Clive James ruminated that if Oscar Wilde were back on earth, the TV suits would worry that his wit was too elitist
It became a cliché to say that Michael Parkinson's retirement from TV in the dying days of 2007 was 'the end of an era'. But clichés are sometimes true. It did mark a quantum change in the history of television talkshows -- as did Gay Byrne's retirement from the LLS -- which, like everything organic must evolve and change. It is the considered view that the change which has occurred is a change for the worse: but it is undoubtedly a change for a difference.
The contemporary talkshow -- say, Graham Norton, Ryan Tubridy or the pace-setter, £6million-a-year Jonathan Ross -- is about the host as entertainer and even comedian. The celebrities agree to go on because they have to: if they have a movie to plug or a gig to push, their agents give them no choice. But for anyone with an ounce of decorum -- poor Nicole Kidman visibly winced at being put through a form of Japanese ritual humiliation by Wossy -- it is an ordeal which just has to be got through, like canal root dentistry.
But you very seldom get, on contemporary talk shows, seriously good conversation or a genuinely gifted raconteur. It may be a mistake even to look for high-flown conversation. Clive James, who hosted chat shows during the 1980s and '90s, tried time and again to bring together a group of people who would be brilliant at conversational discourse: he had some success, and he himself was no slouch as the egotistical TV host. But he ran out of steam -- and of commissions. The TV bosses informed him, as the century neared its end, that brilliant talk was not what the public wanted.
What they wanted was entertaining celebrities. They wanted Joan Rivers. They wanted Ruby Wax. They wanted 'alternative' comedy, that is to say, routines that were more explicit, more foul-mouthed and more blasphemous. The public then came to want 'reality shows', which would make celebrities out of ordinary folk, or take doubtful celebrities and put them in embarrassing situations -- sometimes called 'gladiatorial TV' in the media business, as it works on the same principle of gladiators being torn to shreds in the Roman circus purely for the entertainment of the masses.
And they wanted 'lifestyle'. Clive James ruminated that if Oscar Wilde were back on earth, the TV suits would worry that his wit was too elitist.
TV is not what it was in its glory days of the 1960s, '70s, '80s: because social change restlessly moves on. And although performers like Tommy Tiernan perhaps wouldn't understand this, all art depends upon setting boundaries. If you can say anything, you say nothing.
Taboos are necessary not just to a moral order, but to inspiration. I am glad, sometimes, that I was able to be a rebel back in the 1960s when there was so much to rebel against: that's what made it fun. But if anything goes, what's there to push against the pricks?
And then something else happened anyway. The internet rose, as did the phenomenon of the mobile phone: and young people -- always the target audience for TV suits -- spent less and less time watching television. The worldwide web is the medium of the young, with their blogs and their varieties of websites and personalised videos. Mainstream television is now more often for older people, or for special interests, like sport. In the developed countries, TV viewing is now a declining activity.
At its height, Parkinson's shows elicited fabulous talk: wonderfully articulate people who could converse like ancient Athenians. And Parky's special gift was -- he let them talk. He didn't interrupt. Unlike the lesser-gifted, gabbling, frightened TV gasbags, Parky wasn't afraid of silence on air. (Neither is Terry Wogan.) But the focus was on the guest, not the host.
Privately, Parky has a much less deferential persona. In private life, Michael -- who was a young reporter in the North of England with my husband back in the 1950s -- can be quite a prickly person. He's amiable, but suffers no fools.
One of Parkinson's finest hours as a reporter relates to a little-known episode involving Conor Cruise O'Brien. Parky was despatched to Africa by the Daily Express in 1961 and told to crucify Conor Cruise, whom the Express regarded as 'a Communist' (he was an anti-Imperialist in the Congo, yes). The paper was particularly interested in Conor Cruise's private life after a separation from his first wife. Parky told them, in best Yorkshire fashion, to get stuffed.
Later in the decade, Parky became George Best's moral minder, as Best was berthed with the Parkinsons in an effort to control his wild, wild ways. It was Mary, Michael's strong-minded wife, who couldn't take the procession of girls going through Georgie's bedroom in the family home.
No doubt we will learn all when Michael Parkinson publishes his memoirs: but his TV interviews will remain as a template, to be taught in broadcast academies, of how to conjure good talk over the airwaves.
- Mary Kenny
