The king is dead, long live the king. For people of a certain generation the death of Michael Parkinson represents the passing of the greatest exponent of live television talk shows, a journalist with a mighty intellect, phenomenal interpersonal skills, and an unerring capacity to find the most interesting strands of an interviewee’s story. In 2010 I had dinner with him, a night that will live long in my memory, a moment in time I will treasure all my life. ***** It is, for this grunter, one of the more lame aspects of social media that it facilitates the emergence…