Michael Parkinson obituary: Cricket was his first and most enduring love

PARKINSON, SIR MICHAEL, CBE, who died on August 16, aged 88, was one of Britain’s most recognisable and popular TV presenters – “Parky” to everyone, whether they knew him or not. His well-loved BBC chat show, which began in 1971, seemed to run for ever, though there was a long gap from 1982 to 1998, before it came back for another six years – and three more on ITV. Several cricketers were among his estimated 2,000 guests, starting in the first series when Fred Trueman appeared with two cricket fanatics in Trevor Howard and Harold Pinter. But as it became clear that he could talk to anyone about anything, and guests understood that the interview would be about them and not him, the greatest names in Hollywood and politics said yes. Cricket, however, was Parky’s first and most enduring love.

He was the only son of a mining family from Cudworth, outside Barnsley, and his parents passed on their passions: his mum took him to the cinema, and his dad, a decent player himself, taught him cricket. He joined a local paper and played cricket on Saturdays, graduating to open for Barnsley’s first team with Dickie Bird, who became a lifelong friend. Later, a bespectacled teenager came into the middle order, and an opposing bowler asked Parky who the “short-sighted midget” was. Geoffrey Boycott, he was told. Parky made runs for Barnsley, but no impression when he went along with Bird for a trial at Headingley. “Tell ’im to stick to reporting,” the coach “Ticker” Mitchell told Dickie.

But Parkinson climbed almost all the other ladders he attempted. He found a job on The Manchester Guardian (as it then was), before moving to London with the Daily Express, and on to Granada TV, where he had a brief stint as a Middle East war correspondent in 1967. By then he was already writing sports columns for The Sunday Times. He sometimes said he thought this was his real me´tier, and he proved a trenchant columnist: “That fossilised relic, commonly known as the Marylebone Clodpoles Club, has been revealed to everyone in all its pathetic, doddering incompetence. It would take the finest brains in the world several years of painstaking thought to invent a cock-up such as MCC contrived over the D’Oliveira affair. Amazingly, MCC managed it without the help of the finest brains in the world, and it only took them a couple of months. What is incredible about this august body of nincompoops is that it never learns from its mistakes.” The splenetic Wilf Wooller demanded to know if Parkinson was a Communist.

Parky had mellowed when he returned to sports columns (mostly on cricket) for The Daily Telegraph in the 1990s, though during England’s grim tour of Australia in 1990/91 he did suggest that the then Test and County Cricket Board should be replaced by the Pools Panel, and described the chairman of selectors Ted Dexter as “one of life’s unexplained mysteries”. Michael Parkinson’s World XI even played three first-class matches, all at Scarborough – two against MCC in the late 1980s, plus a visit by the 1990 Indian tourists. Two of his 20-odd books were about the game, Cricket Mad and Michael Parkinson on Cricket; he never did write the biography of Trueman he tried to start (the  subject was elusive), but produced one of Wisden’s best memorial articles, in 2007, after Fred’s death. He spoke at the Wisden dinner two years later, but was not at his best – he said later he had never been more nervous. However, with his matchless contacts, he proved a successful, popular and generous president of both the Lord’s Taverners and, for 11 years, the Sports Journalists Association. He could have made a fine president of the Clodpoles club if he had ever become a member. But, as his father told him: “You’ve done well, son, and I’m proud of you, but you’ve got to admit it’s not like playing for Yorkshire.”

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