Michael Parkinson obituary: ‘Best interviewer in the business’

Born March 28th, 1935

Died August 16th, 2023

Speaking to The Irish Times in 2016, Michael Parkinson, who has died in Berkshire at the age of 88, explained that, growing up in Yorkshire, he got the notion of becoming a journalist from Hollywood movies. Parkinson remembered “watching Humphrey Bogart with a trilby on saying things like ‘hold the front page, sister’.” He achieved that ambition, working for the Daily Express and the Manchester Guardian (as it then still was) in his cub years, but he will be best remembered for perfecting the art of the television interview during the 1970s. His conversations with the likes of Muhammad Ali, David Niven, Orson Welles and Billy Connolly were masterpieces of creative prodding. That journalistic training held him in good stead. He always researched in depth. He knew how to counter evasion. But his greatest attribute was a willingness to listen. This was not just a promotional exercise. It was a conversation. “You knew that he would do his homework, and that he would ask questions that didn’t occur to you, as well as those that did,” Sir David Attenborough remarked after his death. “I thought he was the best interviewer in the business.”

Parkinson greeted the accusation he was a “professional Yorkshireman” with reasonable good humour. “Oh, I take it to be a compliment,” he said. He was, indeed, born near Barnsley to a miner father. As a youngster, he played club cricket and pursued that obsession with popular cinema. Encouraged to read by a dedicated mother, he made it to Barnsley grammar school, leaving at 16 to work on the South Yorkshire Times. National Service took him to the Suez Canal, where he acted as “press liaison” during the disastrous Anglo-French intervention.

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Back in England, he worked at the Guardian and Express before moving to the still-embryonic world of television. After a spell in current affairs at Granada and on the BBC magazine programme Twenty-Four Hours, he embarked on the first incarnation of the Parkinson show in 1971. It fast became appointment viewing (as nobody then said) on Saturday night. Not yet dragooned into the promotional junket aesthetic, Hollywood stars – the older ones with memories of the studio system still fresh – were invited to stretch out and deliver uncut versions of their best anecdotes. They then remained for the rest of the show to laugh at Kenneth Williams’s jokes or nod along to Prof Jacob Bronowski’s pronouncements on the history of science.

[ Meg Ryan, Graham Norton, cancer and me: Michael Parkinson at 80 ]

[ Michael Parkinson on George Best: ‘We became friends and that was it’ ]

In 1973, Richard Harris, a perfect guest, danced around the set as he told a story that concluded with his mother, at an early, iffy Shakespeare performance, audibly trilling “Isn’t he marvellous?” from the front row. Parkinson was an instant devotee of George Best and, after welcoming the Belfast footballer often to his home, published a book entitled George Best: A Memoir in 2018. “We became friends and that was it,” he told The Irish Times. “I wasn’t wrong in my choice of friends, and I hope he wasn’t either.”

His most memorable encounters were, perhaps, with the always engaging Muhammad Ali. The four interviews, during which the boxer was alternately playful and defensive, stretched from fading prime in 1971 to overdue retirement in 1981. “He wasn’t fit. I would feel it. It was awful, so feeble,” the interviewer said of their last meeting. The two men, neither short of ego, exchanged the odd tense glare, but Parkinson eventually concluded the boxer was “the most extraordinary man I’ve ever met”.

Parkinson did his best to seem amused that interviews with Rod Hull and his psychopathic emu puppet Emu were, in subsequent years, brought up almost as much as those meetings with Ali. More troubling in retrospect was a 1975 interview – largely ignored at the time – in which he described Helen Mirren as “projecting slutty eroticism” and asked about her “physical attributes”. Speaking to this newspaper shortly after the video was rediscovered online, Mirren remarked: “It was completely inappropriate. And it struck me so at the time. It was insulting.” In 2019, Parkinson acknowledged the interview “was of its time, and of its time it’s embarrassing”.

The Parkinson show worked because of the leisurely format. It worked because guests ranged from end-of-the-pier comedians to distinguished actors to respected scientists (though he always regretted not securing Frank Sinatra). It worked because the host engaged enthusiastically with guests whose publicists did not demand they talk only of the “content” being promoted. The first strand ran until 1982 on the BBC. It was revived for a year by ITV in 1987 went back to the BBC in 1998 and switched once more to the commercial broadcaster in 2004. That run ended in 2007. An incarnation called Parkinson: Masterclass ran on Sky Arts from 2012 to 2014.

Parkinson spoke warmly of Graham Norton, his successor on Saturday night: “He’s very clever. He’s brighter, he’s funnier than all the rest. He’s not sycophantic”

Meanwhile Parkinson was busy across the broadcasting spectrum. With Anna Ford, Robert Kee, David Frost and Peter Jay, he completed the starry line-up that launched the TV-AM breakfast channel in 1982. The station struggled before Roland Rat – “the only rat to join a sinking ship” – arrived as unlikely saviour. Parkinson’s slot on Saturday morning was actually a rare opening hit for TV-AM, but, after many convulsions, he had left the station by early 1984. A few years later Parkinson had a brief, controversial spell as successor to Roy Plomley on the durable BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs. Plomley’s widow, revealing the Yorkshireman still retained a degree of outsider status, declared: “I don’t think he’s civilised enough.”

In later years, Parkinson balanced grumpiness about the current state of broadcasting with some generosity towards the next generation. He supported former Labour home secretary David Blunkett “when he described the ‘worship’ of the ‘cult of youth’ by modern TV bosses as ‘an unstoppable fetish’”. And yet, in an interview earlier this year with the New Statesman, he spoke warmly of Graham Norton, his successor on Saturday night. “He’s very clever,” Parkinson said. “He’s brighter, he’s funnier than all the rest. He’s not sycophantic.”

Knighted in 2008, he remained happy to connect with fans, but was aware that certain ghosts would always haunt him.

“You walk among people and people are generally nice to you,” he told The Irish Times. “But you know, lurking at the back of their evil minds, they’re dying to say: ‘Where’s the emu then?’”

Parkinson is survived by his wife, Mary, also a busy journalist, whom he married in 1959, and by their three sons.