Auntie talks Parky back into chat

He flirted with Shirley Maclaine, was verbally assaulted by Muhammad Ali and almost castrated by Emu, the manic puppet. Now Michael Parkinson, doyen of chat show hosts, is being wooed back by the BBC. The corporation is expected to make an announcement about Parkinson, 61, in the next few weeks and he is poised to sign a lucrative deal. He is likely to interview some of the stars he has sparred with before, including Diana Rigg, Raquel Welch and Richard Harris.

BBC producers were impressed by ratings for the recent repeats of his finest interviews. BBC1's Controller, Michael Jackson, said yesterday: "What we want to see is a return to the completely straightforward asking of intelligent questions on a chat show. That is the challenge we will be putting to Michael Parkinson."

Parkinson's original series ended in 1982 after 11 years and it regularly attracted more than 12 million viewers.

Mr Jackson said at the BBC's spring programming launch yesterday that he will not be changing his schedules to deal with the launch of Channel 5 at the end of the month. "We won't say exactly what we are putting on on Easter Sunday," he said. "But there is always a special schedule for Easter. Channel 5 won't change our commitment to having a broad range of programmes." Channel 5 said that it had completed the retuning of 90 per cent of 9 million videos and will launch on time.

Easter on the BBC will be dominated by The Missing Postman, a two-part comedy drama starring James Bolam and Alison Steadman. It will also see the airing of Before They Were Famous, a special hosted by Angus Deayton where celebrities are caught on film doing commercials and bit-parts before their careers took off.

BBC2's cult comedy hit of the season looks like being Sunnyside Farm, an agricultural comedy described as "The Archers on acid" and starring Phil Daniels and Shooting Stars' George Dawes - in real life Matt Lucas - as Britain's first transsexual farmer.

BBC1's schedule is heavy with fly-on-the-wall documentaries, led by Jonathan Dimbleby's four-year look at the handover of Hong Kong in The Last Governor.