Parky: My Autobiography by Michael Parkinson Page B

was short on top, long at the sides, and swept back into a DA (duck’s arse). Freddie was the first man in the whole of Barnsley to wear sunglasses at night, and the only man in Yorkshire, outside the odd seller of French onions, who wore a black beret at all times. This, in honour of his great hero, Dizzy Gillespie.
    Thus attired, we would stand and listen to the new Be-Bop, only moving to nod our heads to the beat of the music, or give a V sign to the musical morons who would sometimes appear wearing college scarves and bearing signs proclaiming ‘Trad Is Best’. I don’t know what was happening in the rest of Britain but we felt like pioneers of a new music. We were isolated, even reviled by the rest, but we were certain that what we had discovered was both a new form of musical expression and one that would enrich our lives in future years. And so it proved.
    Certainly, in my case, it allowed me during my years in broad casting the confidence and determination to promote what I believe to be the best in popular music against an ever-rising tide of musical bilge that nowadays swamps radio and, in particular, television. Looking back, I see a remarkable generation of young people who might have been neglected but would not allow themselves to be ignored. In retrospect, what is most admirable is that we made up our own minds about what we wore and listened to and how we behaved.
    During my apprenticeship on the South Yorkshire Times , I was transferred a few miles down the road to South Elmsall to work for another boss, Arthur Mosley. He was a local entrepreneur and owned a venue called the Miners at Moorthorpe. Every Saturday he would hire a jazz band and, for an extra bob or two, I took tickets on the door. It was a blossoming time for British jazz and I had a front-row seat. I also learned at first hand the strange habits of that peculiar tribe known as musicians.
    During the interval I would visit the dressing room and ask what the band required in terms of food and drink. Many of the requests were unprintable as well as unattainable, at least in that part of the South Yorkshire coalfields in the 1950s. But that is how I first met Ronnie Scott, Tubby Hayes, Chris Barber, Jimmy Deuchar, John Dankworth and Cleo Lane and many others. I saw what turned out to be Cleo’s debut with the Dankworth band. I remember she was wearing a flimsy blue dress and looked somewhat awkward on stage. But it all changed when she started singing.
    It was in the dressing room at the Miners that I first met Benny Green. He was playing in Ronnie Scott’s band and was sitting in a corner quietly reading a Penguin Classic. Later on, when I was at Granada Television working as a producer, I worked with Benny on a weekly jazz programme. No one cared more or wrote better about the music he loved than Benny Green. Like John and Cleo, his fastidious, uncompromising promotion of his craft inspired succeeding generations of music lovers and musicians.
    The same could be said about Humphrey Lyttelton, another I first came across during my stint as a doorman all those many years ago. None of us could imagine what the passing years would bring. The drummer in Humph’s band was a young lad called Stan Greig. Two or three years later we met in Port Said. He was a soldier playing the blues in a bar and I was the youngest captain in the British army. We were both part of a military operation that became known simply as Suez.

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    PRIVATE PARKINSON
    I was deferred from National Service, meaning I entered the service of Her Majesty a year later in order that I might complete my three-year apprenticeship as a junior reporter. It also gave me a year to think about how I might avoid National Service altogether. I didn’t fancy two years marching up and down being bullied by sergeant majors, which my colleagues who had already done their time assured me was what happened.
    There were others, a minority, who, while not exactly enjoying it, spoke of the benefits