Sir Michael Parkinson: From the streets of Doncaster to TV chat show king

As tributes begin to pour in for Sir Michael after his death at the age of 88, long before his TV tussles with Muhammad Ali, Sir Billy Connolly and of course, Rod Hull and Emu, he was a reporter based in what was then Doncaster town centre.

Working out of the offices of the Yorkshire Evening Post, which was based in Scot Lane and the Doncaster Evening Post, which was formerly based on North Bridge, Sir Michael was South Yorkshire through and through.

Born on Thursday, 28 March 1935 in the village of Cudworth, near Barnsley, the son of a miner, he was educated at Barnsley Grammar School after passing the eleven-plus and in 1951 passed two O-Levels in art and English language.

He was a club cricketer, and both he and his opening partner at Barnsley Cricket Club, Dickie Bird, had trials for Yorkshire together with Geoffrey Boycott.

He once kept Boycott out of the Barnsley Cricket Club team by scoring a century and 50 in two successive matches.

He began as a journalist on local newspapers straight after leaving school and one of the stories he covered was the death of Doncaster Busby Babe David Pegg in the 1958 Munich Air Disaster, penning an evocative report of the Highfields-born Manchester United footballer, beginning his piece “even the sky cried” as he wrote how rain had fallen on the grieving crowds.

Former Doncaster Free Press news editor Peter Whittell, who died in 2019 at the age of 78, also covered the tragedy which claimed the lives of 22 people who died when their plane crashed on a snow covered German runway on the way back from a European Cup match.

Then a 16-year-old raw recruit, Peter was a friend of the family of Highfields-born Red Devils ace David Pegg - and as news of the disaster filtered through, he was given the unenviable task of breaking details of the tragedy to the player’s mum and dad.

Sir Michael and Peter were tasked with covering the story in the aftermath of the tragedy.

He later worked as a features writer for the Manchester Guardian and later on the Daily Express in London before breaking into television.

But Sir Michael has even more to thank Doncaster for than just the beginnings of his career.

Whilst on a reporting assignment in Doncaster, he met a a young woman called Mary Heneghan on a bus in the town.

On 22 August 1959, the pair married.

Under her new name, Mary was one of the presenters of the Thames TV daytime show Good Afternoon and briefly presented Parkinson in the 1970s.

The couple had three children.

Lady Mary, who is now 87, also frequently appeared as a panelist on Through the Keyhole during her own TV career, with the pair becoming household names and familiar faces on TV screens across the 1970s and 80s.