Still Clive and clicking... James is at his sharpest despite serious illness

Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook Clive James Yale University Press €20.55

With all due respect to novelist Henry and philosopher William, for me there’s-one pre-eminent James in the world of letters. ‘Jamesian’ for this-reader means brilliance without arrogance, wit without crassness, moral weight without pomposity.

It means Vivian Leopold James, who took the name ‘Clive’ from a character in an old Tyrone Power film, showing an early enchantment with even the sappiest popular culture.

In 2010, James was diagnosed with ‘a polite but insidious’ form of leukaemia. ‘Though I haven’t really got a chance, I haven’t got an end date,’ he puts it with characteristic élan. This has given him time to immerse himself in TV box sets, usually in the company of the women in his life with whom he’s become reunited in his ill-health. It adds a plangent note of melancholic tenderness to what is, in essence, a love letter to ‘bingewatching’.

In the prologue to this entertaining little book, there’s a typically Jamesian flourish: ‘When I was given a box set of Veronica Mars for Christmas, I wondered what [German philosopher] Theodor Adorno would have said about American schoolgirl detectives. But after watching a few episodes I realised I didn’t give a damn what Theodor Adorno thought.’

In the Seventies and Eighties, when James was writing everyone else on Grub Street into a cocked hat, his enviouscritics would lament the fact that he could ‘waste’ his first-rate mind on television when he ought to be writing long treatises on Beowulf.

Now in the twilight of his body, if not his mind, James tells us what he hasalways known – that Beowulf and Game Of Thrones are kin, separated only by formats. He also knows that long-form TV series are an entertainment that grown-ups can enjoy now the movies

have abandoned them in favour of the slack-jawed franchise fan.

When, from 1972 to 1982, James wrote about television in the Observer, there were fewer TV channels, and fewer demands on viewers’ time. As a consequence, almost osmotically, Harry Carpenter, Dallas, Parkinson et al entered the public’s psyche. But if you don’t have James’s appetite or time for box sets, you might not know the series and characters he writes about, which could narrow his book’s appeal.

For me, this was, in the end, no matter. Such are his gifts that I have in the past read and enjoyed Clive James, pictured right, on fighter aircraft, Formula 1 and the poems of Eugenio Montale, subjects I either knew nothing about or thought I had no interest in. So it was easy for me to enjoy James on Band Of Brothers and The

Sopranos, even though I’ve never seen either. I have seen The West Wing and House

Of Cards, and he is superb on both. Of the former, he remarks: ‘The West Wing reminded the world that America had intellectual capacity beyond its economic muscle, and surely helped prepare the way for Barack Obama’s election.’

But he is no undiscerning couch potato. He’s bracingly critical about the overrated Breaking Bad and almost baffled by his own reaction to Game Of

Thrones. (He likes it.) I only regret that this book came too early for his assessment of Netflix’s wonderful Eighties homage Stranger

Things. For that, and many other reasons, I sincerely hope there’s a Volume Two.

‘The West Wing surely helped to prepare the way for Barack Obama’s election’