Michael Parkinson's Queensland connection
How the late chat-show host launched a makeover for a struggling newspaper.
It hasn’t gone down in the annals of great advertisements, but the late Sir Michael Parkinson — a giant of journalism — once did a TV commercial for a modest Brisbane newspaper.
When The Telegraph closed in 1988, the decision was made — either for sound business reasons or as part of a sinister plot (depending on who you ask) — to convert the morning Daily Sun newspaper into an afternoon title known simply as The Sun.
Sir Michael was enlisted to advertise the new product using the somewhat curious pitch line: “The newspaper worth listening to.”
The paper and its more successful sister, the Sunday Sun, had been owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd, but the global giant had been forced to sell them once it acquired the rival Courier-Mail, Sunday Mail and Telegraph.
Sir Michael added some gravitas to the whole transaction, but it was ultimately doomed.
What’s left are some fond memories for the likes of me, who was lucky enough to work there in both the News and post-News eras, and some memorabilia — which, at the time of writing, I can’t find.
If anyone can help locate a video or even a still of Sir Michael’s TVC for The Sun, I would greatly appreciate it.
In the meantime, I have my memories (especially of the wild last night of the Daily Sun) and, somewhere in a box, a T-shirt with a grainy photograph of a pair of eyes and the caption: “Use these as your ears.”
Strange days indeed.