Parkinson: the heyday of Saturday night TV

Michael Parkinson’s heyday as a chat-show presenter ran for eleven years, from 1971-82. Parkinson was a key part of BBC1’s Saturday night line-up. It ran through the evening from The Generation Game, a handful of American cop shows including Ironside, Starsky & Hutch and Kojak, the BBC’s two best-loved comedies shows, Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies, Match of the Day and then Parkinson. This was the golden age of a particular kind of BBC1 show, all featuring hugely popular, middle-aged white men, all born in the 1920s and 1930s.

Parkinson’s age was crucial to his success as a TV presenter. Michael Parkinson was a national treasure: a working-class Yorkshireman, the son of a coal miner from near Barnsley, who did National Service and served his apprenticeship in local papers. He was one of that remarkable generation of working-class northerners who had such an impact on British television in the 1960s and 1970s, along with Joan Bakewell, Russell Harty, Melvyn Bragg and Jack Rosenthal.

Parkinson was only thirty-six when Parkinson began. The long hair, sideburns and fancy ties looked very modern on the BBC’s first famous chat-show presenter, just as they did on Melvyn Bragg, when he first presented The South Bank Show at almost the same age. Parky was as much at home with modern sportsmen like Muhammad Ali and George Best as with pop stars such as the Bee Gees, Cher and Elton John, or with rising comedians like Billy Connolly and the stars of Monty Python.

But perhaps most important, Parkinson still had one foot in the golden age of Hollywood. His guests ranged from Orson Welles, Fred Astaire and Henry Fonda to James Stewart, Jack Lemmon and Robert Redford. So Parkinson brilliantly bridged two generations: the great stars of Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1950s, and the biggest names of modern sport, TV and pop music in the Sixties and Seventies.

It is striking how few of the tributes to Parkinson have paid proper attention to his producer, Richard Drewett, also in his mid-30s when the show started. From 1971 to 1977 Drewett created Parkinson, and went on to produce 132 editions of the show. Moving to London Weekend Television in the late 1970s, he was a producer, then head of special programmes responsible for series. These included those of Michael Aspel, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, Gloria Hunniford and Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage, who also featured in studio specials. Drewett was also the key figure behind Clive James’s TV success, first at LWT, then at the BBC. Drewett was astonishingly rigorous in the way he prepared chat shows, organising research interviews with guests, and was always happiest with regular guests who were reliable.

Many journalists have written about the infamous episodes of Parkinson, most famously the incidents with Rod Hull and Emu, Helen Mirren, Muhammad Ali or, in later years, with Meg Ryan. The point is how few and far between these incidents were. In its heyday, Parkinson was a safe boat and every precaution was taken to make sure no one rocked it. This was partly because of the presenter’s professionalism, but in large part it was because of Drewett. It is no coincidence that when Parkinson returned for six years in 1998, the producer was Bea Ballard, who had worked with Drewett, first at LWT, then in the Clive James Unit at the BBC.

By the time Parkinson left his Saturday night home in April 1982, the BBC had already started to look very different. The TV talk show had changed even more. Russell Harty soon died, tragically young, in 1988 and Parkinson suddenly started to look very old compared to a new generation of talk show hosts: Clive Anderson (born 1952), Jonathan Ross (born 1960), Graham Norton and Caroline Aherne of The Mrs Merton Show (both born 1963). There was a new, often camp tone, sharper, funnier, sometimes nastier. The emphasis was much more on pop culture, selling concert tours and new movies. You didn’t get many sightings of Jacob Bronowski, Peter Ustinov or the Archbishop of Canterbury compared to Parky’s day.

Perhaps this explains the tide of emotion that greeted Parkinson’s death. It’s hard to imagine the same public sense of loss when Jonathan Ross or Clive Anderson die. Parkinson was part of an era, a moment in the history of BBC television, when we first saw what a comic genius Billy Connolly was, saw the first glimpse on TV of Henry Fonda as a villain in Once Upon a Time in the West and listened to Jacob Bronowski talking about The Ascent of Man, at a time when such cultural series were not as rare as hen’s teeth — as they are today. The golden age of Hollywood and the golden age of the BBC are both gone. Michael Parkinson brought a glimpse of both into our Saturday night sitting rooms.

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