Parky had a God-given ability to make people talk – me included

Endlessly curious, fascinated by others and an irredeemable gossip: Michael Parkinson was exactly the same off screen as he was on it, recalls Jim White, who worked with him on Radio 2. He’s never forgotten their good-natured rivalry – or what made him laugh...

Michael Parkinson’s classic BBC interview with David and Victoria Beckham (Parkinson, BBC)

Way back in the 1970s, my sister was training to be a social worker. And her personal tutor gave her a bit of advice she has never forgotten. “If you want to know how to talk to people, it’s simple,” she was told. “Watch Michael Parkinson. That’s the way to ask a question.”

Her tutor was right. Nobody talked to people like Parky. Endlessly curious, fascinated by others, he had the God-given facility to make anyone and everyone open up. When they sat opposite him on the television set, he would lock eyes with his guest, listen to what they were saying and let things flow. He was certain everyone had a story to tell and was determined to get them to tell it. And the thing is, he was never sure what that story was until he began. He might spend all week ahead of one of his chat shows doing his research, but he never went in a pre-prepared direction. This was always a conversation not an interview.

And it was not some sort of act. Parky was exactly the same off screen as he was on it. Occasionally, in the Nineties, I used to contribute to his Sunday morning show on Radio 2. I was there to do the newspaper review. But Parky reckoned I was there to take centre stage. This was a man with probably the finest deposit of anecdotes in history, I would have been happy to listen to him for hours. Yet he was never one to talk about himself. He wanted to talk about you. And when he put on a record – invariably something from the Great American Songbook – he would turn to you and say “right, tell me about…”

An irredeemable gossip, he had an insatiable appetite for industry tittle-tattle. And if in the course of a tale you made him laugh – in truth it wasn’t that hard, he had a magnificently vibrant sense of humour – you felt a million dollars.

It was this relentless journalistic inquisitiveness that helped Parkinson elevate the chat show into an event. What a portfolio of interviewees he compiled! Everyone from John Lennon and David Bowie to Brian Clough and Muhammad Ali, not to mention Rod Hull and Emu, all of them delighted to expound and expand and (in Emu’s case) assault. Well, most of them were delighted. Sometimes, his curiosity did not elicit the result he was hoping for – as Helen Mirren and Meg Ryan might attest. But whatever happened, when Parky started asking his questions, something memorable would unfailingly emerge.

One thing about Parky: his timing was perfect. After starting in newspapers in the Sixties – he once told me that he witnessed a fight on the newsroom floor almost every day as reporters, returning from the pub where they had spent the afternoon after filing their copy, would take robust issue with how it had been edited – he took his skill set into television.

He first worked for Granada in Manchester where he struck up a lasting friendship with George Best. But it was the chat show that perfectly dovetailed with his key talents. Even better, his recruitment to the genre could not have coincided with a more appropriate moment. In the early Seventies, television was becoming more egalitarian, so there was no need for him to airbrush his Yorkshire brusqueness. At the same time, stars who had been for so long shackled by the censorious Hollywood studio system were finding themselves increasingly freed from its constraints. Internationally renowned names like Bette Davis, Jimmy Cagney and James Stewart, were for the first time delighted to talk openly. Parky was more than happy to oblige. And we were lucky to see the results.

But what he offered his guests was different. His was not the bland, forgettable easy ride of his predecessor as BBC chat show host Simon Dee. Nor did he provide the comfortable sofa chat of his contemporaries Des O’Connor and Russell Harty, or – later – Terry Wogan. And, gifted though they both are, his principal aim was not the same as his successors Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton. They are there to make their guests repeat the anecdotes they have told the programme’s researchers. It makes for jolly enough television. But Parky’s sometimes challenging approach made things memorable. What David Frost did once with Richard Nixon, he would do two or three times a series: get his guests to say something nobody had heard before.

It was a methodology that had real longevity. Whatever the Monty Python four Yorkshiremen intimation of the many impressions of Parky (of which Rob Brydon’s remains the best) he was not someone stuck in the past. His inquisitiveness meant he was forever fascinated by the new. It allowed him to chat as happily to a rapper as he could a crooner, a fresh-faced ingenue as easily as a wizened old-timer, a modern day sporting millionaire as comfortably as someone from his day. He knew they all had a story to tell. And he was always determined to hear it.

Indeed, the last time I spoke to him at length, during the pandemic when I rang him up about his favourite football team Barnsley reaching the Championship play-offs, he quickly pulled me up on something I said. I wanted him to talk me through his 80 years following the club, maybe talk about his favourite player Sid “Skinner” Normanton, the part-time miner, part-time footballer who terrorised the leagues in the immediate post-war years.

“Oh aye, he did exist, Skinner,” he replied. “There was nothing subtle about him. Looking back basically all he ever did was kick the shit out of opponents. I had a wonderful time watching him.”

So things were better in the past, then, I suggested.

“No way,” he said. “Yeah, it’s important to acknowledge the history, but that doesn’t mean you don’t look to the future. These young lads in today’s team, they run around for 90 minutes. I remember in my time, you’d often see a midfielder with a little beer belly, or a bandy-legged inside forward who could hardly run after half time. These lot, they’re proper athletes.”

That was Michael Parkinson: a man, to the last, who never stopped being fascinated by the world around him.