Sir Michael Parkinson will be remembered for his air of the everyman who went everywhere and met everyone.
When the days grow cold, and we grow old, what will we say of the world’s greatest interviewer,To those hundreds of millions around the world who knew him only through his TV persona, Parkinson will be remembered for his personal warmth, the perpetual twinkle of wry amusement in his eye, and his air of the everyman who went everywhere and met everyone.
He was every bit as famous as those he interviewed, yet ever and always remained the coal miner’s son from Yorkshire who somehow had a knack for getting the otherwise guarded to talk about themselves with extraordinary frankness.At one meal my wife and I had with him and Lady Mary in a chichi Mayfair restaurant about 10 years ago, Prince Harry greeted him happily from two tables over, and Parkinson gave a warm nod of acknowledgment back, but was not particularly fussed.
“And then Bradman’s Invincibles arrived for the 1948 Ashes tour with Keith, and we had never seen anything like them as cricketers, or Keith Miller as a man. He was over six foot tall, tanned, and with the swagger of a Hollywood film star.” Parkinson, who was once a good enough cricketer himself to keep no less than a very young Geoffrey Boycott out of Yorkshire’s Barnsley Cricket Club’s first team – a team that also boasted the future famous umpire Dickie Bird – could never get over his mature friendship with Keith.
In the unlikely event I get there too, I want to be at that table, clearing the plates and filling the wine glasses, but listening in. For not surprisingly, as an anecdotist, there was none better than Parkinson. No matter the subject or person being discussed, he had the perfect story about them, more often than not from personal experience.
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