PARKY: MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Michael Parkinson
Hodder & Stoughton, $39.99, pbk
When he was a journalist on the Daily Express, Yorkshireman Michael Parkinson auditioned as a newsreader for New Zealander Geoffrey Cox, the boss at ITN.
Cox told Parkinson he looked OK on camera but said he found his performance unconvincing.
"You are a very good writer," he said, "but if you take my advice you'll forget about television."
Fortunately for millions of television viewers who have appreciated his delightfully laid-back interviews with famous "celebrities", "Parky" eventually forged a highly successful career as a talk-show host.
In this chatty, skilfully written, most readable autobiography, Parkinson (now Sir Michael) lifts the curtain on a host of memorable, behind-the-scenes encounters with men and women possessed of widely differing personalities.
Candour and good humour are assets which the author brings to his recollections.
Before becoming so successful a chat-show host, Parkinson had considerable journalistic experience, and he continued as a newspaper columnist - with sport, particularly cricket, his greatest love - throughout his television career.
Leaving Barnsley Grammar School aged 16, he became a junior reporter on the South Yorkshire Times.
As a National Service officer, he was a member of the media party present at the Suez invasion in 1956, and later his literary ability won him posts on British national newspapers.
After covering the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967 for the Panorama television programme, Parkinson knew he had gone on his last assignment.
"I was a feature writer trying to be a hard-nosed correspondent and it didn't work.
I had tried but was found wanting.
If I had a future in television, it would be elsewhere."
He was advised by Fyfe Robertson, whom he described as "that exemplar of television journalism": "Get into the studio as soon as you can. No-one ever became rich standing in a ploughed field in Peterborough talking about the price of potatoes. The money is in the studio. And besides, its warmer."
Parkinson, when 36, walked into the BBC Television Centre in 1971 to do a show that would define his working life for the next 36 years.
He can now look back on more than 600 talk shows and nearly 2000 guests interviewed both in Britain and Australia, which he regards as his second home.
When asked to define the talk show, Parkinson said it was an unnatural act performed by consenting adults in public.
He confesses that he was happiest when he was writing for a living "because I could push the rest aside and dwell in a world of my own recall".
"Parky's" memory has served him well in delivering to readers revelatory details of the rapport he established with a host of interview subjects.
The book includes a generous quota of colour and black-and-white photographs.
- Clarke Isaacs is a former chief of staff of the Otago Daily Times.
