Thanks Parky! you showed us anyone can make it.

Thanks Parky you showed us all anyone can make it! 

Any young entrepreneurs from humble backgrounds who may feel daunted by the future should take heart from the rich and successful life of journalist and broadcaster Michael Parkinson for inspiration. He died this week, aged 88. 

The man who wrote like an angel

Parkinson showed it didn’t matter  who you were and where you were from. He wrote like an angel and was a consummate interviewer and, rare these days, a good listener.

The accomplished journalist and broadcaster had no fancy qualifications, nor rich patrons, nor rich parents. He started out, at the very bottom, in a tiny local newspaper in Yorkshire walking the streets in search of stories and making the mundane interesting. 

Parkinson scaled the class barriers

How many of us, who took this hard route in journalism, know how it prepares and steels you for anything that comes. We despair occasionally, at young, internet-struck, journalists who could make the Last Supper sound mundane – even if Pontius Pilate was pouring the wine.    

Parkinson scaled the heights of broadcasting and journalism. This at a time when class barriers stood  like 40-foot stone walls.

Shows repeated half a century later

His Saturday night Parkinson chat show, on the BBC, used to clear the streets. 

It was good enough to be repeated 50 years later. A favourite in the days when the whole family could sit down and watch because the interviews had something for everyone. 

Parkinson questioned them all : Orson Welles; WH Auden; Muhammed Ali and Jimmy Cagney right down to Billy Connolly and Rod Hull who famously attacked him with his emu. 

Yet Parkinson was always at ease with everyone from princes to paupers.  

A tough upbringing in a pit village

Parkinson was born-and-bred near Barnsley, in the South Yorkshire coalfields, the son of a hard working miner. He grew up in a council house in Cudworth – a rough, tough, pit village that was the rich source of many of his first books. 

His father, John William, was a miner and fast bowler who played cricket, drank beer, grew vegetables and devoted himself to raising his family.

If any cricketer dared call him “John Willy” on the pitch, there would be a red alert at the nearest casualty ward that night, Parkinson once wrote.

Insightful and sharp

The pages of books like Parkinson’s Lore drew on this rich material. It was born of years of growing up cheek-by-jowl  in a pit village with people who may not have much money, but make up for it in common sense. He wrote about cunning fast bowlers, tenacious and terrifying footballers, hard men from the  mines and pompous officials, with a rare eye for detail. His was a pen that was insightful and sharp.

Parkinson could paint pictures with words. He captured  complex people and situations with a simple snapshot.  

A tale of Geoffrey Boycott’s character

One insightful tale I have never forgotten, more than 45 years since I first read it, was about England batsmen and fellow Yorkshireman Geoffrey Boycott. 

Parkinson, who was also a contender to play cricket for Yorkshire, played for Barnsley with Boycott and umpire Dickie Bird. He once wrote Bird was such a nervous batter that he used  to chew his nails through his cricket gloves.

Boycott was playing for Barnsley with Parkinson on the day a telegram arrived from Yorkshire Cricket Club telling the future international  to report to the nets in Leeds. 

A messenger ran out to the wicket where Boycott was batting. He read it, took off his gloves, put his bat under his arm, and walked off in the middle of his innings. 

‘I’m finished with this kind of cricket,” Boycott said.

Insight into character in one anecdote. Spot on, Parky. 

How to get ahead as a writer

As a teenager, I devoured all of Parkinson’s books. I loved his economical, clear and unpretentious prose. He showed us that it was OK, indeed fun, to write about real life among  people who work and sweat their way through it .

Parkinson always stressed that the best way to improve as a writer – was not a master’s degree in journalism – but reading the work of other writers and analysing and absorbing the best of it. This is a policy I stick to right up to this day. 

Thanks Parky for the inspiration

Along with Ernest Hemingway and fellow journalist John Pilger, Parkinson inspired me to forge a career writing for a living and – later in life – interviewing  people on TV and writing books.

Thanks Parky – the world of journalism is a lot poorer for your passing .