For 36 years, Michael Parkinson has been a near-permanent fixture, either on TV gurgling sycophantically at famous people or in magazines grumbling that people can’t gurgle sycophantically at famous people as well as he can.

But not for much longer, because last night Michael Parkinson recorded his last ever celebrity interviews before fades away into a retirement of autobiography-writing and complaining about how rude young people are. And it’s even been reported that professional northerner Michael Parkinson even got a bit teary-eyed during the filming of his last show. That’s something we’re either putting down to Parkinson realising what a prolific and generous interviewer he’s been over the last three and a half decades or because Jamie Cullum turned up and started singing bad jazz-pop at him. We’re going to go with the second one.