FIFTY years ago three young men sat dreaming at Barnsley Cricket Club. Dickie Bird and Michael Parkinson prayed that one day they would play for Yorkshire and England and Geoffrey Boycott knew for certain that he would play for both.

Sir Michael – who was the guest speaker at the 450th Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch, held yesterday in Harrogate's Majestic Hotel – said he often thought about those days when they were 15 and 16-year-old players wondering what their futures would hold.

"Dickie became this wonderful character, this most beloved figure from the game of cricket, not a bad county player and a wonderful umpire. Geoffrey became one of our greatest players and I was attacked by an emu. Now who do you think got the best deal out of that then?"

Sir Michael, who was speaking about Parky – My Autobiography, attended a previous Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch with the left wing actor Kenneth Griffiths and Robert Morley, neither of whom went down very well. "All I had to do was stand up and I sold every book I had got."

He told his audience of 540 people: "It is the place to come if you have written a book. It is the accolade. As we have heard this is the 450th. It is the oldest and most prestigious of literary events and I am delighted to be here."

But he confessed that book tours had their own problems. "These book signings are extraordinary events. You go to a bookshop and hope to God that somebody turns up."

The first he did was in Wolverhampton. Sir Michael described how he sat there for about an hour. "I signed various things. I signed pots on arms and that sort of thing. I even signed a New Testament. I was given it by this woman and I said: 'I didn't write this you know?' She said: 'Do you think I am stupid'."

At the end of the Wolverhampton signing he went to say goodbye to a group of four fans, who were waiting two hours before he arrived. "They had not bought a book by the way. They were just staring at me. As I was about to speak, one fan turned to the other and said: 'I tell you what Mabel, he doesn't suit daylight does he?.'"

Sir Michael said he started life in the pit village of Cudworth, near Barnsley, with a father "crazy" about cricket. "He wanted to call me Michael Melbourne Parkinson after the Test ground in Australia.

"My mother, a very bright and determined woman, trumped that by saying that he could have Melbourne if she could have Gershwin, the name of her favourite composer. Melbourne Gershwin Parkinson would have had a very difficult career growing up in Cudworth, I can assure you."

Sir Michael said he was defined by his upbringing and there had been a lot of happiness in his life. "I had this fantasy as a child to be a journalist. It was totally generated by the place that I grew up in – the cinema. The cinema was my inspiration. It was my school. It was the place that fired my imagination.

"As a child of a Yorkshire pit village I knew what New York looked like before I knew what London looked like. I knew what American fashions were like before I even thought about English fashions. I was totally conditioned and when I saw Humphrey Bogart appear as a journalist with a trilby and a ticket in his hat with Press on it, that was for me."

At 16 he left grammar school, got a job on the local paper and bought himself a mac with epaulettes. "I got a trilby and a Press ticket and I practised in the telephone kiosk outside the house. Just like Bogart did, I asked the operator to get me the City Desk."

Sir Michael said he fell in love with a wonderful job. He graduated to the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Express before moving into television. He presented the Parkinson chat show for 11 years.

He has sung with Bing Crosby, danced with Billy Connolly and Will Smith, played a love scene with Bette Davis and interviewed hundreds of stars.

But he told guests: "Television was an accident. Most of my jobs were accidents. I have only applied for one job in my life and that was the first one. The rest just happened."