Sunday correspondent Mark Crysell remembers meeting Sir Michael Parkinson, who died yesterday aged 88.
I sat down once with Sir Michael Parkinson to ask him a few questions.
It was 2009, he’d just released his autobiography Parky, and I, as TVNZ’s Europe correspondent, was tasked with interviewing one of the great interviewers for TV1’s Close Up show.
They’re known in the trade as junkets and frankly, after a couple of years of getting five minutes with ageing groovers and bright and not so bright young things plonked in front of a poster to flog their album/book/movie/fragrance, I was becoming junket jaded.
This was the very thing Parky had turned into an art form and when we sat down in a book-filled room in his Windsor home, not all that far from the Queen’s castle, he was generous, fiercely intelligent, sharp as a whip and funny.
"It doesn’t really matter how famous your interviewee is because I always treat them like the person next door."
Sir Michael was part of the first generation of South Yorkshire working class sons who didn’t have to follow their fathers down a mine to feed their families.
Instead, he became a journalist, working for newspapers like The Guardian, who insisted he’d never told a bad story and, more famously, as a hugely popular TV interviewer for the British broadcasters BBC and ITV for more than 20 years.
Parky would only have what he called "stars" on his show. He would never book a celebrity, the ones who make their names by appearing on reality television.
He wouldn’t have interviewed Kim Kardashian if she sat down in front of him.
"Ghastly people," he told me. "Only famous for being famous."
Instead, he subtly opened up the great and the good, to conduct intelligent, gently probing interviews.
He knew when to listen, when to talk – when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em.
To him, the truly great carried an indefinable aura you could feel when they walked into a room.
"You adjusted your seat belt and just sat there when Muhammad Ali got underway," he said.
Nelson Mandela told him he was going deaf just before the cameras rolled.
Mandela then leaned over and whispered in Parky’s ear “that means I’ll only answer the questions I like Mr Parkinson”.
He also spoke in matching wonder of watching one of Madonna’s assistants, during an ad break, pick the bogies out her boss’ nose on a long stick with a cotton bud taped to the end.
"I've had a fabulous life" he told me with a twinkle and a wink, "I’ve been very lucky".
Just as I was to meet him.
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