Parky: My Autobiography (20 page)

‘But what could this guy offer you that Mark didn’t?’ I asked.

‘He gave me twenty grand in readies,’ said George.

I reported back to Mark, who asked how on earth anyone could think a handful of readies was as good as a lifetime of financial security. I told him George lived for the moment and not the future. It was part of his charm as well as a reason for his downfall.

Granada liked the success of
Cinema
but was less sure about the attention I was attracting from other television companies. There were whispers in the media I might be given my own talk show and I met Stella Richman, the Programme Controller at London Weekend, who revealed her plans for a weekend talk show, which I would host. To underline her enthusiasm for the idea, she said the company would buy me an interviewing suit from a tailor I had never heard of called Doug Hayward – which is how I came to visit Mr Hayward’s salon in Mount Street and became not simply a customer but a lifelong friend.

I never heard from Ms Richman again.

It didn’t matter too much because, in the meantime, Jeremy Isaacs, who was now Programme Controller at Thames Television, and with whom I had worked at Granada in the early days, asked if I would consider doing an afternoon talk show, the first of its kind. I didn’t leave Granada so much as drift away. I loved
Cinema
and enjoyed a happy working relationship with Johnnie Hamp, but they didn’t like me working for other companies and, besides, I could see something larger looming. I wanted that talk show. Stella Richman had fired my ambition. A move to Thames for an interview-based programme would be the ideal preparation.

I joined Thames and began work on the show,
Tea Break
. It started with a close-up of a plate of arrowroot biscuits and panned up to reveal the host. It wasn’t much but it was my own. It was aimed predominantly at women and the production team, apart from a couple of men, was entirely female. The programme eventually morphed into
Good Afternoon
and there were copresenters, good journalists including Elaine Grand, Mavis Nicholson and Jill Tweedie.

Mary would come to London on a shopping expedition and visit the studio to meet me after the show. One day Jeremy Isaacs asked me if I would object to his asking her to take a screen test. He said every time he saw her at Thames he was certain she would make a marvellous performer. I said it sounded a good idea, and so it proved. Mary developed into a top-class presenter. She looked fabulous on camera – it truly loved her – and with her stylish fashion sense, she provoked a rapid and sustained response from the audience.

She also developed into a tenacious interviewer, with a particular interest in issues affecting her as a mother and a teacher. It was the time Maggie Thatcher, then Education Secretary, decided to stop free milk in schools. A junior minister was sent along to explain the decision. My guest on the programme was another politician, Timothy Raison. He was sitting next to me when we went on air; I introduced the programme and then set up Mary’s interview. She was brilliant. She had obviously researched the item well, she knew what she wanted and she questioned the junior minister so thoroughly and skilfully he was reduced to a gibbering wreck.

I watched the performance with growing pride along with Timothy Raison who, as Mary reduced his colleague to rubble, whispered to me, ‘By God, I’d hate to be married to her.’

Tony Preston was head of variety at the BBC. One day in the spring of 1971 he called and said he wanted to suggest me as the host for a new late-night talk show the BBC was contemplating. Would I be interested?

‘What a good idea,’ I replied. ‘I’d like to meet and talk about the possibility.’ I didn’t tell him that in my wardrobe I already had the suit I’d be wearing for the first show.

22

TALK SHOW HOST

I was thirty-six when I walked into the Television Centre in 1971 and never imagined the show I was about to do would define my working life for the next thirty-six years. In the seventies the BBC was a much different organisation from nowadays. For one thing there were a lot of Indians about but not too many chiefs, and the people who ran the organisation – Paul Fox was Controller One, David Attenborough, head of programmes, Bill Cotton, head of light entertainment, Brian Cowgill, head of sport – have their own special place in the television Hall of Fame. They presided over the biggest television factory on earth and the most prestigious. When I was in Israel for the Six Day War, I discovered my official accreditation came a poor second to my BBC Club card in the matter of impressing people and opening doors. It was the time of massive audiences, only three channels and an industry created by a remarkable generation of men and women. Much of what they see and hear on television now must make them cringe.

Walking into the BBC in 1971 was, to my fanciful imagination, like walking into MGM in its heyday. I was soon to discover that then, unlike now, the BBC did not pay Hollywood rates.

Bill Cotton had seen the Jack Paar show in America and liked what he saw. Before Paar, the late-night slot had accommodated a range of variety shows. He refined it into the talk show as we know it today. He was a volatile talent who once walked off halfway through a show because of a dispute with NBC. He told his audience, ‘There must be a better way of earning a living than this.’ Three weeks later he returned with the line, ‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted.’ Cotton liked his interviewing style and commissioned a series of shows to find an equivalent in Britain.

At the same time, Richard Drewett, a young producer on BBC2’s
Late Night Line Up
, had seen the Dick Cavett Show in America and admired the way the host mixed current affairs and light entertainment interviews. He badgered Bill Cotton with his idea for a similar kind of late-night talk show. There was a vacancy. Simon Dee had disappeared; Derek Nimmo wasn’t doing great business. Bill took the idea to Paul Fox suggesting I was the man to fill the gap. Paul told him I was an idle fellow. Nonetheless he thought it worth a punt, providing they found the right producer. Bill teamed me with Richard Drewett and we were given eleven shows in the graveyard slot of summer broadcasting to show what we could do.

I felt comfortable with Richard from the first moment we met. He was tall and thin with blue eyes and a droll take on life. We had much in common. We loved red-nosed comics, the Goons and Woody Allen, movies, sport and music. Richard played trumpet and piano and shared my love of Sinatra, the Great American Songbook and jazz.

When we met, even before we discussed editorial policy, we indulged our love of music by commissioning a signature tune. Richard wanted a big band in the studio and asked the musical director, Ken Jones, to provide it and write a signature tune. Ken said working Saturdays would interfere with watching West Ham United play so turned it down. I wanted Laurie Holloway as musical director. He was a neighbour and I greatly admired his wife, the singer Marion Montgomery. Sadly, Laurie had been offered a job working in America as Englebert Humperdinck’s MD. We couldn’t compete with the money on offer, never mind the Vegas lifestyle.

Then Ken Jones recommended Harry Stoneham and when we met we liked what we saw. We asked Harry to write something upbeat and jazzy, a tune that would sound good played by a big band. We sat in a basement at the BBC and Harry doodled on the piano. Too slow, we said. He changed the tempo. After about an hour we agreed on the theme and Harry – although we didn’t know it at the time – had a nice little earner.

I said I wanted to walk on to the set down a staircase that lit up individually with every step I took, like Georges Guétary in
An American in Paris
. What kind of chairs? What colour for the set? How many guests? Do I do a piece to camera at the top of the show, like Johnny Carson?

All this was chewed over before any general discussion about the show’s editorial content because, frankly, Richard and I didn’t want any debate about the kind of guests we should book. Between us we had made up our minds that we could blend serious interviews with showbiz; that we would seek unusual combinations and, moreover, keep the guests on throughout the programme so that the interview might become a conversation. We decided that the music should encompass everything from jazz to classics and much in between except the pap designed specifically for the hit parade. When I tell you the year we went to air the big hits included ‘Grandpa’ by Clive Dunn, and ‘Chirpy, chirpy, cheep, cheep’, you will see we were not being élitist or even particularly finicky.

We excluded others from our discussion because from the very beginning Richard had misgivings about the show coming under the aegis of light entertainment. He suspected, correctly as it turned out, that enthusiasm for our idea of a new kind of talk show might quickly disappear at the thought of Pierre Salinger, President John Kennedy’s former spin doctor, sitting next to the glamorous and sexy film star Shelley Winters, which was likely to be our second show.

We had a second show but not an opener. The problem booking a high-profile talk show is that, until it becomes high-profile, potential guests are reluctant to appear. We needed a big showbiz name for the opener.

Richard’s parents had a place in Ibiza next door to Terry-Thomas. Thomas was the gap-toothed comedian and actor whose ultra posh upper-class accent had brought him great renown. As a favour for the friend and neighbour, Terry-Thomas said yes. It was Wimbledon week and the most intriguing of all the tennis stars at the time was Arthur Ashe, the first male black tennis pro to win at Wimbledon. Seeking a possible headline, we booked Ray Bellisario who was one of the first paparazzi. He specialised in snatching pictures of the royal family and, in those innocent times, the nation was divided between those who would have him flogged and those who would prefer to see his head on a pike on Tower Bridge.

In the hope of creating a row in the studio, we arranged to have the leader of the League of Empire Loyalists in the audience. With this motley crew, we set sail.

No evidence remains of that first series of eleven. At the time, the BBC employed a committee to decide which shows were to be kept for posterity and which should be scrapped. It decided ours were expendable and wiped the lot, which included interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Orson Welles, Peter Ustinov and Spike Milligan and a double act featuring Fred Trueman and Harold Pinter, not to mention Shirley MacLaine and the splendidly eccentric Sylvia Brooke, the Dowager Ranee of Sarawak.

When John Lennon was murdered, Bill Cotton called me and said he wanted to replay our interview. I explained what had happened. Bill said it was a fair bet that someone at the BBC, in the VTR department most likely, would have made a bootleg copy. He put the word round the BBC but without any response. Twenty or more years later I was called by an American film producer making a film about Lennon’s life called
Imagine
. He asked if he could use part of the interview. I told him it no longer existed. He said, ‘What do you mean? It’s sitting on my desk.’ What he had was a telecine recording. He wouldn’t say how he acquired it.

The line-up for that show was John and Yoko, George Melly, Humphrey Lyttelton and Benny Goodman. Lennon said he would only talk about the Beatles if I sat in a sack. Don’t ask why. I think it was one of Yoko’s potty ideas. For a greater part of our conversation, I played the part of a talking sack while John reminisced about the Fab Four.

The Pierre Salinger/Shelley Winters interview slipped by without too much twittering from on high. I had particularly looked forward to meeting Ms Winters. When I was a kid I had a pin-up of her in my wardrobe. She was in there with Jane, Veronica and Vera Hruba.

I met her in make-up and wished I hadn’t. She didn’t much resemble the girl in my wardrobe. It didn’t help that she appeared to be bald. In fact, her make-up artist had flattened her hair under a tight skullcap, prior to transforming her in a manner I could only observe with open-mouthed incredulity. The make-up girl had a series of what looked like laces with strips of adhesive attached to the ends. She affixed them to Ms Winter’s face under her chin, the side of her head alongside her eyes and above her eyebrows. Next, she gathered the ends together and tugged them upwards, creating an instant facelift. She then tied them in a knot on the top of her head and covered it with a blonde wig. After the application of several layers of thick make-up, the woman in the chair was transformed into a fair approximation of the object of my teenage lust.

While this was taking place, Ms Winters chatted on about this and that completely unaware of the traumatic experience I was undergoing. When it came time to interview her, I dare not make her laugh in case it loosened the knot under her wig and the whole edifice collapsed.

We booked Spike Milligan – the first of many shows he did for us – and cast him alongside Robert Shaw. When he discovered who he was on with he threw a tantrum – again one of many – saying Shaw held extreme right-wing views and he wouldn’t appear with him. He fled to the car park and it seemed likely we might do his interview sitting in a Ford until he relented. He was, of course, brilliant. He just had to create a little drama to get the juices flowing. Over the years we were to discover that Spike’s idea of an ideal show was the one-man variety, featuring Spike Milligan.

George Best appeared with Michael Caine. For the next ten years or more we were to chronicle George’s sad decline into alcoholism and despair, and similarly we charted Michael Caine’s rise from promising young actor to movie legend and a knighthood.

We validated our decision to book shows featuring guests from different backgrounds but sharing similar, and unexpected, interests when we brought together Trevor Howard, Fred Trueman and Harold Pinter. What the screen actor, sportsman and playwright had in common was cricket. In this case, it was not simply an interest in the game, more an obsession with it. Harold Pinter formed his own cricket team. Trevor Howard stipulated that any script conferences relating to a new film take place in the pavilion at Lord’s.