Michael Parkinson, Betty Boothroyd, Bobby Charlton and Paul O’Grady: Paying tribute to the great and good we lost during 2023

Sir Michael Parkinson was the quintessential, some might say stereotypical, Yorkshireman but he was much more besides. Cricket writer, cineaste, radio host and of course king of the chat show, he had been part of the cultural landscape for 60 years.

His death in August, aged 88, brought to a close an era of television that began at Granada in the 1960s and took in some of the most memorable interviews ever to have been caught on camera. From Muhammad Ali to Rod Hull’s emu, there seemed to be no-one with whom he hadn’t crossed paths.

The BBC had wanted a vehicle that would emulate the success of the nightly Johnny Carson show in the US, and Parkinson was the man they thought could combine showbusiness with a journalistic edge that would see off any suggestions of dumbing down.

His show had been seen initially as just a summer schedule-filler. Few within the corporation could have guessed that when its star died 52 years later his picture would be on every front page.

Sadly he was not the only Yorkshire icon to have taken a final bow in 2023.

Baroness Betty Boothroyd, the former professional dancer who became the first woman Speaker of the House of Commons, was 93 when she died in February. With an unsubtle, cheery and broad Northern quip, she could defuse a dangerous or tense situation in the Chamber, and transform the snarls of MPs into gusts of laughter.

It was typical of her breezy nature that when she was asked how she would like to be addressed as Speaker, replied instantly: “Call me Madam.”

Just a short walk from the Commons was the office of Sir Bernard Ingham, without whose burly, rumbustious and lumbering Yorkshire presence Margaret Thatcher would not have been half the woman she was. He was her press secretary for almost her full term in Downing Street, spelling out in forthright, sometimes aggressive words the message she wanted the world to hear.

After his years in Downing Street he returned to his journalistic roots, becoming a beloved correspondent of The Yorkshire Post. He died in February, aged 90.

Another key figure of the period was Nigel Lawson, who died in April, aged 91. He was Margaret Thatcher’s unassailable Chancellor for six years, until he resigned after a long-running and bitter storm over her reliance on monetarist guru Sir Alan Walters as her economic adviser.

His departure in October 1989 marked the early stages of a succession of bleak and calamitous events which were to lead to Mrs Thatcher’s own downfall 13 months later.

2023 was an especially sad year for sport, with the loss of several figures for whom the word ‘legend’ seems inadequate.

Sir Bobby Charlton, who was 86 when he died in October, was one of the most talented English footballers of the 20th century. Yet in his formative years as the archetypal ‘Busby Babe’ he appeared a reluctant hero.

His talent was obvious to others from his earliest days in Ashington, the Northumberland mining village where he and his elder brother Jack – another future World Cup winner and a legend of Leeds United – were born into a footballing family.

The Charlton brothers were essential constituents of England’s World Cup winning team of 1966 and Bobby went on to help Manchester United to European Cup glory. Yet perhaps an even greater achievement was as an exemplar of everythingthat was good and noble about sport; a hero to be worshipped for all the right reason.

Terry Venables was a more colourful character. Forever remembered as the manager who oversaw the summer when football came home, he died in November, aged 80, after a controversial career whose highlight was leading England to within a penalty shoot-out of reaching the final of the European Championship on home soil in 1996.

Trevor Francis, who died in July, aged 69, is remembered not just for scoring in a European Cup final, earning 52 England appearances or later managing in major finals – all notable achievements – but for one of the game’s historical landmarks, as British football’s first £1m player. It was the highlight of a career that began in his prodigious teenage years and ended at Hillsborough in Sheffield.

Another giant of that era was Gordon McQueen, the former Scotland defender who died in June, aged 70.

He broke the British transfer record in 1978 after making a controversial £495,000 move to Manchester United from Leeds United, but it came at a cost as he attracted the ire of the fans at Elland Road.

The move was met with such a backlash from the Leeds faithful that McQueen felt responsible for the ensuing decades of bitter rivalry between the clubs. Despite the furore, he went on to enjoy a seven-year career in Manchester before a successful television afterlife as a pundit on Sky Sports.

But in the world of punditry no voice was more familiar than that of John Motson, who died in February at 77. To the millions of football fans who tuned in to listen to his instantly recognisable commentary on television or radio for over half a century, he was simply known as ‘Motty’ – sheepskin coat and all.

Motson bridged effortlessly the worlds of sport and entertainment, which also lost some of its leading lights in 2023.

In a decade considered a golden age of light entertainment, Mike Yarwood’s star shone brightest of all. In terms of pulling power on Christmas Day TV, only Morecambe and Wise could hold a candle to him.

Yarwood, who died in September at 82, introduced Britain to a new strain of comedy – political impersonations that were not satirical yet somehow mildly scandalous. TV audiences in the early 1970s had never seen such apparent disrespect shown to the prime minister and leader of the opposition.

The stage and film actor Sir Michael Gambon, who died the same month at 82, was a theatrical giant of such versatility as to inhabit the characters of Dennis Potter at one end of the dramatic spectrum and Alan Ayckbourn at the other.

He was perhaps best known for his 1986 role as Potter’s psoriasis-riven hero Philip Marlow in The Singing Detective on BBC TV.

But he also had a long and fruitful relationship with the Scarborough-based Ayckbourn, who first cast him against type as a melancholy vet in his trilogy The Norman Conquests, at the Greenwich Theatre in 1972.

However, to a younger audience Gambon was known for a different kind of performance altogether, as the headmaster Professor Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter film series.

The veteran actress and former politician Glenda Jackson, who died in June, aged 87, spent nearly two decades in parliament and achieved the “triple crown” of two Oscars, three Emmys and a Tony award for her performances on stage and screen.

The former Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate won the Academy Award for best actress in 1970 for Women In Love and again three years later for A Touch OfClass.

Paul O’Grady’s career began on the fringes of showbusiness, as a drag queen before they became fashionable again, but his personality shone through the make-up – and when he died in June, aged 67, he had cemented his place as one of the greats of mainstream British entertainment.

For a while, he lived two on-stage lives – as himself and his alter ego, the Birkenhead blonde Lily Savage, whose tobacco-soaked Scouse screech was rough as a sack of old gravel.

The split personality ran so deep that when he was offered a part in a stage revival of Oliver!, he didn’t know if they wanted him to play Fagin or Nancy.

A fashion icon for a different generation, Dame Mary Quant, who died in April at 93, did perhaps more than anyone else besides The Beatles to define the 1960s. As the designer of the mini skirt she became one of the most influential figures in the fashion scene, seen as making fashion accessible to the masses with sleek, streamlined and unique designs.

At the same time, Jane Birkin, who was 76 when she died in July, was becoming the embodiment of what it meant to be young and liberated in the swinging Sixties.

In many ways, Matthew Perry was to the 1990s what she and Quant had been to the Sixties. The star of the era-defining American sitcom Friends was 54 when he died in October and is remembered for his perfect comic timing, never failing to land a punchline. But behind the scenes he battled substance abuse for decades.

Barry Humphries, in contrast, was a comic colossus who conquered his addiction. He died in April, aged 89, having spent a lifetime entertaining the world with the high camp of his Dame Edna Everage alter ego and as the lecherous Sir Les Patterson. He was never more at home than on TV in the comfy chair opposite Michael Parkinson.

A native of Melbourne, he came to London after his student days and became increasingly dependent on alcohol. After a particularly heavy binge, he was found unconscious in a gutter. On returning to Australia his parents admitted him to a private hospital, after which he abstained from alcohol completely and became a regular attendee at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

He was, like all those we lost this year, a unique talent and a very hard act to follow.

There was not a spare seat nor a vacant hotel room in all of Harrogate when Tina Turner rolled into town in February 1984. Its conference centre was less than two years old and not even the Eurovision Song Contest, which had been its opening gig, could compete with the excitement she generated.

With her soulful voice, commanding stage presence and boundless energy, Ms Turner, who died in May at 82, had already secured her legacy as the queen of rock ’n’ roll. Not a soul in Harrogate that night doubted it.

In a career that began in the 1950s, she recorded such hits as River Deep – Mountain High, Proud Mary and Nutbush City Limits, was inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and won a total of 12 Grammy Awards.

She also turned her hand to the screen, and inspired an award-winning musical based on her life. But her success was set against a dark backdrop of relationships with men she alleged had been abusive – her former husband Ike Turner and her father among them.

Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939 in Nutbush, Tennessee, to parents Zelma Priscilla and Floyd Richard Bullock. At 11, she moved to live with her grandmother after her mother left her abusive relationship with Bullock and moved to St Louis, Missouri.

She later joined her mother and sister Alline at the age of 16 in the city where she first encountered Ike Turner and soon joined his band The Kings Of Rhythm as its first female member.

She was not the only figure from the worlds of music and the arts to have taken a final bow in 2023.

Shane MacGowan, who died a month ago at 65, followed in the wayward footsteps of James Mangan, Brendan Behan and Luke Kelly by first inheriting and then owning the concept of the raucous Irish poet/singer.

While many knew MacGowan primarily for his Christmas ballad Fairytale Of New York, he was a deep thinker who drew on various elements of Ireland’s literary traditions to create an unorthodox musical alchemy which blended the traditional and modern to create something which was original, fearless and often exhilarating.

Born on Christmas Day, in Pembury, Kent, in 1957 to Irish parents, MacGowan was immersed in an Irish culture of ceili bands and showbands. He earned a literature scholarship to Westminster School but was expelled in his second year when he was caught in possession of drugs.

He became involved with the burgeoning punk movement in 1970s England and formed his own punk band before a revival in Irish musical influences led him to form The Pogues in 1982.

Sinead O’Connor, who died in July, aged 56, was a kindred spirit in many ways, an Irish singer-songwriter acclaimed as one of the country’s most gifted artists after being propelled to international stardom in 1990 with her version of Nothing Compares 2 U.

The ballad was written by Prince but O’Connor made it her own. The simple yet unforgettable accompanying video featured almost nothing else but a close-up frame of Sinead with tears rolling down her cheeks.

She said she thought of her mother as she sang. A multi-octave mezzo soprano of extraordinary range, Sinead Marie Bernadette O’Connor began her career singing on the streets of Dublin.

She was born in nearby Glenageary in December 1966 and had a difficult childhood.

One of five children, she spoke out about being subjected to physical abuse at the hands of her mother, who died in a car crash in 1985.

Another singer-songwriter, David Crosby, who died at 81, was a hero of the generation before, a soldier of the counterculture movement that emerged in the late 1960s and a giant of the adult rock boom that followed in its wake.

He rose to fame in the Los Angeles-based folk-rock group The Byrds.

By the time he left to form one of rock’s first supergroups, with Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and sometimes Neil Young, he had helped create the soundtrack to a generation, plugging in the folk songs of a previous era into an amplifier and turning them into psychedelic masterpieces.

With The Byrds he collaborated on chart-topping hits including a cover of Bob Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man, which leapt to number one in the US singles chart, and Pete Seeger’s biblical adaptation, Turn! Turn! Turn!.

But as songwriters, not Crosby nor even Dylan could compete with the sheer volume of Burt Bacharach’s life work.

He died in February aged 94, and if there was ever a successor to Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and the other pre-war composers who created the Great American Songbook, it was Bacharach.

Few musicians before or since came even close to matching his productivity or his gift for simple, timeless melodies.

Bacharach could count among his hundreds of popular songs I Say A Little Prayer, Walk On By and Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head from the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He had a run of hits from the 1950s onwards, and unlike many of his contemporaries, he never went out of style.

Dionne Warwick was his singer of choice but Bacharach and his lyricist, Hal David, also created material for Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones and many others. Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and even The Beatles, whose own songbook matched his, were among the artists who covered his songs during the 1960s, and Walk On By went on to be covered by artists as diverse as The Stranglers and Cyndi Lauper.

Born in Kansas City in 1928, Burt Freeman Bacharach was the son of the newspaper columnist Bert Bacharach. He grew up in New York where he studied piano at his mother’s request – and although he was more interested in sport, he practised every day after school, not wanting to disappoint her. While still under age, he would sneak into jazz clubs with a fake ID, to listen to Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie.

The Italian film star Gina Lollobrigida, who died in January at 95, also looked to pre-war America for some of her influences. After the conflict she achieved international stardom and was dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world”, after the title of one of her movies.

Besides that film, her career highlights included Golden Globe-winner Come September, with Rock Hudson; Trapeze; Beat the Devil, a 1953 John Huston film starring Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones; and Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell – for which she won Italy’s top movie award, a David di Donatello, as best actress in 1969. Ms Lollobrigida also was an accomplished painter and photographer, and she eventually dropped film for the fine arts.

Lollo, as she was lovingly nicknamed by Italians, began making movies in Italy just after the end of the Second World War, as the country began to promote on the big screen a stereotypical concept of Mediterranean beauty as buxom and brunette.

When her film career waned, she roamed the world with her camera, from the then-Soviet Union to Australia. In 1974, Fidel Castro hosted her as a guest in Cuba for 12 days as she worked on a photo reportage.

Two giants of the British literary scene left us this year. Martin Amis, who died at 73 in May, was one of the most renowned figures of his generation, a satirist known for his unique way with words and his distinctively dark view of the world in general and the English in particular.

He published 14 novels including Money and London Fields, as well as a memoir, two collections of stories and eight collections of non-fiction works over his lifetime.

Born in Oxford in 1949, he was the son of the writer Sir Kingsley Amis, who also died at 73 in 1995, and Hilary Ann Bardwell.

In 1973, aged 24, Martin Amis published his first novel, The Rachel Papers, while working as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement and later as literary editor of the New Statesman. It was the story of a young man preoccupied with his health, his sex life, and his efforts to get into Oxford.

But it was a decade before he found significant critical success with Money, a comic satire of the conspicuous consumerism of the Thatcherist 1980s.

Fay Weldon, who died in January at 91, was a novelist, playwright and screenwriter whose body of work included more than 30 novels – among them The Life And Loves Of A She-Devil and Praxis. She also wrote short stories and plays for television, radio and the stage.

She was born in Birmingham but grew up in New Zealand, where her father was a doctor.

In 1936, when she was five, her parents separated, and she and her sister spent their summers with their her father in Auckland before returning to England after the war.

She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London and as a journalist before moving to work as an advertising copywriter, in which capacity her contributions to popular culture included promoting the popular exhortation to “go to work on an egg”.

She had become pregnant by the musician Colyn Davies and decided that she wanted the child (her son, Nick) but not the father. In 1957, tired of struggling to support herself as a single mother, she married Ronald Bateman, a headmaster 25 years her senior, and they lived together for two years until she left him for Ron Weldon, another musician. They married in 1962.

It was an arrangement considered scandalous according to the social code of the time but it was those very conventions that she and her contemporaries strove to challenge. The generation of authors that followed in their stead owed much of their creative freedom to them.

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