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When the days grow cold, and we grow old, what will we say of the world’s greatest interviewer, Sir Michael Parkinson, who passed away yesterday at home in London, aged 88?

To those hundreds of millions around the world who knew him only through his TV persona, Parkinson will be remembered for his personal warmth, the perpetual twinkle of wry amusement in his eye, and his air of the everyman who went everywhere and met everyone.

But here’s the thing: To those of us who knew him personally, we will remember him for… exactly the same things.

While many personalities of global fame have both a public and private side which can be of polar opposites, a huge part of Parkinson’s success over the decades was that with him, there was absolutely no difference at all.

He was every bit as famous as those he interviewed, yet ever and always remained the coal miner’s son from Yorkshire who somehow had a knack for getting the otherwise guarded to talk about themselves with extraordinary frankness.

Fame, in and of itself, held no interest for him – either in others, or for himself.

At one meal my wife and I had with him and Lady Mary in a chichi Mayfair restaurant about 10 years ago, Prince Harry greeted him happily from two tables over, and Parkinson gave a warm nod of acknowledgment back, but was not particularly fussed. Only now, Prince Harry has risen from his own chair to come over and say hello to him. Parkinson was warm, but just as warm to the waiter.

This TV icon was the very embodiment of Kipling’s famous lines from If: “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch.” He did both, effortlessly.

What he loved were people’s stories, particularly about those who had strived to achieve extraordinary things. The accidental fame of royalty was fine, as was the fame that came with a Warholian tinge, but mere celebrity interested him nought.

I first got to know Parkinson in the early 1990s when, for a decade or so, we both had weekly sports columns on the same page of London’s Daily Telegraph and started comparing notes when he was in Sydney, or I was in London, and it went from there. He loved Australia and Australians, and that love started early when his father told him that, as a people, our down-to-earth and no-frills nature meant we were just “sun-tanned Yorkshiremen”.

Michael Parkinson with Barry Humphries in a 1980 episode of Parkinson in Australia.Credit: The Age

From his youth, the man he revered most was an Australian – our own Keith Miller, the great cricketing all-rounder. The way Parkinson told it, often, England in the late `40s was a very dour, very grey, very buttoned-down place still suffering from the overhang of the Second World War.

“And then Bradman’s Invincibles arrived for the 1948 Ashes tour with Keith, and we had never seen anything like them as cricketers, or Keith Miller as a man. He was over six foot tall, tanned, and with the swagger of a Hollywood film star.”

Young Michael, all of 12 years old, was right there by the gate as Keith strode out for his first time at bat at Headingly, and was in awe for life.

“Just as he came out,” Parkinson would oft recount, “Keith whipped from his back pocket a comb which he pulled through his glorious Brylcreemed hair. We were dumbstruck. A god!”

Sir Michael Parkinson loved people’s stories, particularly about those who strived to achieve extraordinary things.Credit:

Decades later when interviewing Keith, he told the cricketer that story, whereupon Keith once again whipped from his back pocket the same comb and drew it luxuriantly through his hair!

Parkinson, who was once a good enough cricketer himself to keep no less than a very young Geoffrey Boycott out of Yorkshire’s Barnsley Cricket Club’s first team – a team that also boasted the future famous umpire Dickie Bird – could never get over his mature friendship with Keith.

Of the many great meals he had in Australia on his annual sojourns that went for the better part of 40 years, his favourite was hosted for him by Keith in the `70s, where he also invited the likes of cricketers Ray Lindwall, Tiger O’Reilly, Alan Davidson, Harold Larwood, Arthur Morris and Neil Harvey.

“I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” Parkinson later recounted. “In fact when I do die and if I do go to heaven I want the same dining arrangements.”

In the unlikely event I get there too, I want to be at that table, clearing the plates and filling the wine glasses, but listening in. For not surprisingly, as an anecdotist, there was none better than Parkinson. No matter the subject or person being discussed, he had the perfect story about them, more often than not from personal experience.

Muhammad Ali was a Parkinson guest four times.Credit: Michael Collins

From his four interviews with Muhammad Ali, to being thumped himself by Joe Frazier, to flying to Nelson Mandela’s home in South Africa, to his run-in with Helen Mirren – which he later deeply regretted – to his friendship with Shane Warne and legendary joust with Kerry Packer, his stories were fascinating.

Who else was George Michael going to talk to after making his first appearance since being arrested for public indecency in America? The singer’s opening remarks gushed about what an honour it was to finally meet Parkinson, how when he was eight years old his mother would let him stay up late just to see his broadcast and how stunned she would be to know he was on the show with him now. Mind you, he continued:

“She probably wouldn’t be quite as thrilled that I had to take my willy out to get on here!”

Somehow, Parkinson managed to recount such stories without the tiniest air of one-upmanship. He told them not to show off, but because he knew you’d enjoy them as much as he did remembering them. He didn’t have to name-drop. His own name was so big that such a notion was ludicrous.

And yes, I am aware that poo-pooing “name-dropping” while doing exactly that in this tribute might be odd, but you just can’t sum up Parkinson’s life without delving into famous names. It was his métier. He dealt in fame, was comfortable with it, and it defined him in the public mind even if the man himself was so much more than that.

And his knowledge was deep.

When he did me the honour of launching my book on Captain Cook four years ago at Sydney’s Maritime Museum, he told me a fabulous anecdote at dinner afterwards about his fellow Yorkshireman of maritime fame that, I thought, must surely be too good to be true. Why hadn’t I come across it, after putting together an entire book on the subject? I checked later and, of course, it was true … but I’ll leave that for another time.

These last few years have been a time of ailing health and when I last talked to Parkinson just a few months ago I knew he was fading fast. But still, there was that gentle laugh, that interest in all things around him, the inquiry as to what stories I had to tell him that he might enjoy.

I’ll miss him. We all will.

Farewell, Parkinson. It was truly a pleasure and a privilege to know you. You were the common man, who did the most uncommon things, with grace, with dignity, with a wonderful and twinkling sense of fun, and an extraordinary savoir-faire.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it every Friday.

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