I was having tea and scones with Michael Parkinson at the Dorchester. It was 1995 and he'd just hosted a compilation of classic Parky clips, filming links in his garden shed.

"In that 1971 interview with John Lennon, we both had big bloody sideburns down under our chins and looked like two gerbils peering out of a haystack," he said, adding clotted cream and jam.

He reminisced more deeply - to learning cricket as a child down the side of Bailey's fish and chip shop in Cudworth. He was already "Parky" by then. "I hated 'Parky' at school, it felt derogatory. And in Australia I'm Parko. It's bloody, 'G'day Parko.'"

Do your sons know you as Parky?

"Certainly not, they call me 'Sir'. Sometimes my wife says, 'You're a miserable bugger, Parky.' And sometimes I stand in front of the mirror in my suit and say, 'By gum, you're a handsome bugger, Parky.' But it's only to tease her. To say, 'You're a bloody lucky woman, Mary.'"

The Dorchester blend tea inspired talk of Tea Break, one of his early shows for Thames TV, on which Mary became a co-host. "After she'd interviewed a junior minister for health about school milk he told me, 'Christ, I wouldn't want to be married to her.'"

But his greatest irritation, being "Our Parky", he explained, was having his roasts interrupted by autograph hunters knocking at the door of his home in Bray-on-Thames.

"With bloody Polaroid cameras! Luckily, at the moment, the main boat tour thinks another house is mine, so some other poor bugger gets his Sunday lunch interrupted."