In 1973, Richard Harris, a perfect guest, danced around the set as he told a story that concluded with his mother, at an early, iffy Shakespeare performance, audibly trilling “Isn’t he?” from the front row. Parkinson was an instant devotee of George Best and, after welcoming the Belfast footballer often to his home, published a book entitled George Best: A Memoir in 2018. “We became friends and that was it,” he told The Irish Times.
Parkinson did his best to seem amused that interviews with Rod Hull and his psychopathic emu puppet Emu were, in subsequent years, brought up almost as much as those meetings with Ali. More troubling in retrospect was a 1975 interview – largely ignored at the time – in which he described Helen Mirren as “projecting slutty eroticism” and asked about her “physical attributes”.shortly after the video was rediscovered online, Mirren remarked: “It was completely inappropriate.
Meanwhile Parkinson was busy across the broadcasting spectrum. With Anna Ford, Robert Kee, David Frost and Peter Jay, he completed the starry line-up that launched the TV-AM breakfast channel in 1982. The station struggled before Roland Rat – “the only rat to join a sinking ship” – arrived as unlikely saviour. Parkinson’s slot on Saturday morning was actually a rare opening hit for TV-AM, but, after many convulsions, he had left the station by early 1984.