A bit Parky - Michael Parkinson interview

CHAT show king Sir Michael Parkinson always admitted flirting was part of his interview armoury, and when I ask about it, he says absolutely, he's doing it now. Honest to God, if I'd noticed I'd have joined in.

They must do things differently in Cudworth, the Yorkshire village where Parky comes from, because, far from cooing sweetly, he has that slightly belligerent, hawk-like quality that I have come across before in older male interviewers, like John Humphrys. It's exhausting.

I try some gentle teasing about the fact that as a young man he sounded a bit of a chancer, but the question is only half out (it would eventually have buttered him up about whether finding his niche in television interviewing made him the professional he became) when he swoops immediately. It's a bit strange because in his autobiography he pokes fun at himself, giving endless examples of his idleness and inefficiency, including his boss describing him as "a lazy bugger", but now he says reprovingly that he was just an unlikely candidate for some of the jobs he did. Maybe that's just his blunt way of saying, "I'll do t'jokes round here, lass – you can take me seriously." Or maybe it's Yorkshire flirting.

Anyway, I'm not inclined to let him away with it, so while he reminds me that he was the youngest captain in the British army, I remind him that he lied to get there. You were supposed to have five O levels – he only had two but he told bosses his certificate was missing because his elderly aunt had been knocked over by a double-decker bus on the way to the post. "Oh that was just overcoming bullshit, frankly. I mean… you can't apply for this because you don't have the credentials? Well that's nonsense. How many people would be excluded if we all stuck to that?" Perhaps, when it comes to army captains, he has a point, though I wouldn't necessarily like to see the principle extended to surgeons (I want to take your appendix out and see no reason why the absence of a medical degree should be a barrier), or the director of the local nuclear station. "What," he continues indignantly, "I was going to tell them I had two O levels, which would stop them making me an officer? Are you mad?" I'll take that question as the quaint courting ritual he obviously intends.

Clearly, Parkinson is not one to undersell himself. He came from an impoverished mining village and went on to interview the world's greatest stars, Hollywood legends like Fred Astaire, James Cagney and Bette Davis, but when asked which environment he felt most comfortable in, he says he doesn't feel uncomfortable in any environment. As a young man, he might have been intimidated by better-educated people. "But if you have half a sense of talent and a lot of energy, more likely you would be better than they would. That's a lesson I learned quite early on. The majority of people I came up against in life who were antagonistic towards me weren't antagonistic because I came from a working-class area or had a funny accent, but because I was actually cleverer than they were or better at my job than they were."

But every so often, just as you're thinking a little humility wouldn't go amiss, the granite cragginess of his expression gives way to something softer, the eyes becoming suffused with humour. We're in two black leather chairs, placed opposite one another at a window overlooking London's Oxford Street, the wail of emergency sirens breaking through the glass. The kind of chair reminiscent of the Parkinson set. Of course, this time he's in the interviewee chair.

I can only hope his guests were more easily snared than he was. Discussions have gone on for months. Could I do it by phone? No. Could he confirm dates? No. He's very busy. Since he has now retired from TV and radio, it's amazing he ever fitted work in. Confirmation finally came just a few days before the interview, and my possible return flights from London were full. Could he make it half an hour earlier? No. On the day, interview time is cut by an abrasive man who stands glowering in the corner. But clearly Parkinson has been oblivious to arrangements, and soothes things immediately. Here's his mobile number. Ring if I have other questions. It's a generous gesture that, frankly, few interviewees would make.

Later, I ask someone who that glowering man was. "His son." Ah.

FATHERS AND SONS are a theme in this story. From the window of his childhood home, Parkinson could see the colliery where his father, Jack, worked. He could smell the sulphur in the air. But in later years, it was looking at his father's hardened hands that conjured up that mining community most vividly. Jack Parkinson never wanted his only child to work down the mine, and Michael shared his view. He wanted a job where his hands stayed soft: journalism. But he didn't want to be stuck at the South Yorkshire Times, still riding around on a bicycle rounding up births, marriages and deaths stories when he was 45. He wanted success.

Many years later, when he had achieved it, his father was dying, partly from the miners' lung disease pneumoconiosis. Parkinson's wife Mary took him to their home. She and Jack adored one another, and it was to Mary that his father had confided his wish not to die in hospital. Michael would sit with his dad and find himself drawn to the hands resting on the covers. "He had these extraordinary hands," he recalls, "calloused but nicely shaped, nice nails, and I always remember when I was a kid and had my hand in his that it was very reassuring. When he was dying, I used to look at him and think, 'One day I will write a book called Like Father Like Son?' On the cover would be my hand and my father's hand. It was my first thought about the autobiography."

The miner and the layabout, he says. In the end, his autobiography was simply called Parky, but he did include that hands memory. It's a passage of such exquisite, understated tenderness that once read, you would be certain of more than gruffness in Parkinson. "For some reason," he concludes in the book, "this memory made me feel ashamed and filled my mind with the unbearable thought that his hands represented all he had done to enable me to enjoy a view of the river and an easy life."

Parkinson's was a warm, secure childhood. "My only problem growing up was that both sets of grandparents lived next door to each other, 300 yards from where I lived. Sometimes, when mum and dad were working, I had to get tea there at night, but I had three aunties who lived along the way and sometimes they all claimed me. By the time I'd left my grandparents, I'd had four meals. I should be the fattest person you've ever interviewed."

Many of his friends didn't have it so good. "Their dads were drunk and maybe they beat their mums up, and while I never saw that, I witnessed the consequences. My parents never laid a finger on me." He smiles. "Well… my mother would throw things occasionally. But it was a lovely childhood and gave me a great sense of family."

His mother, who died last year aged 96, was "the engine" of his ambition. She was very bright but her family scrimped and saved to send only her brother to grammar school. They borrowed £600 and were still paying it back 20 years later. "She never lost a very deep sense of insult, and so channelled all that ambition into me. She was a very remarkable lady. And she was right. It was unfair. I was the first generation freed by the education act. We had a choice our parents didn't, and I was always very aware of that, of how lucky I had been. That great, progressive Labour government from 1945 onwards transformed society."

When you educate the working classes, he says, stand back. Things will change. "It was our generation that produced the Sixties, that wonderful explosion of working-class talent that overtook the arts and changed things. My accent… I couldn't have got a job at the BBC as a doorman, for God's sake. But because of what happened, after a while you had to have an accent like mine to become a journalist at the BBC. That was transformation."

But why, when describing his father's hands, did he use the word 'shame'? "The shame that this good man had actually been forced into an occupation which killed him in the end. It wasn't entirely pneumoconiosis but it was a big contributory factor, so that's what I was ashamed of, a society that convicted him, if you like, to a life down the pit." Not personal guilt, then? "Well, then there's the guilt that I escaped and he didn't. That, I suppose, is a definition of the guilt I felt. I had got away. Without the grammar school, I would have been down the pit. There was no alternative."

People often spend the first part of their lives claiming they won't be like their mum or dad, the second part having children and suddenly understanding their parents, and the later part slowly turning into them. Parkinson didn't become a miner but did he end up like his father? "I grew up into the creation my mother wanted me to be, and when I got older I hope I became more like my father, though I doubt I would ever have his gift for simplicity. He only cared about cricket and me and his wife. He was a very happy and contented man."

Understandably, Parkinson had looked visibly emotional talking about his father's hands. "I could barely type that. My typewriter (no word-processing for him] was awash with tears. I think I acknowledged my grief for him. I wasn't any good with grief, I wasn't experienced with grief, and I didn't know what to do when he died. I just cut him off. So, doing this book, I had to start thinking about what I did remember that I had shoved to one side."

I suspect he shoves quite a lot to one side but he seems a bit grumpy at that suggestion too. Why would I say that? Because not only does he use the expression "cut off" about his dad's death, but several times in the book he describes turning away from things he doesn't want to face. He also mentions refusing to give the Sportsman of the Millennium award to Muhammad Ali, with whom he had several special encounters. "But I wouldn't want to face Ali out of sympathy for him," he protests. "Why would you want to look at a man who was once the most beautiful, graceful athlete in the world, who's now a wreck who can't control his limbs?"

But Ali chose to be there. "No. My view of that was that he was being paraded around like some prize exhibit. He wasn't capable of making a judgement. He was being wheeled around like a man in a wheelbarrow." His advisers should have stopped him fighting long before but they did, he argues. Ali fought two fights after failing simple neurological tests. "The consequences of that decision are what you see now. When you have gloried in the sight of a great athlete, why would you want to watch his demise? Not me, madam. Not at all. It's a reporter's job to assess and make a judgement about things."

In which case, I'll hazard the judgement that Parkinson's attitude is motivated by genuine concern and affection for Ali, but is perhaps revealing too. Perhaps his question should be turned around. Why would the world glory in the beauty and magnificence of an athlete, but turn away from him when he becomes damaged? Youth yields to age, beauty to blemishes and health to handicap. That is life: a process of painful change. But Ali is still Ali in that terrible, broken body. If the world manipulated him, as Parkinson suggests, if the world switched on their television sets to watch him in those final fights, then the world should look him in the eye now. Turn away from boxing, by all means. But turning away from the damaged boxer is simply turning from the guilt and discomfort he generates.

When Parkinson cut off the grief of his father's death, he found himself drinking heavily. He went to a psychiatrist. This surprising revelation (he's a bit gruff for self-discovery) is dismissed in a single sentence in his book. He seems uncomfortable when asked about it. "My wife persuaded me to see a shrink. It was a lesson in 'don't go to shrinks', basically. Sort yourself out. I only mention it because I am the last person to seek psychiatric care." If the psychiatrist could have helped him, would Parkinson still have blocked him? "I didn't need help," he protests. So what was he doing there? "It was common sense. If you're drinking too much, then stop." Mary gave him the key. She told him drink made him ugly, and that hit home.

He thinks he didn't have the gene to become an alcoholic. Not like his friend George Best, who used to come and stay with him, bringing his latest lady friend. "He wasn't going to change, no matter how ill he became, no matter how many implants he had. He couldn't stop, but I have always been able to stop." Alcohol wasn't Parkinson's problem, just a symptom of it. But interestingly, he used similar tactics to Best to avoid facing things. "I remember Bestie telling me that when Matt Busby used to call him in to give him a bollocking, he used to count the birds on the wallpaper behind Busby. I went to the psychiatrist once, stared over his left shoulder, counted patterns on the wallpaper and nodded." Two years after his father's death, he found a photograph of him and cried for an hour. Afterwards, he felt purged.

PARKINSON'S FAMOUS BBC show began in 1971, and would continue for over a decade. In the early 1980s, discussions took place to extend it to five nights a week, like Johnny Carson's show in America. Plans fell through and Parkinson departed for stints in Australia, where he was equally successful. He continued working in newspapers and radio but wasn't brought back for a new BBC series until 1998. Yet somehow, he never faded from public consciousness as a major force of British television interviewing. When the BBC brought back Match of the Day on Saturday nights, he moved to ITV, but eventually new executives moved in and Parkinson was pushed out. His final series, last year, signalled the end of the traditional chat show, with only the comedy variety of Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton remaining. Do the public still want proper conversation on television? "Of course they do," he says stoutly. Viewing figures proved it.

Sometimes, he was criticised for being too deferential. (Certainly not his inclination as interviewee.) Deferential is a silly word, he says. Not in my dictionary. "The people who said that were journalists who couldn't interview their way out of a paper bag, frankly. I've never seen the talk show as crucifixion. But when there is something that might be controversial, I ask the question. There are not many journalists who would ask Woody Allen about his affair with his step-daughter, but I did. We were warned off, but I went ahead."

Ironically, Parkinson doesn't approve much of today's celebrity culture, and says private lives are not the public's business. With Woody Allen, the question about the affair was justified because Middle America had stopped supporting him. It wasn't prurience that fuelled the question, Parkinson insists. It was journalistic instinct.

But certainly he became almost as revered as his guests, who would stroke his knee and play to the notion they were lucky to be in his presence. Did his wife ever object to the flirting? No, Mary was always in the audience. A trained teacher, she also turned to television presenting. He says now how brilliant she was, and how proud he is of her, but admits that his male pride got a bit twitchy at the time. "I did think, 'Where is this person who's supposed to cook me a meal,'" he admits.

He married Mary because he looked at her face and thought he could gaze at it for a long time without tiring. He gets a bit shuffly and embarrassed when I ask if he's an old-fashioned romantic, though not in a displeased kind of way. He had a famous spat with actress Meg Ryan that suggested he was. Ryan was openly and immediately hostile, and seemed to find Parkinson's questions pompous – maybe some of them were –but Parkinson argued for love and against cynicism.

He and Mary had three sons. Mary brought them up but he wasn't an absentee father, and all work with him and live within three miles of him. Mike, who runs his production company, is the abrasive interview marshal with him today, the same close, protective instincts clearly on display that Parkinson felt all his life about Jack. Eldest son Andrew looks after his website, and middle son Nick runs his gastro pub. The Parkinson father-son bond is strong. Generational. I wonder, though, if he'd have liked a daughter. "I'd have loved a daughter. Loved a daughter. Because they fall in love with their fathers."

Still, he has five granddaughters now, as well as three grandsons. The most important thing, he says, when you get to the end of a career like his, is to be happy and fulfilled. And he is. When I ask if his years as an interviewer made him more understanding of human nature, he says he wouldn't be a bad psychiatrist. A brisk one, I'd say, though not without empathy. He certainly wouldn't let patients get away with any nonsense like counting flowers over his left shoulder. r

Parky: My Autobiography (£20, Hodder & Stoughton), by Michael Parkinson, is out now

Highs and lows

Michael Parkinson's first big scoop was getting Orson Welles on the show. But the rotund legend agreed to appear only if the front two rows of a jet were knocked out and a mattress installed.

Following his arrest in a Beverly Hills public toilet in 1998, George Michael (right) appeared on Parkinson, saying, "I've always wanted to get on your show. To think that I had to show my dick to an LA cop to do it!"

When Meg Ryan was in the UK promoting her movie In the Cut in 2003, she gave what Parkinson has since described as his most difficult television interview. "I still can't work out what exactly went wrong," he says. "The fact is she was unco-operative from the start."

In 1971, the year after the Beatles split, John Lennon and Yoko Ono (left) agreed to be interviewed on one condition: that, if Parkinson mentioned the band, he would have to stand in a sack for the rest of the interview. Parky duly donned the black sack and asked his questions.

Unco-operative doesn't really do justice to his interview with Rod Hull and Emu in 1976. "I feared I might be attacked, but was quite unprepared by the ferocity," he says. He ended up on the floor, minus his jacket, shoes and pride.

In 2001, Victoria Beckham revealed to the world, through Parky, that her pet name for David is Golden Balls.

Muhammad Ali appeared on the show four times, and Parky has said he "lost on every occasion". Though they traded verbal blows, he has described the boxer as "the most remarkable man I have ever met… he was just different from us".

Parkinson says his professional regrets were never to have interviewed Frank Sinatra and Katharine Hepburn.

He played himself in Richard Curtis's 2003 film Love Actually, and appeared in the soap Neighbours.

After a headline-making first appearance on the show in 1975, Billy Connolly became a national treasure, and later admitted, "That programme changed my life." The Glaswegian holds the record for the most appearances.

• Sir Michael Parkinson has just launched his official site www.michaelparkinson.tv. Please visit the site to see classic interviews with Tom Cruise, Little Britain, Rory Bremner, Nelson Mandela and Stephen Fry. The album "Michael Parkinson: My Life in Music" is released by Reprise Records on Monday November 3rd, and features songs performed by Frank Sinatra, Dionne Warwick, Michael Buble, and many more.