From the archive: Michael Parkinson - King of chat

‘Parky’ is a national treasure who has interviewed more than 2,000 people in a hugely impressive career spanning more than four decades. Famed for his relaxed, down-to-earth manner, he’s teased entertaining anecdotes out of guests including Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, John Cleese and Michael Caine. But he’s also used his inimitable charm to ask the difficult questions of his guests, the most famous examples including Woody Allen and Tony Blair.

It’s an extraordinary career and he’s nothing short of a legend. So it was with some trepidation that I approached an interview with him, part of an event with BBC Motion Gallery to showcase the vast Parkinson archive.

LC: You’ve kissed Bacall, danced with Astaire and sung with Crosby, and while I’m sure you’re marvellously adept at all those things, it’s as the king of chat that you’re most renowned.

Your talk show started as an experiment in 1971. How did it move from eight-show stint to 11-year run on the BBC?

MP: We got a couple of people who changed the attitude of the managers and agents, who were all important of course, to put their guests on the show. And we got lucky.

We got lucky with John Lennon, who I’d met before in a previous life when I was producing at Granada Television. They were our resident group, The Beatles. And then Orson Welles. In those days, the formative years, that’s what clinched it.

LC: Do you think your show would get off the ground now?

MP: Wouldn’t have a cat in hell’s chance. They’d say, who’s Orson Welles? I did a one-man show with Professor Jacob Bronowski. Can you imagine me now going to a commissioner and saying I’ve got this great idea - this guy, Professor Jacob Bronowski, I’d like to do 80 minutes with him - and they give you primetime. Not at all. No way.

It was a very broad net that we cast. That was the joy of it too. It would be a very boring job indeed to sit down and interview the “stars”. You had to have that rich mixture. The joy was to put together seemingly disparate occupations who came together on the show. It was wonderful.

LC: Why isn’t that done now? Is it because the nature of celebrity has changed?

MP: The nature of the television talk show has changed as well. Now it’s defined by the American example where the host isn’t an inquisitor, he’s a stand-up comic basically and he has the foil to the humour sitting next to him.

Look at the range of people who are doing talk shows. Look where they come from. Jonathan [Ross] is an example - he isn’t a stand-up comic, although he’d like to be. The fact of the matter is that Jonathan is very capable of doing a good interview but, generally speaking, he is on that wave where you’ve got to be - not confrontational - but you’ve got to be the star of the show and the people you book are kind of ulterior to that. That’s one way of doing it, of course, but it’s not my way and I don’t see anyone doing that kind of conversation interview we used to do.

LC: So it’s not about the art of conversation anymore, it’s about ego?

MP: No, it’s about laughs. It’s about getting a laugh. It’s about trivial things in that sense. Not that I ever thought the talk show was about important things but it was about good conversation. Whenever I did a show, I thought ‘book three or four people I’d love to have dinner with’. Then you’d put a camera there [gestures over shoulder] and you, the audience, look over and partake in this conversation. Inevitably, because you’re on all the time, you become that famous person, but that’s not your job as an interviewer.

LC: So who are among your best ‘dinner party guests’?

MP: Well, you’d have to have Billy Connolly there and I needn’t ask a question. Orson Welles, a great conversationalist. There’d have to be a couple of women there. Shirley MacLaine, an outrageous flirt, and Lauren Bacall. I was very lucky. It was the best job in the world.

LC: What else has changed?

MP: You’ve always had a degree of attempted interference…and we’d always say no. It’s the reason we never did Streisand and why it took 25 years to get Madonna. Now there are more people surrounding the big stars than there ever were before. When Crosby came on the show, he arrived with a hat box under his arm, no entourage at all, in a London cab. He walked up to the BBC and said “My name’s Crosby. Where’s the gal who’s gonna fix my toup?” A toupee was in the box. No one was carrying it.

Now, I have been there when Barry Manilow arrived with soothsayers, crystals and god knows what else - advisers trying to tell us what to do.

What’s allowed it to change is the various producers of programmes who have colluded with this nonsense. The more we turn around and say “bugger off, you do it on our terms,” the better. Once you give it to other people you’ve lost it totally.

LC: Was there ever a time you kicked yourself about a question you didn’t ask?

MP: I only did one interview that totally and utterly satisfied me and that was Jacob Bronowski in that it went from A to Z, exactly as I planned it - not because of anything I achieved but because of the way his mind worked.

It never works out that way… you can always look back at it and think ‘I should have done that, I should have said that.’ But I never dwelled on it.

LC: What’s the art of a great interview?

MP: Once you’ve been to cover a murder in a Yorkshire village where nobody wants to speak to you, you soon learn how to engage people. But what you have to overcome in television first of all - and this is terribly important - you must make your guest believe there is only you and he or she in the room and that the rest of it out there - the technology, the microphones - doesn’t exist and you’re having this one-to-one conversation. You learn to do that over the years but before that it is preparation, of course it is.

And then shaping the question. Think of it as a written piece with a beginning, middle and end. That’s the most difficult thing to do on television.

LC: You’ve interviewed leaders such as Blair and Mandela. Did you ever want to go into political interviewing?

MP: No, I don’t like interviewing politicians because unless there’s an exceptional moment in their lives, I find them, generally speaking, as a club of people, quite unattractive. I never had David’s [Frost] great, sort of, curiosity about power. I much preferred people who had a story, a background - ‘what was it about you that actually made you famous, made you different’. So that didn’t include too many politicians because they’re very good at disguising all those things.

The only conclusions I came to out of all the people I talked to was that they had had from childhood a very keen idea of what they wanted to be and they worked hard at it. It’s very interesting. Of all the great artists I interviewed, none took for granted what they had.

LC: Now everyone wants to leave school and be famous.

MP: I’d say be careful - you might be remembered for that which you’d rather forget. For instance, for all that’s been said about me, the only thing I’ll be remembered for is being attacked by a bloody emu. Is that worth being famous for?

Fame is a dangerous condition to have if you’re not old enough to understand it. Also, fame without talent is just silly, futile, daft. That’s a problem with these programmes that promote that notion - that all you have to do is be famous. It’s not just 15 minutes, it doesn’t last that long. But the corrosive element can last for a lifetime.

The other thing is it’s much easier being famous as a man than as a woman. I think they [women] get a fairly rough deal out of fame actually, and what people say about them and how cruel people can be.

LC: Anyone who got away?

MP: Oh, quite a few. Sinatra, Katie Hepburn, Don Bradman. But not too many. I got lucky and got to meet most of my heroes and people that I really admired. That, again, was the genius of the job at the time. We were allowed to not just get our favourite film star in but our favourite musicians. I had Oscar Peterson on the show more times than I can remember. Writers too. It was wonderful. They paid me, too.