His program became a regular stopping point for entertainers, athletes, politicians and other international newsmakers from Madonna to Nelson Mandela to Muhammad Ali.
In 2007, Mr. Parkinson told the Yorkshire Post that the proliferation of “instant celebrities” from social media and reality TV shows did not capture his interest. “I’m not interested in people being cast away on a desert island,” he quipped. “They’re not stars.”
“So he took me down to where the men worked,” Mr. Parkinson told the Melbourne Age newspaper. “Down the real mine, into the shafts and tunnels. Not the sanitized version of what they wanted us to see. I was very frightened.” As they emerged, his father threatened to beat him if he ever again came near the mines.Mr. Parkinson’s mother was of a literary bent. She gave him books to read, notably the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos.
Believing TV could be his future, he got a job in the early 1960s as a current affairs producer with Granada TV in northwest England, before joining BBC-TV as a reporter on the respected current affairs program “Twenty-Four Hours.” In 1971, he was offered the first iteration of “Parkinson.”In 1959, he married Mary Heneghan, who he said helped him through a struggle with alcohol addiction. In addition to his wife, survivors include three sons.
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