Clive James (1939–2019)

Wondering what Clive James would have thought of Game of Thrones feels a bit like wondering what Ruskin would have thought of Banksy, and yet here, delightedly, we are. As James likes to remind us in his columns, he isn't actually dead yet, despite a nasty leukaemia that's looked like finishing him off any day for the last five years. And what better way to pass this borrowed time than by sitting with his two daughters and binge-watching our new golden age of TV programmes. The Sopranos, The show more Good Wife, 30 Rock, Breaking Bad and dozens more are all here, filtered through his customary sardonic learning, impossible to read without hearing the cadences of his nasal, mellow Australian tones.

It should be no surprise that he's turned his attention to these shows: his Observer column in the 70s so revolutionised television criticism that it practically invented it. Indeed his glee at engaging with what used to be called ‘low culture’ is one of his most appealing traits, the more so because he approaches it with a more formidable arsenal of high culture than almost any other critic around. When he compares Don Draper to Truffaut's L'homme qui aimait les femmes, part of the pleasure is in recognising that he would also review Truffaut with reference to Don Draper, and probably has.

Not that what he is actually saying is particularly new. When he comments that Mad Men allows us to ‘revel in the opportunity to look back and patronize the clever for not being quite clever enough to be living now’, or that the show ‘is a marketing campaign: what it sells is a sense of superiority’, he is saying the same thing that the other critics already said, only better than they said it. That's enough reason to read him, but more insights might have been nice too. There is also an edge of amiable but over-persistent leeriness to some of his expositions, which means you come away from this book knowing that he fancies Cersei more than Daenerys, finds Kate Mara delectable, and considers that the only reason to watch Ghosts of Mars is ‘Natasha Henstridge in a teddy’. I can roll my eyes over this stuff, but I'd rather not have to, even when I agree with him. It's not the content but the tone that feels misjudged, and being tone-deaf is not a criticism you would ever associate with Clive James on form.

It suggests that, in at least a few ways, he is not quite keeping up with the contemporary mood (despite some completely unexpected references in here to The Witcher 3 and Amy Schumer's ‘Last Fuckable Day’ sketch). And this goes for more than just mood. He spends a paragraph of his introduction considering the grammatical justification of talking about ‘box sets’ rather than ‘boxed sets’, but doesn't grasp that no one has used either of those terms since streaming services made them both obsolete. Someone get this man a Netflix subscription, pronto.

Anyway, the pleasures of this book vastly outnumber its niggles. Some of the lines in here are fantastic: on Mad Men (again) he talks about the women having to deal with ‘a glass ceiling that's been set at floor level’, while Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones ‘had such an impact that he suddenly made all the other male actors in the world look too tall’. Whatever its subject, a sentence written by Clive James is always worth reading, indeed studying. I hear him in everything I write, and after he's gone I'm going to spend the whole time wondering what he would have thought about whatever new cultural phenomenon is in circulation. This book, which answers the question, can only feel like a gift. show less

Clive James became famous by appearing on television but he did his best work writing about it. I picked this up in an idle moment and had difficulty putting it down again. I also couldn’t stop laughing. James was such a funny critic that he often found himself accused of performing stand-up routines rather than writing criticism. In fact, as demonstrated by this selection of reviews first published in the Observer newspaper in the 1970s, he combined wit and critical insight with rare show more skill.

His often mesmerising prose was suffused with high intelligence and a refreshing lack of snobbery. James subjected himself willingly to the full sanity-threatening diversity of ‘70s British television and found a deranged sort of enlightenment. He was the first television critic to appreciate that its supposed ephemera could be more entertaining and culturally significant than the alleged ‘quality’ output. He knew that the weather forecaster telling you about the coming storm, with the irritatingly chirpy manner and wildly strobing jacket, the hysterical and barely articulate sports commentators, the hapless continuity announcers unable to get through the shortest of links without fluffing, were the true stars of the medium; they were of television in a way that the passing famous thespians and playwrights were not. He was always quick to praise the well-written sitcom or popular drama serial over the latest pedestrian adaptation of a classic novel. Some concluded that James preferred trash to art, but they were mistaken. He just recognised that TV had its own unique strengths and they had little to do with Great Literature or Art.

For those of us of a certain age and background Visions Before Midnight carries an intoxicating Proustian rush as the once famous and now forgotten names of TV personalities and shows roll by. But there’s more to this book than the dubious if seductive pleasure of nostalgia. What happened on the box was a reflection, however distorted, of what was happening outside it and these wittily perceptive pieces are also valuable cultural history. show less

At the start of this memoir of his childhood through to early adulthood, Clive James warns us not to trust him: ‘Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel….So really the whole affair is a figment got up to sound like the truth’. It might sound like unusual honesty from a memoirist, but I suspect it’s more in the way of an ingenious double bluff: James preparing to reveal all in sometimes embarrassing detail while simultaneously creating show more a convenient face-saving smokescreen. The Cretan who said all Cretans are liars springs to mind. We know the biographical outline is true, James is raised in a suburb of Sydney by his war widow mother, and his detailing of his inner life also has the unmistakable ring of authenticity. The book is, I think, emotionally truthful without being slavishly faithful to the facts. Later on he relates how he gained popularity with his schoolmates by telling tall tales - of his ‘close personal acquaintance with Rommel’, for instance. Such comedic exaggeration formed the basis of much of what James did, this autobiography being a notable example. He continually inflates the facts to render them funny. Like his playground audience, however, the reader is in on the joke, and exaggerating the objective facts of our lives does not necessarily distort the subjective truth of them: it might well amplify it. Although the term autofiction was still in its infancy when the book was published in 1980, that’s undoubtedly what it is.

James goes out of his way to portray himself as an obnoxious little shit. Perhaps he goes too far, the endless litany of his misdemeanours and inadequacies eventually reading like an inverted form of boasting. Clever Clive is typically ahead of the reader, pre-empting this very criticism by observing: ‘I am also well aware that all attempts to put oneself in a bad light are doomed to be frustrated. The ego arranges the bad light to its own satisfaction’. He also acknowledges that candour about one’s faults doesn’t preclude ignorance of them. Towards the end, writing about a relationship, he observes: ‘I rather liked the idea of being thought of as a shit - a common conceit among those who don’t realise just how shitty they really are’. Nonetheless, his regret over his often insensitive, thoughtless and ungrateful behaviour towards his widowed mother is communicated with patent sincerity.

He provides some useful life tips, not least how to fart on cue to maximum effect in the classroom: ‘The whole secret of raising a laugh with a fart in class is to make it sound as if it is punctuating, or commenting upon, what the teacher is saying. Timing, not ripeness, is all’. Unreliable Memoirs scores high on the scatology-ometer. In addition to noxious bodily gases we are treated to generous helpings of poo, mucus and semen, all served up in his characteristically elegantly witty sentences; a combination of the crowd-pleasing and the erudite being another Jamesian hallmark. It’s also sexually candid, possibly more so than such a memoir would be nowadays, with graphic recollections of his early sexual experiences. The numerous idiocies and largely self-inflicted torments of male adolescence are chronicled with self-lacerating acuity, as the teenage Clive frets about the size of his dick and other lamentable physical imperfections. This book isn’t for the squeamish or easily shocked, but then neither are childhood and adolescence.

I first read it when it came out and recently came across a copy in a charity bookshop. It’s still just as funny as I remembered, reason enough to read it as truly funny books are thin on the shelves, but it’s more substantial than that might suggest. Despite the title this is a genuinely confessional memoir full of regret over bad behaviour mixed with unmistakable longing for Housman’s ‘blue remembered hills’ of childhood. It’s a mea culpa and a love letter to ‘the land of lost content’; that land, in this case, being both childhood and Australia. James, writing as a self-exile in rainy England, evokes his homeland so vividly that it is less a setting and more a central character, bringing both it and the past to life in prose which is pure poetry-:

‘Hunting for cicadas in the peppercorns and the willows, you were always in search of the legendary black prince, but invariably he turned out to be a redeye. The ordinary cicada was called a pisser because he squirted mud at you. The most beautiful cicada was the yellow Monday. He was as yellow as a canary and transparent as crystal. When he lifted his wings in the sunlight the membranes were like the deltas of little rivers. The sun shone straight through him. It shone straight through all of us’. show less

A photo on the back of the jacket reveals the author sporting lavish sideburns, a tonsorial arrangement which artfully combines baldness with long hair, and a hideous cravat, so you know immediately that it was taken in the 1970s. James says he had an entire rack of cravats ‘of a chemically derived material printed with a paisley pattern’. He describes the period as ‘an era of dandies without taste’. This ability to sum up a subject or person in one witty sentence is evident show more throughout the book.

The fourth instalment in the Unreliable Memoirs series, North Face of Soho covers about fifteen years from the late ‘60s to the early ‘80s. It starts with James having a nervous breakdown after being fired as director of an Oxbridge revue and ends with another theatrical disaster. In between he is building his career, or perhaps that should be careers, and nowhere near as famous as he would become later in the ‘80s when millions came to know him simply as a television performer rather than the brilliant critical essayist he also was. Consequently it’s much more interesting than the final volume, which dealt with the years of TV fame, the ascent always being more fascinating to read about than the Olympian view from the summit.

Although the quantity of his output during these years is impressive, it’s the variety that is really striking. When he wasn’t establishing a reputation as a heavyweight literary critic in the pages of the TLS, The New Review and the The New York Review of Books, he was doing impressions of Henry Kissinger on late night satirical TV shows. Or furnishing singer-songwriter Pete Atkin with literate lyrics. Or helping future Factory Records boss Tony Wilson present an off-beat rock show called So It Goes. Or writing a groundbreaking TV review column for the Observer newspaper. Or writing poetry. I could go on, but you get the picture. This is a book full of anecdotes involving people who don’t belong in the same book: Peter Sellers & Robert Lowell, Barry Humphries and Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and Johnny Rotten. The common factor is the Zelig-like kid from Kogarah.

James was a postmodernist before postmodernism was a thing, and long before the thing became a cliche. I’m not sure if he was consciously breaking down barriers between art and entertainment or if he just couldn’t help finding everything interesting. Perhaps he wasn’t sure either. Most intelligent people are interested in lots of different stuff. Unlike many, certainly fifty years ago, James wasn’t afraid to say so. He made the world of ‘serious literature’ seem accessible to the general reader and gave you the courage to enjoy alleged trash without feeling stupid. If someone as obviously clever as Clive James thought Star Trek was good fun, then it was okay for you to do so. Culturally omnivorous rather than populist he was the personification of the idea of a genuinely democratic culture, neither highbrow or lowbrow: ‘everything created should be composed on the assumption that it can be enjoyed by anybody, even if not by everybody’.

All of this was exemplified by his TV reviews written between 1972 and 1982. My paperback collections of the columns fell apart long ago through excessive reading. These mesmerising pieces were so funny that some concluded they weren’t criticism at all. James, however, proved that being funny and being serious were the same thing. When he made fun of the indefatigable patriotism of the BBC sports commentators at the 1972 Olympic Games (‘And Wilkins quite content with his fifth place. He can build on that’) he was telling you about Britain’s reluctance to accept that it was no longer an imperial power. Usually mainly remembered for hilarious put-downs of the famous his TV columns were really a celebration of the bewildering variety of 1970s British television, even if the compliments had a tendency to be distinctly backhanded. He wrote with an admirable lack of snobbery, taking popular fare like sit-coms as seriously as the supposedly prestigious productions, and frequently finding them more rewarding. Never intimidated by reputation he was always willing to point out that the Famous Playwright wasn’t wearing any clothes. And he didn’t just review the programmes: he also reviewed the adverts, the continuity announcers unable to get through a single link without fluffing, and the weather forecaster resplendent in a wildly strobing jacket while prattling about something called ‘a freezing fog situation.’ For Clive James television was a riotous carnival of eccentric characters and bizarre juxtapositions erupting into your living room. His reviews were often more enjoyable than the programmes and remain worth reading even though many of the programmes have been forgotten.

This is a wonderfully entertaining memoir, it zips along with tremendous energy and is full of wit and wisdom. It’s also full of the kind of finely honed and assiduously polished prose that dullards dismiss as slick. The kind of prose that is easy to read and almost impossible to achieve. James was a poet whose best poetry was written right across the page. He is honest about the ambition that drove him (‘I seemed less ambitious for anything in particular than for everything at once’) and avoids false modesty while taking delight in detailing his many failings. His failings are on such a grand scale they sound like achievements in themselves. For instance, he didn’t just smoke he ‘smoked so much that I needed the hubcap of a Bedford van as an ashtray’. Classic comic exaggeration, I thought. I then came across an article by Russell Davies in which he recalls both being in the street with James when he found the hubcap and how alarmingly quickly it filled up with cigarette butts.

Not everything Clive James did was good. There was quite a lot of dross among the gold. He mentions, without a flicker of embarrassment, a sequence of putatively comic epic poems with awful alliterative titles like Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World. Some of his programmes were more entertaining than envious fellow journalists allowed but there is no doubt that he was much better writing about television than appearing on it. His finest work is on the page: the reviews, essays, and memoirs like this one. A fashionable view is that he was a split personality fatally divided between his desire to be a famous jester and taken seriously: fashionable and false. This book, like all his best work, demonstrates the truth of something he once said: ‘A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgement and should be trusted with nothing.’ show less