Over his career, he became a familiar face on both the BBC and ITV for his intimate celebrity interviews, most notably on the BBC show\u00a0Parkinson, and conducted headline-making chats with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Dame Helen Mirren and Meg Ryan.<\/p>\n
Now his son Michael Parkinson Jr, 56 \u2013 known as Mike \u2013 has revealed what his dad was like at home, away from the studio and his celebrity guests.<\/p>\n
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As well as revealing his broadcaster father suffered from imposter syndrome and that the family didn\u2019t want to \u2018step on the toes\u2019 of the public\u2019s grief over the past few weeks, he also praised his mother.<\/p>\n
Mike discussed his father\u2019s relationship with his own father, a miner, and how the two only saw each other when the young Sir Michael was playing in a cricket match or football match, agreeing that their connection was \u2018old-fashioned\u2019.<\/p>\n
He then revealed that his own relationship with this father wasn\u2019t \u2018consciously different\u2019, because of that.<\/p>\n
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\u2018I can\u2019t sit here and start saying he was the father of the year because he wasn\u2019t the father of the year \u2013 but not in a bad way,\u2019 Mike told hosts Richard Madeley and Kate Garraway.<\/p>\n
\u2018He was very much a man of his time, he very much was strict and \u201cdo as I say and not as I do\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2018I think it does go back to the fact that in the end what defined him as a man is what he did, and it drove him, and it drove him forward. And behind every single story there is a great woman, and behind him was my mother.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018She was the one that held the family together [and] reminded him that he needed to come home and be with us,\u2019 he added.<\/p>\n
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Barnsley-born Sir Michael married his wife Mary, 87, also a journalist and broadcaster, in 1959.<\/p>\n
The pair met on a bus in Yorkshire and have three children and eight grandchildren.<\/p>\n
Mike has worked with his father for the past two decades in the entertainment industry, while brother Nick is a chef and other sibling Andrew has kept away from the spotlight.<\/p>\n
Mike also revealed the level of his father\u2019s celebrity in itself truly hit him when he came back in 1998 again with Parksinson, after initially finishing in 1982, and was met with such a rapturous reception, making the TV legend emotional.<\/p>\n