical to the end.
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 the British television.