Who can fill Parky's shoes?

Eamonn Andrews. Like his American betters such as Johnny Carson, Andrews in the Sixties would sit behind a desk and talk to safely sofa’d guests. He sweated, so he made his viewers sweat. Introducing Muhammad Ali, he made a thing of how the boxer had changed his name from Cassius Clay. “So, Cassius,” he began.

Something needed to be done and that something was David Frost. ITV’s original The Frost Programme in 1966 repackaged the BBC satirist as a talk show host with edge. Soon he had grasped and squeezed the goolies of a small-time insurance crook called Savundra. “Good old Frosty,” cried his studio audience. Sadly, his edge blunted; bedazzled by a ring on Elizabeth Taylor’s finger as big as her ego, he forgot even to sneer. The dogs were barking, and it was time for the caravan to move on, past Simon Dee, past David Jacobs, past Russell Harty, and towards 1971.

Like the rest, Parkinson had a band and an audience. Unlike them, he was a journalist, from the print, from Yorkshire. He was therefore inquisitive. His mid-big to big-big-name guests, though often windily anecdotal, would sometimes be entranced by his rough charm into entering a zone of trust. Where they would spill. Some in the BBC excitedly wished Parky on five nights a week; he ended up with two and, offended, in 1982, foolishly defected to TV-am. He was not forgiven by the BBC for a quarter of a century, but when Parkinson returned, its format was unchanged and only its guest-stars had diminished (though he might argue, with Norma Desmond, that it was the movies that got small).

Between his reigns there had been Wogan, showing how the chat show had declined with the decades from aggressive through inquisitive to merely genial. Its reinvention in the Nineties as licensed irreverence – Baker, Norton, Evans, Anderson, Dame Edna, Mrs Merton and Wossy – was no more than a reversion to its comedy origins. Its hosts were deeply ironic about everything save their ambition to be the British David Letterman, the stand-up who had grumpily assumed Johnny Carson’s mantle in America.

Parky grumbled that no one asked proper questions any more, and no one listened to the answers. But by now everyone knew everything about everyone – and what they did not know had been ruled out of bounds by the PRs. Tensing, Parkinson asked Tom Cruise a question that contained the words “Nicole Kidman, your ex-wife”. Cruise snapped: “I know who she is.” Bullied by Hollywood, undermined by the ironists, reduced to interviewing stars legendary only in their own reality shows, who could blame the spiritual leader of the chat show from abdicating? Will there ever be another? As the monks of British television spread out across the nation in search of next Dalai Charmer, our writers offer some suggestions. Parkinson: The Final Conversation, Sun, ITV1, 9pm

He has left us, and Michael Parkinson has not left an heir. People talk lightly of Jonathan Ross – talking lightly being all Ross does – but he is a different proposition. Ross joshes; Parkinson, before the accumulated embarrassment of the job crushed him, asked questions. His departure, 36 years after Parkinson debuted late one Saturday night on the BBC, lays bare the crisis that faces the British chat show. We no longer have one.

In the beginning, more than half a century ago, there was The Tonight Show – but it was American and, were it not for the hold its mixture of scripted monologue and unscripted chat would later have on British producers, it need not concern us. Britain went its own way, hiring an Irish boxing commentator called

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