If the show was good enough for Welles it was good enough for pretty much anyone who was

If the show was good enough for Welles, it was good enough for pretty much anyone who was available. When these were guaranteed, he changed his request, insisting that two seats should be removed so that he might lie down in the cabin This too, was arranged. Welles said he would appear on Parkinson on condition that two first-class seats were provided for him on British Airways. When the series launched, the production team pitched agents for guests. “And every agent of every big star said, `Let’s wait and see.’ ” The breakthrough came with Orson Welles, whom Parkinson’s producer secured by travelling to Spain, where Welles was filming a sherry commercial. “Agents have always made a living out of fear and the trick is to ignore them These guys are only powerful if the producers are weak If anybody placed demands on us, we said, `Fine They don’t come on the show.’ It was very simple. If you’ve got a top-rating show, they soon bloody kowtow to you.

Are you saying Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t going to come on your programme unless you agree not to ask him certain things?”I wasn’t saying anything.”Bollocks,” Parkinson says.”God almighty,” he adds.In truth, though, even Parkinson had to play a game or two early on. “People say the show I did in the Seventies was better because nowadays the agents rule the talk show and tell the host what he can say and what he can’t Well, that’s always been the case. What’s changed is the craven manner in which people now accept that bollocks.”Parkinson swings his feet on to the floor and leans forwards. (“Bollocks” is one of Parkinson’s favourite words, along with “sodding” and “bugger”. All feature prominently in his dominant conversational mode, which is salty exasperation.) We are sitting in his dressing room He has his hands in his lap and his feet up on the table. The compelling repeats we’ve been seeing, featuring conversations with Peter Cook and Richard Burton and Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howerd, lift out of the screen like treasures from a golden age, before television chat shows turned into Hello! with some of the longer words left out.So what has altered? “There’s all this bollocks talked about agents these days,” Parkinson says.

To watch it now is to realise that it has no recognisable descendants, either. “Change your tie, not your jacket.” And we set off down the corridor, Parkinson going ahead, singing cheerfully and generally seeming very much at home.At the point at which Bill Cotton put to Parkinson the idea for a 60 or 70-minute late-night, post-Match of the Day Saturday talk show, there was no precedent for such a thing. He gathers his jacket and three ties of variously bright hues “The old sleight of hand,” he says. “Beautifully applied muck,” the make-up assistant says, looking a little hurt “Beautifully applied muck,” Parkinson agrees. He was back at the BBC last week, recording the final set of introductions and links for Parkinson: The Interviews – compilations currently going out on BBC1 of some of the most intriguing moments from the 361 late-night chat shows Parkinson hosted between 1972 and 1982, a period in which he established himself as one of the medium’s finest interviewers and became – thanks to comedian Rod Hull – the only man to be savaged on national television by a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Parkinson stands in front of the mirrors in the forcefully lit make- up room, wiping his neck with a paper towel “Let me just get this muck off,” he says. “Or Mick?”

In the Seventies, it would have been impossible to imagine a time when you might ask at Television Centre for Michael Parkinson and be greeted with a blank look But then, it’s 13 years since Parkinson signed in here “We parted quite amicably,” he told me, once I’d got in “Or so I thought,” he added and laughed noisily.