THE FACILITATOR (REMEMBERING MICHAEL PARKINSON)

When Michael Parkinson finally drew the curtain on his chat show career in 2007, he received a 12 minute standing ovation in the TV studio where it was filmed.

A broadcasting stalwart for four decades, "Parky" was a national treasure in the UK and also adored in Australia, as the guest list for his final show proved.

Sir David Attenborough, Michael Caine, Billy Connolly, David Beckham, Judi Dench, Jamie Cullum and Barry Humphries' Dame Edna Everage were among those final guests.

However it was Peter Kay who stole the show, bringing along party hats, plastic plates, orange cordial, a Victoria Sandwich cake, Twister and Kerplunk for the festivities.

Kay was a former warm up comedian for Parkinson's show and his ability to spot up and coming stars was one of the chat show host's canniest tricks.

After all, it was on the recommendation of a garrulous taxi driver that he brought Billy Connolly onto his show, only for the Glaswegian comic to be propelled into national stardom.

Parkinson was a proud Yorkshireman who began his career as a local journalist.

Born in Cudworth in 1935, he was the son of a miner who secured a place in Barnsley Grammar School after passing his 11+ exam but left with just two O'Levels.

However he secured an apprenticeship at the Barnsley Chronicle with the South Yorkshire Times and turned up for the job wearing a trilby and trench coat, basing his image on his favourite screen actor at the time Humphrey Bogart.

Parkinson would later tell a National Council for the Training of Journalists conference in Nottingham that the job was the making of him as a man and he recalled how he quickly had to grow up after being sent to interview the mother of a soldier killed on National Service.

"I'm 17 years of age, I'm dressed like a clown and I'm about to tell this woman that her son's been killed and I couldn't do it," he confessed.

"It changed me totally and utterly. All the ideas I had about what this job was about changed and I understood that, no matter how glamorous bit might seem and how exciting it was in all the 'Bogey' movies, that when you became a journalist you intruded on people's lives."

In time, he would secure a job as a features writer for the Manchester Guardian alongside the future playwright Michael Frayn and then in Fleet Street at the Daily Express.

In 1955, there was a brief spell as a British Army press officer in Egypt during the Suez Crisis as part of his National Service.

His deep love of cricket and football would help him secure a high profile weekly sports column in the Sunday Times.

Parkinson's sports writing and occasional pieces for Punch magazine would later inspire two books 'Cricket Mad' and 'Football Daft' .

In 1959, he would marry the Yorkshire journalist Mary Heneghan who substituted her maiden name for his and later became a broadcaster.

The couple would have three sons, Andrew, Nicholas and Michael Jr and later eight grandchildren and in the 1970s, he would become an advocate for birth control having had a vasectomy to enable Mary to stop having to take the Pill.

Inevitably, after carving out a successful career as s print journalist, Parkinson moved into broadcasting.

In 1963, he joined the production team on Granada Television's Scene at 6.30 current affairs programme on ITV where he would work with the Irish broadcaster Gay Byrne who would later become a chat show king in his own right in his homeland.

The two would forge a lifelong friendship on the show where Byrne would famously interview Ken Dodd with The Beatles, with Parkinson later claiming he had learned a lot from the Dubliner's professionalism.

Parkinson also started to appear as a reporter on other Granada Television programmes.

In 1965, BBC producer Paul Fox coaxed him over into a role in the late night news review show '24 Hours' with Cliff Michelmore.

However his love of film resulted in him returning to Granada after he landed the presenter's role on the channel's flagship movie review show 'Cinema'.

This gave Parkinson his first real taste of the Hollywood publicity machine and his first big name interview in the shape of Laurence Olivier.

Two years later, the BBC offered him the chance to front his own Saturday late night chat show 'Parkinson' which the channel's Head of Entertainment Bill Cotton initially modelled on US chat shows like 'The Ed Sullivan Show' on CBS.

Parkinson and his producer was not keen on replicating the US model and like Gay Byrne's 'Late Late Show' on RTE was keen to build a conversational show by getting the guests to interact with each other.

Originally broadcast with an eight episode run during the summer lull, it was a hit with audiences who loved the mix of interviews with Hollywood greats, comedians, pop stars and sporting celebrities.

In addition to launching Billy Connolly's career outside of Scotland, Parkinson's verbal sparring sessions with Muhammad Ali were particularly enjoyed by audiences.

But there were also classic appearances during the show's initial 11 year run with Peter Sellers, James Stewart, Peter Ustinov, David Niven, Orson Welles, Kenneth Williams and Pat O'Brien and James Cagney that proved extremely popular.

A decision by Parkinson to seek out Hollywood greats proved to be the not so secret sauce that guaranteed his chat show's success and he went to great lengths to secure Welles, flying him to London on a mattress because of his bad back.

But it was enough to secure other movie icons like Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall and Gene Kelly.

There were, of course, occasional missteps. 

In 1975 he understandably got on the wrong side of Helen Mirren after an inappropriate intro that described her as a "sex queen" and mentioned her physical attributes.

However Parkinson remained a favourite of TV audiences, partly because of his affability and his willingness to give his guests free rein to dust off their wittiest anecdotes.

His willingness to be the butt of the joke was also a huge strength, with audiences revelling in him being attacked by the ventriloquist Rod Hull and Emu.

Now a household name, there were guest appearances in shows like 'The Morecambe and Wise Show' in 1977 where he was one of a number of popular broadcasters involved the iconic 'Nothing Like A Dame' sketch.

There would also be appearances over the years interviewing Cupid Stunt on 'The Kenny Everett Show,' Terry Wogan's 'Blankety Blank' celebrity quiz show and later on his career as a guest on Caroline Aherne's spoof talk show 'The Mrs Merton Show,' on the satirical show 'Have I Got News for You,' and as a guest on 'Room 101,' 'The Frank Skinner Show,' the Australian soap 'Neighbours,' and on RTE1's 'The Meaning of Life with Gay Byrne' in which he described himself as an agnostic atheist.

There was also a striking role as himself in a 1992 horror mockumentary 'Ghostwatch' which aired on BBC1 on Halloween alongside fellow presenters Mike Smith, Sarah Greene and Craig Charles which caused a huge furore, with thousands of frightened viewers complaining about it because they thought it was real.

In 1979, Parkinson exported his chat show to ABC in Australia interviewing politicians like Malcolm Fraser, Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke as well as entertainers like Jack Thompson, Paul Hogan, Barry Humphries, Billy Connolly, Bob Hope, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Clive James, Michael Caine and Kenneth Williams.

The parallel Australian version of the show ran for three years.

There was also a brief stint in the US, as a co-host on two episodes of ABC's late night talk show 'The Dick Cavett Show' in 1973, encountering his old sparring partner Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.

In 1982, however, Parkinson shocked the BBC by opting to end the show and signing up alongside David Frost, Anna Ford, Robert Kee and Angela Rippon for Britain's first commercial television breakfast television show 'Good Morning Britain' on ITV's TV-am.

Launched in a blaze of publicity, the hosts were dubbed the Gang of Five but the show was a ratings disaster - although Parkinson's weekend show was a success, partly because BBC1's breakfast show did not broadcast on a Sunday.

The subsequent dismissal of TV-am's chief executive Peter Jay and his replacement by Jonathan Aiken saw Ford and Rippon very publicly fall out with the company as the broadcasting dream team was replaced by then unknown broadcasters like Nick Owen and Anne Diamond and the puppet Roland Rat.

After the disappointment of TV-am, Parkinson took over from Michael Aspel as the host of the popular ITV celebrity charades show 'Give Us A Clue' with Una Stubbs and Lionel Blair.

In 1985 he returned to TV film criticism, temporarily replacing Barry Norman as the host of BBC1's movie review show 'Film 85'.

Yorkshire Television offered him in 1987 the chance to return to the chat show formula with 'Parkinson One on One' on ITV which earned him a BAFTA and saw him interview celebrities like Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Richard Harris, Elton John, Robbie Coltrane, Boy George, Phil Collins, Anthony Hopkins, Spike Milligan and his old chum, Billy Connolly.

Unlike his BBC show, the ITV version concentrated on a single guest.

In 1986, Parkinson took over from Roy Plomley, the creator of Radio 4's 'Desert Island Discs' as its second ever host and hosted the popular show for three years.

However there was friction with BBC management, with Parkinson being accused by them of having a Yorkshire bias in his choice of guests despite only one of them hailing from the county. 

In 1994 and 1996, BBC Radio Five live talked him into presenting 'Parkinson on Sport' which paved the way for a popular BBC Radio Two morning show 'Parkinson's Sunday Supplement' which ran from 1996 to 2007.

1995 saw Parkinson return to BBC1 for a series of popular retrospective shows 'Parkinson: The Interviews' which plundered the archives.

Inevitably, this led in 1998 to a revival of his 'Parkinson' chat show on BBC1 which proved as popular in its second incarnation as it was the first time around.

Major celebrities like Clint Eastwood, Robin Williams, Tom Hanks and David Bowie, Boris Johnson and rising stars like Ricky Gervais.

A 2002 appearance by Peter Kay saw Parkinson again allowing his guest free rein to create a memorable chat show appearance.

Kay also memorably paired him with Ronnie Corbett in the Comic Relief video for Tony Christie's 'Road to Amarillo', only for the Scottish comedian to fall off his treadmill during filming.

Parkinson's genial interviewing style was against the trend for rottweiler style inquisitors like Jeremy Paxman but it still got him guests.

However in 2004, he once again switched channels, taking the chat show to Granada and ITV after he failed to agree with the BBC how it would sit in the TV schedule alongside 'Match of the Day'.

The show continued to draw big names from both sides of the Atlantic including Madonna, Dustin Hoffman and Oasis' Noel Gallagher.

There was a memorable double appearance by Tom Cruise and Billy Connolly as they promoted their movie 'The Last Samurai.'

Like its 1970s incarnation, it was not all plain sailing, though, as an awkward encounter with Meg Ryan demonstrated. 

The final incarnation of Parkinson's chat show with Harry Stoneham's signature theme tune ran on ITV until December 2007.

Awarded a knighthood in the New Year's Honours, he moved into retirement with colleagues praising his lack of ego and professionalism in a glowing Saturday profile piece in The Independent newspaper.

In 2008, he interviewed a number of prominent public figures for his own website including Nelson Mandela and the comedian Rory Bremner.

Having penned a series of children's books 'The Woofits' in the 1980s, he continued to write in his retirement including a 2008 autobiography called 'Parky: My Autobiography' and a memoir about his close friend, the Manchester United and Northern Ireland footballing icon George Best.

He continued to enjoy his cricket and also went into the fine dining business, owning a restaurant near his home in Berkshire.

In recent years, as his age advanced, Parkinson battled ill health.

However he remained deeply devoted to his wife Mary, his sons and his grandchildren.

His passing marks the end of an age when proper chat on TV really was king.

Michael Parkinson was a special host.

He was a facilitator who knew exactly how and when to gently prod celebrities into delivering gags and great anecdotes.

His humility and generosity will be deeply missed by viewers and entertainers alike.

(Michael Parkinson passed away at the age of 88 on August 16, 2023)