Sir Michael Parkinson showed people from Barnsley that they could be aspire to achieve more - Jayne Dowle

But it’s local details like this that made ‘Parky’, who passed away last week at the age of 88 after a short illness, so human.

He loved the detail too. It’s fair to say he made his name by finding out what made people – especially huge mega-celebrities such as boxer Muhammad Ali and film director Orsen Welles – really tick.

His great strength was that he was never afraid to ask questions, as I used to tell my own journalism students. In one of several memoirs he wrote over the years, he recalled that as a young reporter for the South Yorkshire Times – having left Barnsley Grammar School with two O Levels and outshone by his mate Geoff Boycott for a place in the Yorkshire cricket squad – he would ride round a 25-mile radius of local pit villages on his bike, interviewing “anyone who would stand still for two minutes”.

As former ITV Calendar presenter Christine Talbot said, recalling the influence Parkinson had on her own career, he would always let his guests talk, but would ask tough questions at the same time.

I never met him, sadly, but I felt I knew him – again, those six degrees of separation. As a kid growing up in Barnsley in the 1970s ‘Michael Parkinson’ loomed large over my life. His eponymous BBC Saturday night chat show, which ran between 1971 and 1982, was proper ‘event television’, regularly attracting audiences of 12 million, totting up 361 programmes and featuring interviews with at least 1,000 guests.

His name was shorthand for ‘local lad done good’. Watching from the sofa, hearing that gravelly voice that sounded just like my own dad’s, seeing the sideburns and the wide-collared shirts he favoured, just like all the men wore back then, must have planted a seed in my head.

I listened a lot as a child. And I learnt, through family members, neighbours and eventually my first boss, a newsagent who had been friends with Parkinson as a lad, that this man with the Barnsley accent on the telly, interviewing David Bowie and George Best and being mauled to the floor by Rod Hull’s avian puppet, Emu, had started out as a journalist, here in our town.

That he was born in a council house in Cudworth. That his dad was a miner. That he’d ‘knocked about with’ Geoff Boycott. That he’d been a reporter and now he was on television.

Something took shape in my head. If this ordinary-sounding bloke could make his living talking to people, writing stories, sharing stories, then maybe it wasn’t impossible to grow up, leave the cobbled back streets behind, and have a different kind of job?

Other influences came along over the years, but I’ve never forgotten that early impression Parkinson made. When I was working in the newsagents and calling in the gossipy stories picked up from customers to the local paper for a fiver a tip – how I treasured those cheques – my boss would look on approvingly, and tell me he remembered his old mate Parky doing a similar thing.

It strikes me now – and I didn’t realise it at the time - that Parkinson stood for aspiration. Along with his cricketing comrades, he showed that a humble background could be the spur – and not the setback – for ambition.

The story goes that, when he was 12, his dad, who worked at Grimethorpe Colliery, took him down the pit in order to fire an ambition to never follow in his footsteps. His mother, by all accounts refined and determined, apparently wanted to call him Gershwin, after her favourite composer.

For years Parkinson had lived in Bray, Berkshire. This being Barnsley where everybody has an opinion, there were always those who said he’d sold out - because like that other famous Barnsley figure, Darren Gough - he’d gone ‘down south’ and stayed there.

However, his connection with the town, and with Yorkshire in general, never waned. In April, he celebrated his great friend and Barnsley-born cricket umpire Dickie Bird’s 90th birthday at – where else? – Headingley Stadium in Leeds.

They both looked frail, but they both were still smiling, two lads who in their different ways, took on the world, and showed the following generations that anything was possible – if you were from Barnsley.