Legendary chat show host Michael Parkinson has spent his 30-year-career interviewing larger-than-life personalities such as Muhammed Ali, Peter Sellers and Nelson Mandela. But the 67-year-old journalist has hit back at the disintegrating quality of entertainment today, saying: “God knows what’s happening to television. It’s something I’m totally in despair about.”
In an interview with the TV Times, the British icon lashed out at the current reality show trend and the instant celebrities who go along with them. “We’d never dream of having a Big Brother person on the show or any of those cheap and silly entertainers there are now,” he says. “If this had been the landscape that I viewed when I first came into television I don’t think I’d have bothered. Now I’m like a troglodite.”
Michael speculates that if he were to start his career in current times – with the influx of celebrity hosts such as ex-footballer Ian Wright and model Melinda Messenger – he’d probably be out of luck. “If I came along today as a 26-year-old journalist and said, ‘Here I am. I’m not a bad interviewer and I’d like to do a talk show’, they’d tell me to bugger off,” he explains. “They’d say ‘Can you sing, can you dance, can you put ferrets down your trousers? What do you do for tricks? Oh you do interviews, do you? What’s that?”
The star will once again put his famed interviewing skills to the test when his new series, which will feature guests such as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Hanks, begins next week. Michael, who says his current two-year-contract with the BBC will likely be his last, also plans to write his autobiography in the future.
Photo: © Alphapress.com
