Michael Heseltine’s Haymarket group of companies was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and I was at the Grosvenor House to say a few words about the great man and introduce the cabaret. I almost never go to official dinners, first nights, cocktail parties or any such event. I don’t like them, they don’t suit me. So how come I was standing up in front of nine hundred well-heeled guests, thinking what the hell am I doing here? You could smell the money, and the reason I was sniffing it was because I had been having a rose named after me at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham when Michael Heseltine appeared out of a Japanese garden and reminded me of a time, forty-seven years ago, when I worked for him. His publishing empire, which included gardening magazines, was coming up fifty and would I help him out at the dinner?
That was why I was sitting at the top table at Grosvenor House surrounded by bankers and other friends of Michael’s, including David Frost, John Major – looking ten years younger than when he was PM – Mary Quant and Stirling Moss. I introduced Shirley Bassey as the cabaret event, one of the few performers extant who could defeat the size and acoustic of the hall, which must have been built to house the Graf Zeppelin.
I started counting the ratio of bald heads to full heads of hair, which I normally do on these occasions if only to allow myself a slight feeling of superiority. I spotted a white-haired man on the next table who had fallen asleep. A picture of this with the caption ‘The Man Who Fell Asleep During a Shirley Bassey Concert’ would become a collector’s item. Nothing woke him, not all of Shirley’s anthems, until ‘Something’, when he jerked forward like a salmon at a fly. He was in fact attempting to rescue his front teeth, which had fallen from his slack mouth.
My mind wandered on from heads to haircuts. I have mine done by Leslie at Smile. I’ve been going there for nearly forty years. Same wife, same house, same job for all that time. Must be I don’t like change or, more likely, recognise a good thing when I see it. Les has seen my hair go from dark brown to salt and pepper to white. There was a time when it went a most peculiar colour due to the sun.
Immediately rumours started that I had bleached it. The papers had their fun but then it became silly. One of the assistants in the salon told Les that she had been approached by a journalist who offered her a hundred quid if she could give them a lock of my hair so they might analyse it and tell the nation the awful truth. What we did was provide her with a snip of hair from a Pekingese of my acquaintance. We heard no more but I can only imagine the journalist’s reaction to the analyst’s report that Mr Parkinson did not dye his hair but, on the other hand, he
had
won a prize at Crufts.
Ricky Hatton, Paul Anka and Michael Winner were the stars of our fourth show. I first met Paul through Sammy Cahn, who took me to Vegas to see him in cabaret, a show that ranked as one of the very best I have ever seen. Anka talked about the heyday of Vegas and partying with Sinatra. He told the story of Sinatra getting drunk and belligerent one night at the Sands Hotel and having an argument in the Casino, which ended in the management sending for Carl Cohen, ‘a mob guy’, to calm him down.
Paul said,‘Sinatra pulled the tablecloth from Cohen’s table, spilling hot coffee all over him. Cohen punched Sinatra in the mouth, sending his teeth flying all over the coffee shop.’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘We never went back to the Sands again, is what happened,’ said Paul.
Michael Winner talked about his recovery from a near-fatal illness. He said in hospital he was put in the Princess Margaret Room, provoking his reaction, ‘Great, I thought, she died.’
I asked Ricky Hatton, who is such a funny, agreeable young man, how he squared his gentle, pleasant personality with his pitbull aggression in the ring. He said, ‘It’s nice to be nice before you beat someone up.’ Great title for a book.
We booked an all-female show for our fifth. These always work well, partly because the women gang up on me in a game called ‘Kill the Host’, but mainly because women are better at relating to one another in that conversational gossipy way that works so well on the talk show. The guests were Sophie Dahl, Sharon Osbourne and Joan Rivers. I remember Sophie as a baby and look at her now – tall, willowy, beautiful. I knew her mum and her grannie and granddad, Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal, who were a fascinating couple. Looking at their granddaughter made me feel old.
Sharon Osbourne is a remarkable woman and I admire the way she has survived a turbulent life, making a virtue, nay a career, out of adversity.
You could say the same about Joan Rivers, who found comedy a better cure than pills or, indeed, suicide, as she had demonstrated on an earlier show, and in doing so created one of my all-time favourite comedy moments. She was sitting next to Cliff Richard and was describing how, at a particularly depressing moment in her life, she took a revolver and was about to blow her brains out when her pet dog jumped on her lap and nuzzled her. She paused in the telling, but I didn’t fall for it. I had worked with enough comedians to know they can’t keep a straight face for too long. Cliff, being nice, dear Cliff, offered her a reassuring hand, and asked sympathetically, ‘What did you do?’ ‘I shot the dog,’ said Ms Rivers. Indicating her fur collar, she added, ‘Look, I’m wearing him now.’
Our next guests were the remarkable Attenboroughs. Dickie told me about his lifelong fascination with Gandhi and his first sighting of him in a cinema newsreel with his father in the 1930s. Dickie said Gandhi was dressed in his familiar dhoti and the audience laughed and jeered at his appearance. His father told him, ‘My son, the loud laugh bespeaks the empty mind. This is a truly great man.’ Later, when he was planning his film about Gandhi, he was particularly impressed by a story of Gandhi walking down a street and having to step into the gutter to make way for two white men. Gandhi said to his companion, ‘It amazes me that men should feel honoured by the humiliation of fellow human beings.’ Dickie Attenborough has made a singular contribution to British cultural life and history will judge him as one of the great nurturing guardians of the British film industry.
Sir David Attenborough is the greatest broadcaster of our time. His documentaries have entertained and informed countless millions, and no one has done more to explain the planet we occupy. The most damning condemnation of television today is that in the unlikely event of another David Attenborough turning up, the bosses wouldn’t know what to do with him. He is irreplaceable and why he is not a Nobel Laureate is one of life’s great mysteries.
Similarly, Bobby Charlton, the third guest on the same show, occupies a special place in our hearts. Not only was he one of the greatest footballers of all time, and certainly assured of his place in any England team of any era, but his gentle, modest way and the dignity of his bearing make him a role model for any sportsman. That many of the modern players choose to ignore his example (although, it’s possible most of them don’t know who he is) is both their loss, and their shame.
With the lovely Joanna Lumley I fronted the sixtieth anniversary of BAFTA at the New London Theatre. There was the usual crowd of autograph-hunters outside. Nowadays, they constitute two different categories – those who do it for love and those who do it for money. The latter is the largest category – by far. These are the people who sell the autograph on eBay, the ones who ask you to sign single sheets of paper or a photo without a dedication. Autograph books are rare. One eBay woman, with a child aged about twelve, gave me a page to sign. ‘Look who it is,’ she said to her son. ‘Who is he?’ he said. ‘Parkinson,’ she explained. ‘What’s his first name?’ he asked. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. I signed Britney Parkinson.
Miss Piggy was the first star guest on the BAFTA evening. I wanted to revive our relationship, to talk to her to see if the magic still existed. Sadly, the producers gave the job to Sharon Osbourne, which was a serious piece of miscasting. Fact is, Miss Piggy is a man-eater, a predatory female. All the humour stems from her relationship with men. The sexual tension, the source of her humour, is lost playing opposite a woman. ‘Leave us now, we have woman’s talk,’ Sharon said to me. ‘You have much in common,’ I replied.
Sharon and the pig were OK, but the Kumars meeting Sir Ben Kingsley was awkward. It seemed like a great idea at the time – the Kumars meeting Gandhi is irresistible – but it suffered because Sir Ben seemed to be unaware that
The Kumars at 42
is a spoof chat show. The dynamic of the Kumars is the conflict between the son – the splendid Sanjeev Bhaskar – and his ambition to be a talk-show host, and his feisty grandma – the sublime Meera Syal – who thinks he is an idiot, and who has the hots for some of the male guests. The guest is simply the poor sap caught in the crossfire of their relationship, the victim of their confusion. When I did the show she called me ‘a silver-haired mongoose’. There’s an ancient twinkle in her eye, like a snowflake on a tombstone.
When I left the theatre the autograph-hunters were still there. The woman and her son hadn’t moved from the front row. Behind them a man lifted up his book and asked me to sign. I reached out to take his book over the head of the boy who looked up at my armpit and he cried, ‘Oh look, mam, he’s got a big hole in his jumper.’
Daniel Radcliffe, the young actor made into an international star by playing Harry Potter, is a shiny person. Everything about him gleams from his highly polished shoes to his open, friendly face. He was on our seventh show to talk about his role in a TV drama called
My Boy Jack
, the tragic story of the death of Rudyard Kipling’s son in the First World War. The story has a particular poignancy because Rudyard Kipling was the country’s foremost advocate of war against Germany and encouraged his boy to enlist, even though he had failed a medical board. The ensuing tragedy resulted in Kipling writing bitter poetry about the war, including the chilling couplet:
If any question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
I was especially interested in the interview because of my fascination with the First World War and its poets. In fact, the day before I met Daniel I had bought a first edition of Wilfred Owen’s war poems, which included a letter from his mother to a neighbour saying: ‘Wilfred would have wanted you to have this book.’
Owen’s observations of the horrors of war, of the bravery of soldiers, of the discrepancy between those who send men to war and those who fight them on their behalf, are as true and meaningful today as they were when he wrote them in the trenches ninety years ago. And we thought, as we always do, it was the war to end all wars. We vowed never to forget them. But we did. And we are still doing it.
Daniel was on the show with Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Ray Winstone. The last time I interviewed Dawn and Jennifer was at the BBC with Tom Jones. Everything went according to plan until Tom’s song spot when the girls thought they would enliven the end by throwing knickers at the singer. The crowd loved it, Tom didn’t mind (it brought back memories) but his management team thought it a disgraceful slur on their artist’s reputation, this, in spite of the fact that there was a time in Tom’s life when women threw so many undergarments at him, the knicker factory in
Coronation Street
went into overtime.
One evening Mary and I went to see Patrick Stewart in
Macbeth
, a powerful, compelling production, which, along with his recent work in classical theatre, marks him as one of the most charismatic actors of his generation. When he returned from America and the
Star Trek
franchise, he set about using his celebrity and financial clout to do all the work he had longed to do since leaving Britain for the States. He was also involved in good work as Chancellor at Huddersfield University and, over dinner after the show, asked if I would accept an honorary degree. The ceremony, he said, would be at Barnsley Town Hall. That was the clincher.
I had Lewis Hamilton, the hottest young man in all of British sport, on the show. That first season he could do no wrong. He was a slight, attractive figure with a quiet manner and a nutcracker handshake. He talked about the feeling of serenity that sometimes sweeps over him in the cockpit when he is doing well and at one with the car. He said he relaxes so much he often hums to himself during a Grand Prix. It was one of the few times I got an interesting response to that hoary old question about what goes through the mind of an actor, musician, athlete – any performer – as they push themselves to their limits.
Frank Tyson, the England fast bowler, was said to recite poetry as he ran in to relax him and aid his concentration. Dickie Bird told me a marvellous story of playing against the great man at Scarborough and hitting him for three consecutive fours. According to Bird, as he delivered the fourth ball, what he heard from Tyson was not poetry, but the challenge, ‘Hit that bugger for four.’ They were, said Dickie, the last words he heard before he ended up in hospital with a broken jaw.
Another time, after I had introduced Kiri Te Kanawa at an open-air concert and she had sung a sublime version of ‘Summertime’, I asked her what was going through her mind as she created a sound of such purity and beauty. She said, ‘Halfway through the song I saw three ducks flying across my line of vision and I thought, I wish I’d brought my gun.’
David Cameron was on the same show as Lewis Hamilton. He recounted how he had met Kate Moss at a charity do. He remembered she had a house in his constituency that had recently been flooded, so he said how sorry he was, particularly because the local pub had also been flooded and he knew how much she liked the pub, but it was going to be opened in six months, so anything he could do in the meantime? He was, in his own words, ‘wittering’. She told him he seemed like a really useful guy and could she have his phone number. He went back to his table and announced, ‘The good news is I met Kate Moss and she wanted my telephone number, the bad news is she thinks I’m something to do with drainage.’