Parky: My Autobiography (31 page)

31

WITH LOVE, JOY AND LAUGHTER

It was the mid-seventies. Things could hardly have been better. The show was attracting audiences of eight million viewers and more, I had a highly successful column about sporting matters in
The Sunday Times
, we had a beautiful family house on the River Thames and three boys growing up in a robust and noisy manner. Mary was a star in her own right on television and we were proud of her. Then my father died.

When he retired from the pit we brought my parents from Yorkshire to live nearby in Oxfordshire. It pleased my mother to return to the county of her birth, it delighted my father because his wife was pleased. His main ambition in life was to make her happy. His other was to make his three grandsons into professional cricketers and he put them through the routine he designed to ensure his son played for Yorkshire.

Play forward, play back. Nothing flash. Never cut until late July and only then when you’ve made 50. When bowling, remember it’s a side-on game. Look after umpires and they will look after you and only marry a girl who can sit through a Roses match without yawning. He took them on holiday to a resort where he introduced them to the science of Roses beach cricket, and with his mastery of this particular form of the game undiminished, created a demoralised and disgruntled opposition. It was still a bit like a team captained by Napoleon taking on Captain Mainwaring and his platoon.

Seeking revenge one year the Lancastrians suggested a game of water polo. This posed two serious problems for my father. Firstly, he couldn’t swim and secondly he had a heart condition, which was supposed to limit his range of physical activity. Typically, he solved both problems by ignoring them. To this day my sons speak with awe of their granddad’s performance, which they described to me as ‘playing while drowning’, as well as him recovering by the side of the pool by taking the tablets prescribed for his heart condition and telling them, ‘Don’t tell your grandma.’ The heart condition was exacerbated by pneumoconiosis, a lung problem sadly common among miners of my father’s generation. More than fifty years underground had taken their toll but he refused to let disability compromise his life.

We went one day to Stratford-upon-Avon – my mother’s choice of excursion – and somewhere between Anne Hathaway’s cottage and the theatre we lost the old man. He had a terrible sense of direction and I imagined him distressed and floundering in a strange town. My mother said we mustn’t worry. All we had to do was ask where the nearest cricket ground was. When we found it, there he was in a deckchair, sitting near the sightscreen, the happiest man on the planet. He loved all games, and was very good at most of them, but he loved cricket the most. He judged everything and everyone by the game. The only time I ever saw him lost for words was when someone confessed they neither knew nor cared about cricket. Then he would shake his head sadly, baffled that a great part of his world – for cricket was surely that – could mean so little to any other sane human being.

In many ways the manners of the game, its courtesies, the humour of cricket, defined him as a human being. I was never told fairy tales as a child. Instead I heard about Larwood’s action and Hobbs’ perfection. Before I ever saw him play I knew all about Len Hutton. Stories extended into football and the first time I witnessed Stanley Matthews in the flesh I knew which way he was going, even if the full-back didn’t. The stories of these gods, and many, many more besides, I heard at my father’s knee.

He was a remarkable man with a marvellous facility to adorn an anecdote.

It was he who told me of the full-back whose fearsome sliding tackles carried him into the wall surrounding the ground, causing the spectators to start wearing goggles at home games for fear of being blinded by flying chips of concrete. Frank Barson, the Barnsley centre half, he assured me, once ran the entire length of the field bouncing the ball on his head, beat the opposing goalkeeper and then headed his final effort over the crossbar because he’d had a row with his manager before the game.

Moreover, the old man swore he managed to see Len Hutton’s 364 at The Oval by convincing the gate attendant that he was dying of some incurable disease and his last wish was to see Len before he took leave of this earth. I never swallowed that one until once at a football match, where the gates were closed, I witnessed him convince a gateman that he was a journalist and I was his runner. I was seven at the time, and it was the very first occasion I watched a football match from a press box.

Whenever I smell cut grass and hear the sound of bat and ball I think of him. He was at his happiest in England and had no wish to go abroad. My mother had more expansive ambitions.

At the time of my father’s retirement neither had travelled overseas nor had they been on an aeroplane. We decided to send them first class to Madeira. I arranged for a limousine to take them to the airport. It was one of those ancient Rollers with a glass panel separating the driver from his passengers. The chauffeur opened the door to the rear seats, an offer my mother accepted, whereas my father sat up front with the driver. My mother’s look of disapproval as they headed off to the airport was nothing compared to her thunderous demeanour when we met them off the plane two weeks later. She strode ahead with my father, obviously in the doghouse, trailing behind with all the luggage.

The story she had to tell started when they boarded the plane at Heathrow. They had settled in their seats when the steward asked if they would like a drink before take-off. Mother ordered a sherry and father a pint of bitter. When the steward said they didn’t serve pints of bitter, but my father could have a glass of champagne, he said, ‘Champagne? I can’t afford champagne young man.’ The steward pointed out that the champagne was free. ‘Free?’ exclaimed the old man. ‘Well that’s different.’

It is necessary to tell this next part of the story in my mother’s voice. Imagine pursed lips: ‘Do you know, your father drank just about all the champagne they had on board? Worst of all, he was so tiddly that after they had served lunch he called the steward over and asked if he needed any help with the washing up. Well, I’ve never been so embarrassed in all my life.’ Worse was to follow when, upon arrival at their destination, my father became involved in a dispute over a tip with the local porters, who were on the point of taking all the bags off the bus and calling a general strike before the tour guide settled the difference out of his own pocket and allowed the holiday to begin.

Their next holiday was a cruise on an ocean liner. I bought my dad a white linen jacket and black bow tie, which would be suitable if they were invited to the captain’s table. I knew they would receive an invitation because we had arranged for it to happen. It arrived for the third night of their voyage, a cocktail party followed by dinner with the captain. My father was dressed before my mother so he said he would go ahead and see her at the cocktail party. Attired in white jacket and black bow tie he set off. When my mother arrived twenty minutes later she was horrified to see him standing by the door just about buried in mink wraps and other garments. Apparently, he had been dithering at the door when a couple mistook him for the doorman and handed him their coats. From that point on, the longer he stood there the more garments were deposited in his arms until, when my mother arrived, he was literally buried in fur.

‘Gormless,’ said my mother. ‘That’s what he is, gormless.’

He didn’t travel well and yet his great ambition was to go to Australia to follow an Ashes series. He greatly admired the Aussies, believing they were antipodean Yorkshiremen, part of the same tribe, loving beer, plain speaking and cricket. When I first visited Australia and went to the Sydney Cricket Ground and saw the Hill and the lovely old pavilion, I knew what he meant and what he had missed.

He loved coming to the show and moved effortlessly around the Green Room, chatting to anyone who would listen, engaging Hollywood stars and waitresses with the same easy, unaffected manner. Everyone who met him felt they had known him for a long time.

He formed a special bond with Mary, filling the gap in her life caused by her father’s early death, and becoming her mentor and her champion. She, in turn, felt a deep love for him.

When he was very unwell and in hospital it was to Mary he confessed his deepest fear. ‘I don’t want to die here,’ he said.

So she brought him home and for a month or more he lay in palliative care, while we watched his life ebbing away like a disappearing tide.

I would sit with him and look at his hands lying outside the sheets. His hands always fascinated me. They were strong and well shaped and the palms and fingers were those of a working man, calloused and rough to the touch. I would lay my hands on his, mine unmarked, soft and smooth, and I would remember as a child the love and security I felt when he took my hand. For some reason this memory made me feel ashamed and filled my mind with the unbearable thought that his hands represented all he had done to enable me to enjoy a view of the river and an easy life. I imagined one day I might write a book about his life and mine and call it
Like Father, Like Son?
On the cover would be a picture of our hands, the miner and the layabout.

He died as he had lived, without making a fuss.

When the undertakers came for him they brought him downstairs in a blue rubber bag and he looked so small and insignificant I turned my head away. In that moment I accommodated his death by pretending it hadn’t happened. Nor could I share my mother’s grief because I couldn’t face my own. That was when my mother started writing her book, as a tribute to the man she loved. It was typical of her intelligence.

I began to drink even more than normal, which was to say, a lot. The more I drank, the more depressed I became. I went to see a psychiatrist who probed away but didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. My drinking didn’t interfere with my work. I didn’t drink for twenty-four hours before a show and never ever on the day itself, at least not until the show had ended.

It was Mary who caused me to change.

She said to me one day, ‘You know the worst thing about you and drink?’

I asked what she thought it was.

‘It makes you ugly,’ she said.

Her words rang in my brain ever after and, without ever causing me to become teetotal, made me forever cautious of further excess.

One day, about two years after my father died, I came across a picture of him as a young man, a group photograph of the village cricket team outside the pavilion on the ground where I first saw him play. He looked eager, athletic and handsome and the image broke the dam of my grief and I started crying. I cried for an hour or so, tears of love and regret, of pride and guilt. When I stopped I felt purged and later came to realise that when my mother reached the same moment, she stopped writing her book. Like me, she was then able to remember him with all the love, joy and laughter he gave to us when he lived.

32

STORM IN A BBC TEACUP

I started getting the professional seven-year itch in 1978. By the end of the year I had done more than two hundred shows and was exploring the possibility of expanding what had become a highly successful and popular part of BBC’s Saturday night programming.

I remembered being in America, a long time before I started doing the talk show, and, switching through the channels in my hotel room, coming across an early
Johnny Carson Show
. Carson announced that Ella Fitzgerald and the Count Basie Band were among the guests and that was enough to grab my attention. Then he introduced a new Hollywood star, George Segal at the very beginning of his career. Mr Segal turned out to be a fabulous guest, not only talking entertainingly but revealing a real talent as a guitarist. Carson kept him on beyond his allotted time to the point that he closed the show by saying to Ella and the Count, ‘Can you come back tomorrow night?’

This seemed to me to define Carson’s power as a talk-show host, as well as demonstrating the flexibility of the five-night-a-week format.

After seven years of trying to find a headliner or two for every show, I felt it would make a pleasant change to expand the format. Broadening its boundaries would enable us to create – as Carson and others in America and elsewhere had done – a nightly familiarity between show and viewer and explore a wider range of guests and subjects. I had talked to Bill Cotton about my ideas in general terms. We’d sometimes meet in his office after the day’s work and chat over a drink or two. Like me, he could not explain why the five-night-a-week show had never been tried on British television and felt sure it would work. John Fisher, my producer, was also keen. Bill went to the Managing Director of Television, Alasdair Milne, who bought the idea.

The plan was to replace the ailing current affairs show
Tonight
with
Parkinson
.
Tonight
had been running for three years with an average audience of 2.5 million viewers per night. Bill Cotton reckoned we could increase that figure to between six and eight million. We decided the show would be done at the Mayfair Theatre in London and a couple of flats were organised to accommodate John and me, since we would literally be living over the shop.

Alasdair Milne told the Board of Governors at their meeting in October 1978: ‘I am convinced that this would enable us to freshen schedules that are, after ten years of being tinkered with, beginning to look stale; and we introduce to British television a new kind of evening programme which should prove attractive to the audience.’ The Director General, Ian Trethowan, had been consulted and had given the go-ahead. We thought it was a done deal but we had reckoned without a foxhole of disgruntled journalists in Lime Grove, questions in the House of Commons and dramatic intervention from the Board of Governors.

What seemed like a good idea at the time turned into a bureau cratic nightmare, and the beginning of the end of my relationship with the BBC. There were rumblings in the media about trouble ahead but it wasn’t until a meeting of the Governors on 8 February 1979 that the full-scale conflict began. At the time I had no means of knowing what was exactly happening at various meetings of the Governors. It is only now, when we are allowed access to the minutes of those meetings, that we discover exactly what went on. Reading them is to be given a glimpse of the Establishment at work, as well as a demonstration of the clunking wheels of bureaucracy turning and the media manipulation of politicians.