“If you didn’t live in that time, you’re not allowed an
opinion in my view.”
“If you didn’t live in that time, you’re not allowed an
opinion in my view.”
“If you didn’t live in that time, you’re not allowed an
opinion in my view.”
This sentence has rattled through my head for the last week,
because I have never heard anyone say something like this before. I also cannot
think of a situation where you could get away with saying something like it.
How do you respond to it? Am I allowed?
When writing about why I don’t like chat shows [link],
I came across an interview gave to the “Mail on Sunday” newspaper in 2016 [link],
just as a book on his encounters with Muhammad Ali was published. Even if I
wouldn’t have made a point of tuning in to “Parkinson” in the 1970s, if I had
been around then, I probably would have if Ali, or Billy Connolly, or Peter
Sellers, or Kenneth Williams was a guest – some people are worth hearing, even
if they are mainly there to promote something.
Although the article was to promote the Ali book, the
headlines came from when Parkinson was asked if there were any moments in his
career that he regretted. Saying he has been accused of being old-fashioned,
Parkinson used the example of the 1975 interview he had with Helen Mirren, who
was introduced on the show was the “sex queen” of the Royal Shakespeare Company
and, after a theatre critic was quoted as saying Mirren was good at “sluttish
eroticism,” Parkinson asked if Mirren thought her “equipment” got in her way of
performing as an actress. After clarifying he was referring to her figure,
Mirren replied, “Serious actresses can't have big bosoms, is that what you
mean?”
The interview can easily be found online, and while it has
since been decried as sexist since, it was perfectly fine for broadcast in 1975
– “it was OK at the time” is a phrase often heard in cases like this, usually
because it may not be these days. In the “Mail on Sunday” interview, Parkinson
said he may have overreacted, but he was reacting to the provocative figure Mirren
presented. When asked if they had made up since, Parkinson said, “I don't want
to. Nor does she. I don't regard what happened there as being anything other
than good television. There is no need to apologise, not at all. She didn't
want to do an interview and after about ten minutes I didn't want to interview
her. There's no problem, it's not World War III for God's sake.”
For her part, Dame Helen Mirren, later quoted in an article
for “The Telegraph” website [link],
said, “That’s the first talk show I’d ever done. I was terrified. I watched it
and I actually thought, bloody hell! ... I did really well. I was so young and
inexperienced. And he was such a f------ sexist old fart. He was. He denies it
to this day that it was sexist, but of course he was.”
This leads me to where I became unstuck. In his interview,
Parkinson is reported reacting to the notion of his interview with Mirren being
a defining moment of the “sexist” Seventies: You have to judge it by what
happened in that time. If you didn't live in that time, you're not allowed
an opinion in my view [my underline].... I’ve not done anything that I'm ashamed of. I can
see everything in the context of the time I did it. I can think, 'Ooh, I
wouldn't do that now.' But that doesn't mean to say I was wrong at the time.”
The interviewer, challenging that one sentence, writes, “if
one of his guests had said that, he would have challenged them strongly,” but I
wished it was challenged in this interview, although we do get the odd quote
later, “Am I a sexist? No, I'm Yorkshire. I don't know what the answer is or
what a sexist means, basically. I've been married for 57 years so something
must be going right. I wouldn't say I'm a sexist at all.”
To be honest, I just needed to write about that one sentence,
“If you didn’t live in that time, you’re not allowed an opinion in my view,” but I also needed to present the context in which that was uttered. I
will go with Dame Helen’s reaction to the interview, because she definitely was
there at the time, but to say you are not allowed to have an opinion on
something is a red flag that needs as much oxygen as possible – if I said that
to anyone, I would be demolished in response. Perhaps it is easier, for Sir
Michael Parkinson, not to use his chat shows as primary sources.
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