One of the most memorable moments of my early days in television came during a live breakfast time broadcast. The host of the show Michael Parkinson looked to the camera, and commented “It’s a chip shop back there” with an exasperated gesture towards the chaotic technical areas behind the studio, the source of his annoyance.
Parkinson was already a broadcasting legend when I worked for his company, and sometimes on his shows, at TV-am in the early 1980s. It was one of the unhappiest periods of his career which, according to his obituaries in The Times and The Guardian, led him to start drinking heavily again. I was never aware of anything like that. Still, being alongside TV greats you can learn a lot.
Kojak and Parkinson accounted for the television I watched as a teenager, since I only tuned in on Saturday evenings. I don’t think the bald, lolly pop-sucking detective played by the late Telly Savalas has left much of an impression. Michael Parkinson, who died this week, certainly has.
The extended interviews in which Parkinson got stars from showbiz, music and sport to open up about themselves were irresistibly eye-opening. They remain models from a golden age of television, as Jenny Hjul wrote in her tribute for Reaction. Unlike David Frost, who was four years younger and Cambridge University educated rather than a miner’s son with two O-levels, Parkinson mainly avoided interviewing politicians. Although in 2006 he got a memorable late confession out of Tony Blair that he would be “judged by God” over the Iraq invasion.
The brilliant first Parkinson shows ran continuously from 1971, for what was supposed to be a brief silly season fill-in, until he quit in 1982. He was frustrated that the BBC was resisting his idea for a five nights a week US style chat show and was lured by potential riches when the new ITV breakfast franchise was awarded to the “Famous Five” consortium of which he was a member.
Those five were Anna Ford and Angela Rippon, glass-ceiling busters and rival newsreaders for the BBC and ITN, Robert Kee, a distinguished and well-connected historian and broadcaster, the one and only David Frost, and Michael Parkinson. There were still more eminent personages involved. The chairman was Peter Jay, son-in-law of Prime Minister Callaghan and recently returned as HM Ambassador to the US. Investors were shepherded by Jonathan Aitken MP.
None of these luminaries had a clue how to run a television company. They had all assumed TV-am would be yet another ITV “licence to print money”, handed out by the great and good to their fellows. As it turned out TV-am was a manifestation of the beginning of the fragmentation of audiences which has accelerated ever since. It had to compete not with the BBC, but also with its “stable mates” on the ITV button because it sold its own advertising nationwide and spurned the ITN news service. Channel 4 also started broadcasting at that time.
TV-am’s launch in February 1983 was a commercial and critical disaster. The pretensions of its esteemed leaders did not help. The BBC cynically positioned its new breakfast show down-market of its commercial rival. Arriving for my shift at 4pm on the eve of the launch, I was surprised to be asked to book some celebrity guests for the next morning. TV-am had been the biggest media story across the front pages for months yet the need for stars had been overlooked. The celebrities I managed to track down – the boxer Henry Cooper was one I remember – would all love to have done it but, unsurprisingly, they had previous engagements. Frost saved the day by prevailing on John Cleese, his old friend and partner in comedy, to come on wearing pyjamas. A few days later I was asked to help set up an 8am discussion for the women presenters on what was then called “female circumcision”. Over on BBC the Green Goddess was doing physical jerks.
Panic and bloodletting ensued at TV-am studios in Camden. Within weeks Ford and Rippon were dispensed with. In a widely reported incident Anna Ford chucked a glass of red wine over Jonathan Aitken at a society party. The elderly Kee gradually faded from the scene. Frost and Parkinson stayed on. Greg Dyke, later Director General of the BBC, came in as editor from the Friday evening Six O’Clock Show on London ITV. Dyke began the popular format which turned the station into the most profitable in the country, before it had its franchise taken away.
Frost quickly set about converting his role into one that worked, as presenter of “Frost on Sunday”, the first such interview programme in the UK, which has become a staple of broadcasting in the country.
Parkinson seemed bereft without the massive resources of the BBC to support him. He brought in his wife, Mary, as a presenter, with old mates as guests such as the cockney jazz musician and wit, Benny Green. The next year he left to continue his chat show in Australia. He was a poor fit as presenter of Desert Island Discs for a couple of years from 1986, claiming “the establishment” was against him and later dismissing it as “a silly little programme”. He returned to British television for nostalgic revivals of Parkinson on BBC and ITV from 1998 to 2004.
Tastes were changing. As Parkinson liked to point out, he was a journalist and interviewer. Not a performer. In his latter “curmudgeonly old bastard” phase he protested that “people like Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross don’t do talk shows. Theirs are comedy shows which they are very good at, but their guests are foils for their humour.” He also complained “stars now have all these rules” and disliked the size of the entourage they, and even politicians, now have accompanying them.
Parkinson’s luck was being in the right job at the right time and having the skills to make the best of his opportunities. The stars he had on his show were mostly fresh to talking about themselves and were often pleased and surprised to find themselves doing so. These days her PR team would make sure that the glamorous American actress, Lee Remick, did not tell Parkinson that she got married so she could have sex.
As early as 1975 his awkward encounter with Helen Mirren, in which she bridled at his questions about her “equipment”, i.e. breasts, showed he struggled with changing times. She subsequently called him “a sexist old fart”; he excused himself as a “Yorkshireman”. His encounter with Meg Ryan in 2003 is equally notorious. She, bored of the junket circuit which by then required stars to do dozens of interviews for each film they are in, would not play ball and suggested they cut the interview short. Parkinson, the inquiring journalist, was visibly frustrated and embarrassed. I have seen Jonathan Ross conjure a whole half-hour of entertainment out of an equally monosyllabic Bruce Willis. Similarly, Chris Evans knew how to josh with Mirren to chat about her tendency “to get her kit off”.
I admired Michael Parkinson’s professionalism as a journalist and interviewer. Rightly he took himself seriously in those roles as well. I last saw him some years ago at lunch in Shepherd’s Restaurant. Part of the Langan’s group set up in partnership with Parkinson’s friend Michael Caine, it was very much his milieu. He was taken aback when I reminisced about his “chip shop” comment at TVam and he assured me he couldn’t remember it.
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life
