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View Gallery By Sheena Hastings Michael Parkinson is aware that, at 73, he could look like a dirty old man if he flirts outrageously with his young female interviewees. But it still sometimes happens. Sheena Hastings met him.

Michael Parkinson. The man with a face like a comfy old chair is in the hot seat, and he's dressed for ease in blue jeans, casual shirt, navy blue sweater. Sky-blue socks, expensive tan loafers, sharply-cut silver-white crop and minimally intrusive spectacles.

He's very comfortable with himself, a bloke who, you can tell, feels he hasn't much left to prove. If his chat show ended this year, he'd have television's best back catalogue (700-odd shows spanning 38 years), and would probably still do his urbane brand of stars-and-easy listening radio and fine sports writing. He might finally get around to that long-overdue autobiography.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Parky's next run of Saturday night shows, showcasing 24 star turns, returns in May. He's thought about a memoir, but may think about it a bit more seriously "when I'm 90". He still clearly enjoys doing what he says no-one else does.

The pretenders to his crown have included Russell Harty, Clive James, Des O'Connor, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Mrs Merton, Gaby Roslin, Terry Wogan, Graham Norton, Davina McCall, Jonathan Ross, Frank Skinner, and more recently, Welsh bombshell Charlotte Church.

Parky, who's back in Yorkshire to talk about his career at the Bradford International Film Festival, sees most of what they do as "comedy", more in the American tradition. He puts himself in a category of one. Numero Uno. The others don't do what he does.

"The best by a mile is Jonathan Ross. He's a very funny man, but it's not a talk show. He could be talking to tailor's dummies most of the time... the guests are props."

Parkinson says that his show, which some feel is far too fawning and congratulatory to its subjects, is about having a conversation, probing gently, politely scratching away at the carapace of famous personalities, helping the viewer to understand them a little better.

"I used to go to the cinema four times a week. I knew how a New York taxi driver spoke before I knew how anyone in Manchester talked. In the end, I got to interview the people I'd only ever seen before 30ft high on a screen."

A chance meeting with a TV producer led him to Granada and a film programme called Cinema, which attracted 18 million viewers straight after Coronation Street. Before he knew it, he was doing a talk show. In the early days, he and the team knew he had to crack a mammoth name if the show was to be taken seriously by all the other stars. It was decided that the one to go after was Orson Welles, who was filming in Spain at the time.

"My producer went to talk to him, and he eventually agreed, but stipulating that, because he had a bad back, the plane to London had to have two seats removed so that he could lie on a mattress on the floor. The arrangements were made, but Welles decided to use a seat after all.

"We don't rehearse interviews, and I don't usually say more than a quick hello to guests before we go on air. But Welles came to my dressing room beforehand, and when I called him 'sir' out of deference to his great talent, he told me that was 'bullshit'. I knew then that we'd get on fine.

"He also asked if he could see my list of questions (which I'd spent about a year working on). He ripped them up, and said: 'Let's talk'." Welles went on to appear on Parkinson four times. "He could look at a lamp and talk brilliantly about lamps. Few people are like that but he was, and Jonathan Miller and Stephen Fry are equally fascinating."

Fred Astaire, Robert Mitchum, Bette Davis, Sammy Davis Jnr, Charlton Heston, Jimmy Stewart, Lauren Bacall, Cagney, Olivier, Richardson... Parkinson worked his way through practically the whole panoply of major stars, and slipped in many of his favourite jazz greats.

Regrets, he has a few. Katharine Hepburn gave a rare interview to Clive James, not long after Parky (who'd been writing to her every month) left the BBC chat show after 11 years, to become joint franchisee at the new breakfast station TVam in 1982. Frank Sinatra never said yes to him.

Parkinson's association with TVam didn't last long, but it took 15 years of jobbing around other TV programmes, including Going For a Song, before the talk show was relaunched. He admits feeling rather forlorn during that time. Everyone in television drank a lot back then, he says, but depression made him hit the bottle even more.

"Before, you didn't have to deal with the star's entourage. Years ago big names would just walk into the building alone. Bing Crosby appeared with a hatbox containing his toupee, saying 'Where's the girl to fix my toop?'"

In case you're wondering, guests on Parkinson are paid ("but not a lot"). They are not allowed any kind of editorial control. On the day, Parky asks if there's anything they don't want to talk about. If there is, he'll listen and make a quick decision.

"We wanted to do Madonna many years ago, but her entourage came back with a whole list of areas she wouldn't talk about. We said no. More recently, they came back and said, 'She'll talk about anything,' so we went ahead.

"Woody Allen said he didn't want to talk about his relationship with his step-daughter (Soon-Yi, the adopted daughter of his previous long-term partner Mia Farrow). I told him I had a problem with that, because Middle America would not touch him over it, and it had affected his career.

"I asked him about it in the interview. He didn't like it, but he did it... More dishonest would have been to promise not to ask the question, then drop it on him live on air."

Today's "instant celebrities" will never make it on to Parkinson, he says. "Guests have to be really famous and really good at what they do, and I've got to be interested in them. I'm not interested in people being cast away on a desert island. They're not stars."

Difficult moments in the otherwise untroubled history of Parkinson have involved drunks (Oliver Reed, Reginald Bosanquet), a pair of actors who had smoked "something not sold at the tobacconists", an attack in the vitals by Rod Hull's Emu, and the prima donna behaviour of actress Meg Ryan, who didn't really want to talk and ignored the other guests.

No flirting with Meg, then. Despite being in his eighth decade, the old twinkle is still very much there, as is a certain chemistry with some female guests.

"They touch my knee, and I don't discourage it. I don't touch their knee, but I let them lead me on. How sad, but flirting is a wondrous part of life, isn't it?"

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