It took a while for them to get rid of us and we made a few headlines in the meantime. The interview with Tony Blair was the lead story in the media for a couple of days. I asked the then prime minister about the war in Iraq and how he coped with having to make life and death decisions:
PARKINSON:
‘You’ve been called a liar and a warmonger . . . what’s your feeling when you read that? And also when you read of casualties and people blame you for those casualties, that’s an awful thing to live with and I wondered how you coped?’
BLAIR:
‘Well it’s even more difficult for the people out on the front line doing the job.’
PARKINSON:
‘Of course.’
BLAIR:
‘And that’s what you have to remember.’
PARKINSON:
‘And you sent them there.’
BLAIR:
‘Yep. And that decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgment that, well, if you have faith about these things, then you realise that judgment is made by other people. And also by . . .’
PARKINSON:
‘Sorry, what do you mean by that?’
BLAIR:
‘I mean by other people by, if you believe in God, it’s meant by God as well . . . the only way you can make a decision like that is to try and do the right thing according to your conscience. As for the rest of it, you leave it to the judgment history will make.’
The
Daily Telegraph
said: ‘It was the frankest admission Mr Blair has yet made about how his religious beliefs influence his actions as Prime Minister, particularly the life and death decisions involved in military action.’
We had wanted to do a one-man show with the prime minister but Number Ten thought not, which left us with the question of who we put on with him. I thought Kevin Spacey, the film actor and artistic director of the Old Vic, would be an excellent companion. He was politically smart, articulate and no supporter of Mr Blair’s friend, the President of the United States, George Bush. In fact, when Spacey and Blair came together in the studio and the prime minister started talking about the president, Spacey jokingly moved his chair to the other end of the set.
We discussed the link between acting and politics and I said it always seemed to me that Bill Clinton was a marvellous actor. Tony Blair described him as ‘the best politician I have ever come across’. He then told a marvellous story of a summit in a foreign land where, for some unfathomable reason, the world leaders were required to make a photo call wearing local fashions. He said he was given three shirts to chose from, ‘ranging from ghastly to unbelievably hideous’.
He said, ‘I put on what I thought was the least worse, which was to say ghastly, and go to the summit meeting and meet Clinton who is wearing the worst of the lot, the unbelievably hideous one. So I go up to him and say, “Bill, that looks awful.” And he says, “Yep,” and I say,“Why?”And he says,“Tony, let me tell you something. When the folks back home in America see my shirt they are going to say, look at our Mr President, someone has made him wear that shirt just to be nice to all those people out there. But when the folks back in Britain see you in your shirt they might just think you chose it.”’
The show rated six million, the critics were so kind you would have thought we were a flagship for the network instead of being on our way out. The fact was Simon Shaps still didn’t want the show. They tried Al Murray and Dame Edna in my spot in an obvious search for a replacement. Their ratings did nothing to suggest they had achieved this, yet Murray was openly talked of as the man who would take over. When we asked what the difference was between his ratings and ours we were told that his programmes were watched by ‘different eyeballs’.
Charles Allen departed and our last reliable supporter had moved on. Michael Grade took over as ITV’s Executive Chairman and took me out to lunch. He told me the show was ‘too expensive’, yet when the last series of
Parkinson
was announced we were told that Elizabeth Taylor was the star guest the bosses most desired and we could spend £250,000 on getting her. There was obviously still plenty in the pot to finance barmy ideas.
It was decided
Parkinson
’s last series would start in the autumn of 2007 and I set off to Australia to watch the cricket – but not before a letter arrived informing me I was to receive a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List. I had no idea. I told the family. Felix, my four-year-old grandson, asked, ‘Will you wear a suit of armour?’ In fact I turned up in the morning suit Mr Hayward had made for my last visit to the palace to receive my CBE. That time Prince Charles officiated, this time it was Her Majesty The Queen. Stuart Rose, the boss of Marks & Spencer, was also being knighted. I had not met him before and found him an attractive man with a ready sense of humour. After we had been instructed in how to advance and retreat from Her Majesty we were asked if we had any questions. Stuart Rose asked if they had a back door through which he could make his entrance. When asked why he replied, ‘I’m trade.’ Her Majesty asked how long I had been on television. I told her about fifty years and she laughed, sympathetically.
In Australia, England were the visitors, defending the Ashes so gloriously won in 2005. The Aussies had their revenge with a display of what can only be termed aggressive retribution, which, at times, was so overwhelming as to appear contemptuous. Our only consolation was we were beaten by the best cricket team I have ever seen, including the greatest spin bowler of all time, Shane Warne. I interviewed Warne at length for Australian television and it turned out to be the highest rating satellite television programme of them all.
Then I sang at the Sydney Opera House.
It would be wrong to claim it had been my ambition so to do, but when the chance occurred I was eager to experience the impossible. It happened when I was asked to write and present a live concert of film music at the Opera House, along with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. As I wrote the script and paraded the glorious music by the Bernsteins – Leonard and Elmer – Vaughan Williams, John Barry, John Williams and Henry Mancini, and many more, it occurred to me that, with a slight finagling, I could construct a means whereby I might justify singing in one of the world’s most spectacular monuments to great music and celebrated performers.
Discussing great movie songs in the script, I told the story of ‘As time goes by’ and how it was written long before the film
Casablanca
was ever made and how, after the film had been finished, the studio wanted to replace it with an alternative song. Their decision was thwarted only because Ingrid Bergman had moved on to make a film in which she played a partisan freedom fighter and had had her hair cropped so short they couldn’t match the shot. So ‘As time goes by’ stayed because of a haircut and became the world’s favourite movie love song.
Many years ago I recorded the song with my friend Laurie Holloway when I was one of a group of celebrities asked to record a drinking song and a love song for a charity CD. The drinking song I chose was one my father taught me called ‘Beer is best’. I had used the song again in a documentary I wrote for Yorkshire Television. I told my audience that all of this justified my singing it in a programme about film music. It led to me standing on stage at the Sydney Opera House singing these words:
Beer is best, beer is best,
Makes you fit, makes you strong,
Puts some vinegar in your old King Kong.
Beer makes bonny Britons,
Beer will stand the test,
What did Winston Churchill say?
Beer is best.
You have to admire my nerve.
I told the conductor, Brett Weymark, I needed a pub pianist to accompany me and a battered upright pub piano. The piano was just right but the pianist was a skilled classical musician and not familiar with the vamping style of pub pianists. Brett stepped in. He had played in pubs to pay his way through college and knew how to belt out a tune. Together we battered the audience into submission.
The entire event was hugely enjoyable. To stand in front of a large symphony orchestra is a great privilege and to feel the music surge through your body was to be transported into a state of what can only be described as musical bliss.
It was a happy time until Andrew, my eldest boy, called. My mother had been taken to hospital. She didn’t have long to live. We flew back to London straightaway and, as we waited for our luggage at Heathrow, I received a call saying she had died.
We went to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford where she was laid out in a room with her hair swept back, her hands on the coverlet and three pink flowers across her bosom. I remember thinking how formal she looked, how much she resembled a carving on a tomb. And then I realised that the reason I was inspecting her like an exhibit was because, yet again, I was avoiding the possibility of grief invading my life.
I took her hand, and let the sorrow and the joy of being her son overwhelm me, and then I knew my mother had died.
40
THE ENGINE OF MY AMBITION
Freda Rose Parkinson was ninety-six years old when she died. For all but the last two years of her life she was an industrious and opinionated citizen of the world in which she lived. When she was born women did not have the vote, there was civil unrest in the land with gunboats in the Mersey and troops on the streets, and George V celebrated being crowned Emperor of India by going on a tiger shoot. She lived in the most momentous century of human existence, through wars and poverty and radical change without ever a backward glance, and in the end she didn’t die; she gave in.
She was the engine of my ambition. Her anger at being an intelligent woman yet deprived of a chance of a brighter future by a system that discriminated against all working-class children, but particularly women, burned through her life. Typically, she converted the energy it created into forging her son’s ambition. She filled the house with books, took me to the movies and the theatre, opened up the prospect of a life beyond the confines of a pit village.
Similarly, she drove my father on, encouraging him to make the best of a life down a pit. For a while he went along with the idea but only because he loved her. I remember sitting at our kitchen table doing my homework while my mother sat holding a large book on mining engineering, bullying him through exams.
She loved him, and no other, but not like he loved her. My father loved my mother with a devotion that defied reason but was wonderful to behold. It wasn’t that he forgave his wife her faults and accommodated her shortcomings. He simply didn’t see them, which was even more remarkable considering my mother could be a troublesome woman. Her success at designing knitwear and selling her talents from a council house in a mining village only further convinced her that life had dealt her a lousy hand. It seemed to me she constantly wished she was somewhere else, somewhere a long way removed from our view of Grimethrope Colliery.
Like any working-class matriarch, she ran the house and our lives according to her rules. She had a fearsome temper and I remember on one occasion sitting in my wigwam in the garden with my father after we had sought refuge from one of her tantrums, and he suggesting – jokingly – I should go back inside and ask her to she join us to smoke a pipe of peace.
On the other hand, I never witnessed her looking less than glamorous; nor ever saw her without admiring the way she took pride in her appearance.
I drew strength and confidence from her example and grew into manhood very much the son of my mother. It took me a journey into later life to become more like my father, or I hope that is what happened.
Her happiest days were spent living in her cottage in Oxfordshire, which is where they relocated after my father retired. They relished their grandchildren, started travelling abroad and never missed a chance to attend a recording of the talk show, where my mother, who was a terrible flirt, would flutter her eyelashes at the likes of James Stewart and Henry Fonda.
She was a widow for a third of her life and dealt with her grief and her solitude in a typically practical and resolute way. She took a summer job working in a holiday home she had visited with my father; she delivered meals on wheels and visited care homes where she gave beauty treatments to old people. She told me they often wanted to be made up to look like a film star from Hollywood’s golden period, the favourite being Carmen Miranda.
She travelled abroad with friends, never losing her enjoyment of savouring the world, and grew closer to her sister Madge and her husband Jim, who formed a bedrock of love and understanding for Mary and our family as well as my mother. She lived by herself and resisted any form of outside help, such as a daily home help, until she was in her nineties.
She walked a mile or more every day of her life and was in her late eighties before a series of events led to me persuading her to stop driving. The end came when, after parking in a deserted street in Oxford and finding herself boxed in when she returned, she endeavoured to shunt her way out of trouble. I was rung by a car-owner incandescent with rage at having his car battered by an octogenarian road hog.
Ever after she went by public transport, turning down any other sensible alternative, such as a taxi. She soon forgot the circumstances that led to her giving up driving and for the last ten years of her life would tell anyone within earshot that her awful son had taken away her car for no apparent reason and was an ungrateful cur.
It was because she was so independent and mettlesome that her swift decline into senility became so wretched to witness. It started with what might be termed ordinary forgetfulness in a person in her nineties, and then she began telling us of imagined visitors – a child, a cat, a family who spent all their time getting drunk in the pub across the way, keeping her awake at night. Then she started wandering. A young policeman called me at 2 a.m. He had found my mother in her dressing gown walking the streets looking for my father. He had taken her home and made her a cup of tea. They were getting along fine. He sat with her until we arrived.