at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music giving the Australia Day speech (Invasion Day for Aboriginals)

saying why the country will become a republic:

you have to sing to the tune of Yellow Submarine:

"one-day-your-Queen-will-be-Camilla-Parker-Bowles"

Did the old fool hand out free Parker pens?

no..never got a pen.

next week a press conference for a show which should be most interesting :

Michael Parkinson and David Frost..interviewing each other.

Parky is very interesting talking about his show as he tells all the tales about celebrities off camera antics.

Amazingly though it never showed....there were so many that he dis-liked.

Some time ago Parkinson (he comes from Yorkshire, you know, but he doesn't like to talk about it) acquired this weird physical tic of bending his left arm so that it resembled a chicken wing and then started pumping it in and out, so that he seemed to be fighting against a slow leak. He did it all the time on his chat show. He's a strange, pompous, man (and, as Paul Fox once said, 'never likely to wear himself out through work'). And, as Meg Ryan showed, he's no great interviewer: if people want to talk, he's fine, but if they don't, he's helpless. Of course, that's the same for 99% of interviewers, but it showed how the hype that he's always encouraged for his so-called brilliance was never anything more than that.

Prunella Minge wrote:
Some time ago Parkinson (he comes from Yorkshire, you know, but he doesn't like to talk about it) acquired this weird physical tic of bending his left arm so that it resembled a chicken wing and then started pumping it in and out, so that he seemed to be fighting against a slow leak. He did it all the time on his chat show. He's a strange, pompous, man (and, as Paul Fox once said, 'never likely to wear himself out through work'). And, as Meg Ryan showed, he's no great interviewer: if people want to talk, he's fine, but if they don't, he's helpless. Of course, that's the same for 99% of interviewers, but it showed how the hype that he's always encouraged for his so-called brilliance was never anything more than that.

bit difficult to disguise the fact he is from Yorkshire with that accent !

I asked him about Meg Ryan at a press conference last year.

He said it was hate at first sight and went downhill from then on

I think Peter Cook joked that he could never go through and interview without mentioning 'Barnsley' at some point.
I lost a bit of respect for him when he began slating every other interviewer for being rubbish and yet one week sycophantically sat mesmorised allowing Tom Cruise to spout scientology rhetoric without really interjecting or questioning him. It was during his final days on ITV when he was obviously bolstering his pension and blatantly selling out to the demands of his guests.

I agree about him slagging off other chat show hosts - particularly because he seemed to think the fact he used to be a journalist was such a trump card. In fact, for a journalist he was lousy at research. There's a recording of him interviewing Orson Welles, and he gets an amazing range of facts wrong, from where the man lived to what project he'd just completed. Poor Welles looked utterly bemused. Those 70s shows were great because the stars were so happy to tell stories and be charming. Once he got to the 90s and he was required to work hard to make his guests seem interesting he was poor. Dick Cavett was far better, IMHO - there's a DVD set of his interviews with the likes of Hendrix, Lennon, Sly Stone, Janis Joplin, etc etc - so much wittier and versatile than Parky ever was.

Actually looking back on the old interviews, he didn't do an awful lot of interviewing. The likes of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and (sadly underrated) Bryan Forbes would just come on and perform an act or tell tall stories for 25 minutes - Parkinson sporadically muttering 'extraordinary' or 'fascinating' every now and again. Billy Connolly used to be on every other week doing a variation of his stage act.
In what seemed like a rather spiteful episode, he once got into an argument with Kenneth Williams about union politics which he was unable to counter. To get his own back he invited Kenneth Williams a few weeks later and got him head to head with an old union grandee called Jimmy Reed. You had to feel sorry for Williams as he was totally flummoxed by Reed's obviously more insightful rebuttal - Parkinson just acted as chairman for the episode.
Rod Hull and Emu were probably his best interviewees - notice how he gets visably annoyed because the violent 'goosing' he gets was obviously not on the script.

in the press conference Parky gave a year ago he actually said he was pals with Kenneth Williams and told some amusing stories of their times together...as well as saying Kenneth and Dame Edna were his two all time favourite subjects as they did all the work.

also said he knows he will never live down the Emu show..which I think was superb TV.

Wonderful tale in the new book about Spike Milligan...telling Harry Secombe "I hope you die before me, I don't want you singing at my funeral"

Parkinson is one of the few people who, when he laughs, actually says 'He he he'. Maybe he's a robot. Or an alien.