How we've got through two full sentences without observing that Parky came from humble mining stock I do not know – Sir Michael himself would never dream of covering such a syntactic distance without foregrounding the heritage that equipped him to burrow up the backsides of a thousand celebrities, armed with only a Davy lamp and the hardhitting inquiry: "May I say you're looking beautiful?"
As indicated, this week Parky took it upon himself to lament the "foolish ambition" of celebrities who think they can be chatshow hosts, as well as going on Five Live to call Russell Brand pointless, artless, unfunny and creatively dull. "I would say he has been a very lucky man," expanded Parky, so adept these days at keeping the bitterness out of his public pronouncements. "I mean, Rin Tin Tin had a very big career in Hollywood and he was a dog."
Well. Lost in Showbiz admits it only saw the trailer for Russell's most recent movie Get Him to the Greek, and spent much of the ensuing main feature staggered at his apparent inability to deliver a line – for an accomplished standup to fall short of even a one-note performance would appear quite a feat. But I doubt Brand could give two hoots. He is apparently entirely untrammeled by self-doubt, affianced to a gorgeous popstar, and milking a period in which misguided folk keep giving him lucrative movie roles. Indeed, were anything to make one reflexively warm to the old chancer, it is surely his having incurred the disapproval of Britain's pre-eminent paradigm of professional Yorkshire-dullard smugness.
As for Parky's wholly unwarranted slight on Rin Tin Tin, one can only conclude that having spent so long entombed in those celebrity colons, he lacks the perspective required to appreciate what F Scott Fitzgerald called "the whole equation" of motion pictures.
Rin Tin Tin could open a movie, and did so time and again. For years, he was Warner Bros's most bankable star, and it was his pictures that saved the studio from bankruptcy. He was only retired after the advent of talkies, at which point his natural limitations were exposed, but until that time he could take direction and emote as well as, if not better than, most of Hollywood's humanoid silent stars.
The German shepherd certainly possessed better timing than Parky, whose chief means of reminding us of his existence over the last few years has been to pop up at other people's moments of extreme distress and make some desperately called-for interjection. It was he who judged the days after Jade Goody's death to be the perfect moment to brand her "ignorant" and "puerile" and just another one of those "poor benighted people making arses of themselves".
Of course, it would take a staggeringly benighted person not to see that every financially motivated moment of Jade's last days was informed by her desire to bequeath her sons a better life than the grimly abusive childhood she herself had endured. Yet preferring instead to fart out ovine observations on broken Britain, Parky missed this most tragically interesting aspect of the woman, once again proving Craig Brown's brilliantly sparse observation that "he has a complete lack of curiosity about anyone".
Unable to turn that laser-like focus on himself, Parky has always failed to realise that part of the reason people embraced reality-TV contestants was because they had come to find the packaged and managed celebrity machine epitomised by his show utterly dull. A significant portion of viewers grew so fed up of watching the likes of Parky lube up celebrities for another confected anecdote that they actually preferred to watch talentless no-marks argue about blinking, if only for a bit of authenticity.
Still, with his website informing us he is "now an international celebrity himself", do consider Sir Parky the last word in self-effacement. To this end, we shall play out with Lost in Showbiz's favourite passage from his autobiography, which finds him recalling his days as a club cricketer for Barnsley. Though Parky's ambition to play for England was "thwarted" – in fact he was laughed out of trials for Yorkshire – one who did make county was his Barnsley teammate Geoff Boycott, of whom Parky scrupulously observes: "He wasn't the most greatly gifted player on our team."
Well of course he wasn't. Poor old Boycs, though – he only had his second-string cricket skills to make the best of, whereas you sense the real talent on that Barnsley side could have had his pick of opening for England, becoming an international celebrity, and quite possibly leading the free world, if he hadn't felt so very, very privileged just being little old him on the telly for more than 40 years and for more money than you could dream of. 'Appen there's nowt so radged as pikelets, and so on.
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