Like Father, Like Son by Michael Parkinson is a new book that feels as though it has been pulled together in haste after an emotional interview on television with Piers Morgan for 'Life Stories'. During the interview, a now octogenarian Michael Parkinson, was reduced to tears as he recalled his relationship with his father and the strength of emotion that burst forth surprised him as his father has been dead for over thirty years.
Michael Parkinson's son Andrew had been pushing for a book about the strong bond between Michael and his father, John William, since the publication of Michael's autobiography, Parky, in 2008 but Michael had always resisted writing such a book. He felt he had already covered all there was to say about his father in various short pieces previously published, and he wanted to leave it at that. After the emotional Life Stories interview his sons realised the right window of opportunity had just been opened and Michael finally agreed to their request.
In order to make a whole book out the the scant information they had available, the pages have been filled with the previous articles and son Mike takes over for some of the writing as Michael senior has drawn the line at engaging with historical research. Very little is known about John William Parkinson's early life, so a whole chapter is devoted to telling us what it was probably like based on social history of mining communities from the time. I remember that the BBC series 'Who do you think you are?' were considering Michael Parkinson as a subject but abandoned the idea when they found they had so little to go on. The social history in this book may well have been the facts gathered by the BBC researchers.
Much of the book is devoted to John William's great love for cricket, and to a lesser extent, football, and I found myself losing interest as the book went on. The chapter that I found most interesting was the one with transcripts from old Parkinson shows where the guests speak about their own fathers, and even this chapter feels a bit like padding. You need more than a few stories about cricket to fill 236 pages.
In the second half of the book, Mike junior writes about his own relationship with Michael and he is clear he feels that his father could have paid more attention to his own sons. The chummy relationship over a ragged cricket ball was not to be their experience. Although it is good to have the truth in biographical works, I felt that poor Michael Snr had been reluctantly pushed into this book, only to find himself judged and found wanting by one of his children. Maybe that sells more copies but I hope Mike Junior doesn't come to regret writing those sentences as he gets into his own twilight years and starts to shed his own unbidden tears.
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