Parky: the antidote to attention-seeking TV personalities

The frail man who walked onto the stage at the Hay festival on a Sunday morning in May was recognisable, just, as the legendary talk show host, Michael Parkinson.

Accompanied by his youngest son, also Michael, he acknowledged the capacity crowd, apologised for a bout of ill health that had, he said, made him breathless, and got down to business.

And then the Parky of old reappeared, wit and wisdom intact, recalling anecdotes from his lengthy career, on television, in print and, in particular, as a sports writer, the subject of the book he was there to promote.

Interviewed and prompted by Michael Jr, he relived his encounters with Muhammad Ali, who his dad suggested he should have punched after one bruising round, and George Best, who played football with his boys, and told tales about his fellow Yorkshiremen and friends Geoffrey Boycott and cricket umpire Dickie Bird.

The performance, interspersed with clips from his most memorable TV moments, was lapped up by the nearly 2,000 people in the tent.

When it was time to go, Michael Jr left the old man on the stage alone to take his bows and the audience rose to its feet.  The ovation went on and on and on, a fitting tribute but also a goodbye as it was obvious then that we were unlikely to see him again.

Parky looked awed and humbled, traits that contributed to his deserved reputation as the greatest interviewer of our times.

Afterwards, he signed his book for around two hours, though he must have been exhausted, refusing to disappoint the queuing punters, a trouper through and through.

In all the many accolades following his death this week at 88, there is a consensus that there will never be another Parky.

Of course, he inhabited a different age to today’s chat show hosts, especially in his Seventies and early Eighties heyday, when the Hollywood legends were still around and he bagged most of them for his guest slots.

Back then, people were allowed to smoke on television! And flirt. And tell jokes that wouldn’t get past the censors in live comedy venues today.

Billy Connolly, a regular on the show that made him a household name, has said he wouldn’t have made it as a comedian in the current climate, his material “too offensive” for contemporary audiences.

Parkinson, too, would probably have been dismissed by present day producers for being too blunt, too unreconstructed northern male, and, despite his knack for getting to the heart of his subjects, too unsentimental.

Described as a professional curmudgeon in his later years, and especially acerbic in his views on modern television, he was always, for all his on-screen charm, uncuddly on air.

He told the Telegraph’s Mick Brown he could only remember one of his guests (Bob Monkhouse) crying, and considered interviewers’ pursuit of the “Holy Grail of the celebrity sob” embarrassing.

He was, though, eventually reduced to tears himself when talking about his father to Piers Morgan four years ago, and would surely have forgiven his chum Dickie Bird’s faltering, heart-breaking appearance on Sky on Thursday as he spoke of their final conversation.

But Parky didn’t go in for emoting in public and saved viewers from the toe-curling voyeurism that characterises much of what passes for entertainment these days.

That he still managed to bring out the best – and sometimes the worst (see Meg Ryan) – in his guests was down to his inquisitor’s flair for simply asking the right questions and then listening, and letting the audience listen, to the answers.

“No talk show presenter these days asks questions and listens to the answers,” he told The Guardian in 2012.

Undoubtedly a star, with the trappings that came with his stellar status, he left his ego at home when he headed for the television studios and let his subjects steal the limelight. In that, he couldn’t be further removed from his so-called successors in the genre.

To his fans, that made him the better entertainer. In a medium overcrowded with attention seekers, he nailed the art of modest restraint and honed his own style of courteous curiosity, with a few rare exceptions (see Helen Mirren).

Parkinson was grounded both by his no-nonsense, Barnsley coal mining community upbringing and by his solid family unit, married to Mary for 64 years and living in the same neighbourhood for decades.

He represented TV gold and was the Saturday night backdrop to my generation’s coming of age. His shows are dated by their format, fashions and many long-gone guests, but not by their entertainment value, which endures beyond misty eyed nostalgia.

He may have preferred to be known as a journalist rather than a television personality but Parkinson was a television triumph of a very personal nature.