Chat-show supremo Sir Michael Parkinson pays tribute to guests but despairs at TV's descent into mediocrity.
Actress Shirley MacLaine once called legendary British chat-show host Sir Michael Parkinson "a male chauvinist pig", and although she was clearly flirting with him, reading Parky's latest book you'd have to say she had a point.
A tribute to his decades of TV interviews, Parky's People (Hodder & Stoughton, $59.99) reproduces memorable encounters with entertainers, sportspeople and figures from Hollywood's golden age. But it's the Leading Ladies section, with Parky flirting his way through interviews with stars like the young Helen Mirren, Diana Rigg and Raquel Welch while displaying a red-blooded interest in their physical attributes (especially breasts), that seems almost shocking in these politically correct, more deodorised times.
"You're accusing me, just as Helen Mirren did, of being a sexist brute," chuckles Parkinson over the phone from his base in Windsor. "But that's not quite true. To deny the fact there is a sexual frisson between people when they meet is nonsense. And how could there not be? I sat next to these incredible women. Raquel Welch I interviewed when she was 24 - gorgeous skin, beautiful eyes, a figure to die for - impossible not to flirt. Shirley MacLaine is so flirtatious it's not true. It was a part of the show I enjoyed very much indeed."
At 75, Parkinson comes across as slightly crabby and rather genial at the same time. He is famously dismissive of what passes for good television today, calling it a "cheap celebrity celebration of mediocrity", and condemns shows like the X-Factor, where people are manipulated and humiliated.
"Television is phoney," he tells me. "What viewers seem to want to watch is people being thrown to the lions. But perhaps the audience will get over that and there'll be a return to proper values with television again featuring people who have a story to tell.
"I didn't have people on my show because they were famous," he adds. "I went for people with talent. That's the difference with today - they have no hinterland, nothing to find out about."
The conversational type of chat show, he points out, barely exists now. "They're out of fashion and while they might come back I don't intend to wait around."
The last ever Parkinson screened in December 2007, but his bid to revive the format was never as successful as the show's heyday in the 70s and 80s.
"It wasn't that I didn't want to do the job - it's the best job in the world. But I didn't like the different kinds of people running the TV industry. I didn't have anything in common with them and for the first time I felt uncomfortable in the job.
"So I walked away to do different things and I've got no ambitions to go back. I've had offers but I've had the best of it I think."
Retirement has been busy and writing books has kept Parky away from his beloved golf course more than he'd have liked. First there was an autobiography and then the massive task of going over almost 2000 interviews and choosing a selection to appear in Parky's People.
The whole process seems to have put him in a very good mood. "It was extraordinary looking back," he explains.
"This was the first time I'd looked at many of them for more than 40 years and I'd forgotten I'd interviewed some of those people. Of course they weren't done originally to be part of a book so I was concerned they might not come off the page, but I think it's worked. The book is a tribute really to all the people I met and the shows we did together."
A roll call of greats, Parky's People features everyone from John Wayne and David Niven to John Lennon and Henry Kissinger. It seems there was no one worth meeting that didn't eventually end up walking down the stairs on the Parkinson set, and it must have been a roller-coaster ride for him as interviewer.
"If you'd asked me after I'd come off who I'd just interviewed I wouldn't have been able to tell you," he admits.
"I'd wiped it already. That was the process we went through each week. The mind has to be fluid and you have to wipe it clean and start afresh every time you walk down the stairs."
The two guests guaranteed to put a couple of million on the ratings every time they appeared were Muhammad Ali and Billy Connolly. Over 30 years of the show Connolly appeared 15 times and Parky calls him "God's gift to the chat-show host". But it was Ali who stands out as the most remarkable person he's interviewed.
"He was an extraordinary cocktail of a man,'' Parkinson explains. "Witty, bright, arrogant, cruel. When you read the interviews I did with him from champion athlete to forlorn man it's the life story of a great athlete."
There were low points like an excruciating encounter with a frosty Meg Ryan that continues to be much viewed on YouTube.
"Some people are nervous, they don't like you, they don't want to be there and there's not much you can do about that," he says philosophically.
"Some agreed to sit there and be interviewed then were changed by drugs or alcohol. Others like Meg Ryan were deeply unhappy at that moment in time caused by I don't know what."
There may be a follow-up to Parky's People as there's certainly enough material leftover. In the meantime the man himself is keeping busy and healthy. He works out three times a week and drinks only good wine in moderation. His mother lived until the age of 96 and, says Parky, if he's going to stick around that long himself then he'd like to remain vigorous.
"I'm approaching the business of growing old boldly," he tells me.
"Society is dominated by young people who look like models but they ignore old people at their peril. What we have to say can be not only informative but uplifting."
