TV legend Michael Parkinson has revealed his most awkward interviews

Chat show king Michael Parkinson has dished about what really happened in some of his most famous encounters on screen:

Meg Ryan

“She was right at the end of promoting a film which wasn’t a very good film, it didn’t make it at the box office and she was sick of this long tour and you know the criticism of the movie and all that.

“She’d also just split with Russell Crowe, and that hadn’t helped quite obviously.

“I never used to talk to people before except to say, ‘Hi, how are you,’ before they came on the set. On this occasion I had to go to her dressing room and went out there and said hi to her.

And she was sitting on one side of the dressing room staring at the wall, and the entourage were at the other side staring at the wall, I thought, ‘Hmm, this is going to be cosy.’

“But the thing that really did it was I had on the guest beforehand, and she was sitting behind the set watching it on a monitor there, so she knew damn well what was going on.

And when she came on she simply ignored the two women, the fashion girls (Trinny and Susannah) and she came on and just ignored them, and just sat down.

“And so she was being rude, she moved her chair so she was like front on to me and they were sort of looking around the corner. And then she started, I said, ‘Did you enjoy that fashion item?’ and she said ‘What fashion item was that?’.

“Well she knew which fashion item it was, she was pretending she had fallen asleep or something, and she started to get under my skin, she really did, I mean she was rude to people.

And I can’t bear that you know, they’ve done a job, they’ve set the tone for her, and here we are and she’s just not cooperating.

Who does she think she is? And so that was my mood, I got cross with her, so we had a little sort of a disagreement.”

Helen Mirren

“We certainly made up, that was in 2006 or something like that, when we decided that we’d both like to look at the show again, and we did, and we just cringed because it was just, “Oh my God.”

And I reminded myself what I’d thought, and I didn’t handle it very well at all, but it was when she walked on with a feather bower on.

But really what I was thinking, because I was what, 40, and she was about just 20 or something like that, what I was really thinking, I was like a dad saying, “You’re not going out like that are you?”

You know it was that kind of feeling, and it wasn’t sort of sexist, what do they know these people. So from that point, again it was honest television, honest reaction you know.

And she’s made the best of it because, and quite rightly so because I was rude to her and not nice to her, and similarly she I think also said to me you know, “Neither of us did well there, did we?”

And I said, “No.” We left it at that. But the kind of journalism, how far are we going to go back, 50 years it is, eh?

“Come on, we’ve all changed, but not according to some columnists we haven’t all changed.”

Nelson Mandela

“He did this wonderful thing on me actually, I sensed he was in the room we were setting up, and he said, ‘Where is the famous BBC interviewer?’

And I turned around and there he was, I said, ‘Here, sir’. He said ‘I have to tell you I’m slightly deaf’.

“I said, ‘I hope, sir, you’ll hear my questions.’ He looked at me with a smile and he said, ‘I’ll hear the ones I want to answer’.

“And I thought, ‘How many times has he caught a journalist like that?’ 15 love, you know.”