'I'm not bad at what I do'

“I’m a Sinatra man,” says Michael Parkinson proudly when I ask him how he felt interviewing Victoria Beckham. He is explaining that he doesn’t necessarily have a large stockpile of Spice Girls records, and that, frankly, he doesn’t care. Parky is at that happy age where he doesn’t have to fret about appearing fashionable.

A quick look at the guest list for his new chat show series, starting on Friday, emphasises the point: Andrew Lloyd Webber, Julie Walters, Mark Knopfler, Mike Reid, Robson Green. People with a bit of hinterland, and with in some cases a past that might be brighter than their present. Fame is fickle, but Parkinson’s admiration isn’t.

“I don’t like people who, in my judgment, are chancers,” says Parkinson. “I have to think that the reason a guest is on the show is that he’s bloody good at what he does. My attitude towards people coming on the show is not ‘Do I like them?’ but ‘Do I admire them?’”

I meet Parkinson at a favourite restaurant of his in Mayfair – quiet, friendly, dignified and ever so slightly old world. My opening line is the predictable one – my terror at interviewing the supreme interviewer. “That’s bollocks,” he says. “I’m not bad at what I do. But it’s a certain area of interviewing. People tend to lump all interviewers together, but that’s unfair. I can’t do what Paxman does, or what Robin Day did. I’m not made that way.”

Parkinson once said his aim was to let his guests “give the best of themselves to his audience”. A rather peculiar aim, I suggest. Shouldn’t he be trying to find out what makes them tick, expose the private person behind the public face? “The people I interview are not war criminals,” he says. “The only thing they’ve ever done, generally speaking, is entertain people. What’s interesting is to find out why and how.

“A situation has developed where an interview isn’t an interview unless there’s blood on the carpet. I’d make a fool of myself if I tried to do that, and I don’t see why the people who sit opposite me deserve that kind of treatment. The thing that I was most afraid of coming back was that that particular aspect of television had changed and that my show might seem very old-fashioned. It might look that way still, but the fact of the matter is there was an audience who wanted that.”

What Parkinson calls his “second coming” occurred in 1998, when – older, wiser and a good deal greyer – he returned to BBC1 16 years after his original, much-loved, much-feted chat show ended. It was, as he admits, a huge risk. “I would have hated to come back and do a bad show that was badly received and made me skulk away thinking, ‘Christ, I wish I’d never done that.’ It was nice to come back and do a good show. That’s what pleases me professionally. Reactions have been better than I could ever have imagined.”

It was typical of Parkinson that, despite 16 years away, nothing much had changed: the furniture looked the same; the stairs were still there; even the Harry Stoneham Five, whose music had seemed dated back in the early 80s, were still swinging. Only the guests were different, because the generation of Hollywood stars he had brilliantly caught at the end of their careers in the 70s were dying out. Cagney, Astaire, Crosby, Matthau, Niven – his cast list was remarkable and the resulting interviews legendary.

Parkinson, who is now 65, recognises that the old order has changed. “That great swathe of Hollywood film stars who were brought up through the studio system has gone, and they’ve not been replaced because what created them has gone as well. They’d also been through a war, those men and women, so they had a dimension which is more than being an actor; they weren’t as blown away by their fame as some are today. The other thing that has changed is the power of the agent: there is far more undergrowth to get through.”

But he rejects the argument that there are no decent guests any more, and cites Paul McCartney (“I’d been chasing him for 25 years”) and Woody Allen (“I admire him inordinately”) as examples of recent interviewees who could be mentioned in the same breath as some of the ancients.

But Ali, there’ll never be another Ali, I say weepily. Parkinson becomes animated. “Tiger Woods, he’s Ali isn’t he? In my lifetime I’ve seen two of the greatest ever superstars in sport: Ali was the first; this guy is the second. He’s sensational. I’d love to do him.”

I had assumed that the guests for the entire series were already mapped out, but Parkinson and his team keep it flexible and like to strike the moment. “We don’t plan that far ahead. We’ve got enough to do the first three or four shows. It’s not so much a question of getting one guest; it’s a question of fitting three guests into a show. That’s the fascination of the job. Any silly bugger can book one person and just stick two other people with them. The trick is to think about the combination. The difference between my show and others is that we have that conversational arena – three people who have to talk or we all look like idiots.”

The show is recorded the night before transmission and is only lightly edited. “I shoot to time. I’m very old-fashioned about things like that because that’s the background I came up in. I started in live television, so I just do it as live. I believe that if you over-record, it shows. The continuity is difficult: people age before your eyes. It’s sloppy, awful.”

But there must be times when it goes wrong, when guests dry up or give monosyllabic answers and you are left babbling into endless silences? “It’s up to you to make it work. It doesn’t not work too often, and it will only happen for two reasons – they’re pissed or they’re frightened. There’s no cure for the former condition, as I know to my cost, but with the latter you can settle people down and take a bit longer to get them going. Then subtly edit: those will be the times that we go over, when the person doesn’t respond immediately. And if it doesn’t work at all, you have to be fatalistic about it – you can’t win them all.”

Doesn’t he sometimes wish he could entertain less and probe more? “It’s not In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, but there’s more than one way of skinning a rabbit. Once in an interview you have the person opposite you – in a totally phoney situation, which is television – trusting you. Then you can ask them anything you want. I asked Woody Allen about marrying his step-daughter, which was a fair question. It was a legitimate line of enquiry. He objected to it and said I was being voyeuristic, but I said no I’m not, this has had an effect on your career. I wasn’t the slightest bit embarrassed by it, but I would have been if there hadn’t been a point to it. It did affect his career – in Middle America it had an effect – and it was a legitimate question to ask.”

Parkinson admires his guests, is perhaps occasionally in awe of them, but he is never intimidated by them. “I’m the boss, not them. It’s my patch, not theirs. This is my home. That’s why we never take the show on the road. They’ve got to come down my stairs into my living room and talk to me.”

He abandoned that cosy living room for the harsh commercial world in 1982, when he and fellow broadcasting luminaries David Frost, Anna Ford, Angela Rippon and Robert Kee set up TV-am. They won the ITV morning franchise, but then lost control of the company in a bitter boardroom battle. “We did the difficult thing against the strongest group of bidders there has ever been,” he says, “but then we lost the bloody thing.”

Parkinson then did Desert Island Discs for 18 months, but had a well-publicised falling out with Roy Plomley’s widow and left the programme. “Mrs Plomley decided that I was a rough country boy with a terrible accent who shouldn’t be allowed anyway near her husband’s programme,” he says with undisguised bitterness.

It was not a happy period for Parkinson, compounded by the fact that he started drinking heavily, but he emphasises that he never stopped working – or earning. “I was treading water but I didn’t go under. I kept on working. I did lots of jobs, some of which I’m not particularly pleased to see on my CV, but on the other hand I’m delighted that I kept working. The most profitable year I had was two years after I’d left the BBC and TV-am, and nobody knew I was even on television. I was doing all kinds of crap, but it was highly paid crap, and I was rather proud of that.”

For all that, he certainly wasn’t happy – and the drinking was an expression of his disillusionment. “It was a phase I went through and I can look back at it now and see all the reasons why it happened – TV-am had gone, mid-life crisis, all that crap.” He still likes a drink but it is now firmly under control. “I couldn’t work like I do now if I was drinking too much.”

Parkinson is known principally for his TV work – not just his show but his high-profile anchorman roles. He was the only cool head amid the wreckage of the BBC’s millennium coverage, and in a couple of weeks will pop up as host (the word fits him like a glove) of A Night of 1,000 Shows, a celebration of the 40th anniversary of BBC Television Centre. Yet he sees himself principally as a journalist – he writes a weekly sports column for the Daily Telegraph – and reckons that gives him a substance that today’s generation of TV presenters lack.

“I’ve always been a print journalist and I could make a living as a print journalist, so I’ve never had that fear about what would happen if TV didn’t come calling. That’s terribly important. If they said tomorrow ‘We never want to see your face on television again’, it wouldn’t matter a damn. I could still make a living and I’d probably write a book about how crazy they all were on TV, all my secrets.

“In the early days of TV, presenters were recruited from journalism: we’d had a life outside television and we brought to television an approach to whatever we did that was journalistic. Now anybody is a celebrity, anybody is a presenter. Where do they come from? What are they? They don’t know themselves, poor buggers. They are put on by cynical producers and away they go. The tabloids pick them up and producers say ‘What shall we do with them? I know, give them a talk show; it’s easy, a talk show.’ But it’s not easy, as people have demonstrated for many years. Why is Boot Hill so full of these people?”

Parkinson is a survivor. His show has survived. His marriage, to teacher-turned-broadcaster Mary, has survived. His popularity has survived the shifts in public taste. He has never tried to change and probably wouldn’t know how: he is a pretty unreconstructed northern male of a certain vintage who has no truck with political correctness and thinks Bernard Manning is uproariously funny. His attitudes seem out of place in our happy-clappy, all-inclusive, trans-gender times, yet he remains a star, the bedrock of the Beeb. How does he do it?

“I’ve always taken the view that you should keep on working. I’ve worked for every newspaper in the business; I’ve also worked for most television and radio stations. My view is don’t be posh about it, keep working, because in the end things will work out. It’s the Michael Caine view of film-making: there’ll be a lot of rubbish but one or two things will remind you what you came into the business for.

“If you’ve got any sense, you are what you are: you’re still the person from where you came. The great problem with celebrity is that it can change you, but fortunately it happened to me when I was a mature man. I was 35 and had had a career in Fleet Street and as a producer, so I understood what was happening. If it had happened to me when I was 21, I don’t think you’d be interviewing me today.”

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