Parky: My Autobiography (41 page)

He was kind and considerate and treated my mother with a great deal of respect, something that was not always forthcoming from some of the professionals when my mother entered the care system. I always remembered the compassion of that policeman, and the memory of what he did was a major reason why, after my mother died, I became ambassador for ‘Dignity in Care’, and part of a campaign to improve attitudes towards the elderly.

As her mind deteriorated she became increasingly angered at what she recognised as her growing inability to run her own life. She who had delivered meals on wheels started receiving them. She objected to being called ‘Dear’ or ‘Ducky’ and other such terms of endearment, which she took to indicate she was slightly gaga. She hated being addressed in a loud voice when her hearing was perfect. In other words, she objected to being regarded as decrepit.

There were humorous episodes. She started imagining that my father had returned but was spending all his time getting drunk at the pub. She would wait up for him and, on one or two occasions, rang the pub, asking the baffled landlord to return her husband forthwith before she came across and sorted them both out. I tried to explain to her that she was imagining things, but she countered my arguments with an irrefutable logic. I told her that my father didn’t drink so why would he be found in a pub getting sloshed? What is more, I said, Dad had died thirty years ago.

‘Your dad’s dead?’ she said. She never called him ‘my husband’ always ‘your dad’. I said that was the case.

‘Well no one told me,’ she said.

I was thinking about this when she delivered the line to which there was no answer.

‘If your father is dead,’ she said, ‘then who did I climb over to get out of bed this morning?’

We took her home but we couldn’t cope. She seemed even more confused and disorientated and her occasional bouts of incontinence made her ashamed and deeply unhappy. She went into a nursing home near where she lived with a view of trees and a garden with statues. One day, looking at a statue, she said, ‘He’s been standing there for ages. I don’t know what he’s doing.’

As her confusion deepened she imagined the garden was a schoolyard filled with children. She invented a post office, which she owned, and was constantly badgering me to drive her there. I would take her out in the car through the Oxfordshire countryside and she would say,‘One day I would like to live here.’ She sometimes thought I was her brother, Tom.

Normal conversation was impossible so one day, knowing her love of Frank Sinatra and the Great American Songbook, I played a CD in the car. She sang every lyric just about word perfect. She, who could barely recognise her own son or remember where she lived, could recall every lyric she had memorised as a young woman.

In the end, as I say, she gave up. She didn’t like what she had become, so she hid her medication under her bed and, most tellingly of all, stopped caring about her appearance. We went to Australia to fulfil a contract but I always knew I would receive the call bringing me back. And that is what happened but too late to say our final goodbyes. In effect we had already done that a year or so beforehand when we still recognised each other.

I owed her so much and this book is a testament to her ambition, which she regarded as being fulfilled, as I finally understood, when we took her to Buckingham Palace in 2000 to receive my CBE. When she reached the palace door and was asked for her ticket, she discovered she had lost it.

She looked at the man on the door, chin jutting and eyes blazing, and explained, ‘But I’m Mike Parkinson’s mum.’

I withered with embarrassment.

‘Of course you are,’ said the kind man, and let her in.

41

FINAL LINE-UP

The last series started like the first series had done thirty-six years earlier, with a visit to Doug Hayward’s. My friend since 1970 didn’t measure me on this visit. He couldn’t. For some time now he had been suffering a form of dementia, reducing his mind to a rubble. I felt guilty because when I sat with him I was talking to a stranger and, in truth, I couldn’t cope. Whereas once we talked just about every day, I found myself closing my mind whenever I began to think about him.

I am forcing myself to remember as I write and I find myself smiling. He was a funny and engaging man. In 1970 he used his contacts and persuasive charm to finance a movie about a park football team going to Mexico to play in their own version of the World Cup. When they returned, he asked me to write the script. The fee was a couple of suits. The footage was a mess. It didn’t make sense. The only way to make it work was by having a commentator in shot to blag his way somehow through the missing footage. That’s what we did and it won an award.

I returned one of the suits Doug made me for performing this miracle because the canvas showed through on a button hole. My tailor inspected the damage, took a felt pen from his pocket and coloured the canvas blue, to match the suit.

‘That’s done it,’ he said.

‘Is that how you treat your customers?’ I asked.

‘Only those who haven’t paid for their suit,’ he said. It was the start of a loving friendship.

Doug Hayward died in a nursing home in early 2008. He was a very remarkable man and a good and true friend. His funeral service was in the lovely Farm Street church near Doug’s shop in Mayfair. I spoke in tribute, along with Sir Michael Caine and Sir Roger Moore and later, at the reception, other close friends, including Sir Jackie Stewart and Jimmy Tarbuck, paid their tributes, as did the loyal and talented team who worked with him, particularly Audrey Charles who held everything together in Doug’s darkest moments. I loved him very much and I will miss him. At the reception I was approached by a mutual friend who said Doug had given him a suit for his birthday. It fitted perfectly and he was very moved. Some time later, attending a sporting event and leaving his jacket in the cloakroom, there arose a question about identifying his jacket. My friend told the cloakroom attendant that he would find his name stitched into the inside pocket on a Hayward label. The man looked, smiled, and handed my friend the garment. The name tag read ‘Made for Telly Savalas’.

We met at the ITV offices on the South Bank to start the process of booking the first show of the last series. According to that morning’s newspapers we were going to start the series by bringing back the Emu. Rod Hull’s son was taking over his dad’s act and, according to Paul Jackson, our head of entertainment, he could well make his television debut as a guest on the last series of
Parkinson.
Mr Jackson was speaking at the Edinburgh Festival and I can only hope he was joking.

The media took it seriously and it came up at every interview in the run-up to the first show. One journalist (hopefully a trainee) asked me the question and then followed it up by asking if there was anyone I had wanted to interview but hadn’t. ‘Frank Sinatra,’ I said. ‘Any chance of getting him on this series?’ she said. I said I’d ask Doris Stokes, who represented Mr Sinatra nowadays, and put the phone down before she asked me for Doris’s phone number.

The line-up for the first show was Michael Palin, Diana Rigg and David Frost, with Annie Lennox doing the music spot. The guests had all been stalwarts over the years. This did not impress our bosses. One wondered if David Frost was ‘interesting enough’. Another remarked, ‘They are all so old.’ Such helpful comments made us wonder – not for the first time – if there is a link between open-necked shirts and being brain dead.

We recorded the show at the London studios. Television studios have their own character and I had a soft spot for Studio 1. Standing at the top of the stairs, waiting to go on, was my favourite moment. Mine was the only big band in captivity. It was my indulgence and I loved the sound it made. The musicians, led by Laurie Holloway, were some of the best in the business. Their sound was a physical thing. I could feel it on my back as I walked down the stairs.

Michael Palin reminded me of my final appearance back in 1982 when I left the BBC for the first time. At the farewell party he had presented me with a Spear & Jackson No 5 shovel, as used by Eric Outhwaite, the Most Boring Yorkshireman of All Time, a character he created for an episode of that sublime series
Ripping Yarns
. The shovel has a brass plate with the inscription ‘To The Second Most Boring Yorkshireman in the World’. It went well with the Light Entertainment Depatment’s brass bucket. At the time I was thinking of opening a hardware shop.

I asked David Frost if he could remember his first interview. He said it was when he was working for Anglia Television in the early sixties and he interviewed a scientist about a new insecticide, which devastated every living insect. David asked him if he was not concerned that such a toxic potion might also harm human beings, to which the scientist replied, ‘We will cross that bridge when we come to it.’

Recalling his historic interview with President Nixon, David remembered a bizarre moment during the week of the interview. Nixon thought he should start every session with five minutes of relaxed small talk, but wasn’t very good at it. This particular morning, trying to be one of the boys, he asked David, ‘Did you do any fornicating this weekend?’ David observed, ‘In endeavouring to be matey he got the word wrong. I mean lovers don’t call themselves fornicators any more than freedom fighters call themselves terrorists.’

Annie Lennox sang on the show. In between takes I talked to her about her dad who worked in the Glasgow shipyards and died young. She said, ‘When I was leaving to come to the show my youngest daughter asked where I was going and when I told her she said, “Would you ask Parky if he’ll be my granddad.”’

Not everyone was as fond of me as that. Writing in the
Sunday Telegraph
, Stephen Pile said the time was coming when I was going to nod off in the middle of an interview. And I thought I was more sprightly of late. But I couldn’t quibble with his observation: ‘Parkinson’s work looks old-fashioned now. His deference, profes sional reserve and journalistic competence are out of keeping with the times.’

If that’s what was wrong with me, then it was definitely time to go.

In show two the guests were Billie Piper, James McAvoy and Jennifer Lopez. Billie was starring in
Belle de Jour
, the internet blog that became a book and then a six-part TV series. Belle is a high-class call girl. Some said she didn’t exist, that she was a creation of a group of writers out to make a quid or two. Billie claimed to have met her, and said Belle was confident, bright, beautiful and loved sex. I’m not sure Billie enjoyed the part. I think she was worried about the public reaction to Dr Who’s girlfriend playing a prostitute – ‘From Who to Whore’, as one headline writer put it.

Inevitably, I asked the question about actors taking their clothes off, and sex scenes, and how far you go. James McAvoy, sitting next to Billie, volunteered the information that whenever he played a sex scene he hid his willy by tucking it between his legs and taping it down. That confession was edited from our interview but I think the public has a right to know.

According to the celeb mags, Jennifer Lopez was no longer J-Lo. The ‘Demanding Diva’ was a thing of the past. Well the entourage this time did seem smaller than the last time we met six years before but it was still about the size of the Russian army. The last time, at the BBC, her dressing rooms were draped with white damask and she was surrounded by bodyguards whose ancestors modelled for the Easter Island statues. When I went to visit my interviewee in her dressing room I was turned away on suspicion of being a deranged stalker. It was the same this time. A bodyguard asked my business. ‘I am Michael Parkinson. Miss Lopez is on my show,’ I said. Not a flicker. Fortunately, the tour manager intervened. When eventually you get to see her she is a pleasant, humorous and very beautiful woman. She was born of Puerto Rican immigrants in the Bronx and didn’t so much live the American dream as create her own personal fantasy world far removed from the slums of New York.

In fact, what all three guests had in common was a childhood determination to be a success. This is not the same as wanting to be a celebrity. It is the difference between hard work and an appearance on
Big Brother
.

Later, in the Green Room scrum, James McAvoy looked at ease. He is going to be a big star. He connects with his audience in the same way Ewan McGregor does. Both have a composure, a self-confidence that is remarkable in men so young. Ewan’s cousin, the actor Denis Lawson, defines the gift as being total concentration, enabled by a certainty as to who and what they are. ‘As well as being a great gift for an actor, it also makes them very attractive to women. Women love men who concentrate,’ he said.

The third show featured Colin Firth, Al Murray and Harry Connick Jnr. I had wanted to interview Firth ever since my wife fell in love with him as Mr Darcy in
Pride and Prejudice
. I was hoping he would turn out to be a puny man with a badly fitting hairpiece. In fact, he is tall and exceedingly handsome. What is more, he is charming and self-effacing. Damn him.

Al Murray was another newcomer to the show. It looked like he’d be replacing me when I leave, with his talk show based around the persona of the pub landlord. In fact, of course, it’s a comedy show based on the talk-show format, which seems to be the preferred choice of the people running television nowadays. Yet another jokey spoof chat show. Whatever happened to the art of conversation?

Murray insisted on doing the interview in character as the pub landlord – a mistake and I told him so. I pointed out that experience with Ali G and Frankie Howerd had proved beyond debate that the scripted, in-character interview did not work. Frankie Howerd, terrified of working without a script, had the entire interview on autocue. It was a disaster. Later, he admitted he had been wrong and the next interview he did without a script and was wonderful. Ali G also insisted on the entire encounter being scripted, with predictable results. We warned Murray’s people but they were adamant. I wanted to debook him but the bosses regarded Murray as an ITV star of the future and were wary of upsetting him. We didn’t script the interview but it was very carefully prepared and the result was that it didn’t work. It looked and felt awkward and staged. The only artists who could be truly conversational in character were the glorious Dame Edna, the marvellous Lily Savage and the unpronounceable Cupid Stunt.