Clive James
Australian-born man of letters who invented modern television criticism and as a natural performer became a star of the medium himself
CLIVE JAMES, who has died aged 80, was an old-fashioned man of letters – a critic, essayist, poet and novelist – who thanks to his wit and affability became an improbable star of television. He first made his name in the 1970s as television critic of The Observer, with a much imitated column that combined a selfconsciously literary style with spectacular personal rudeness. He described Arnold Schwarzenegger as resembling “a large brown condom filled with walnuts”, Frank Sinatra’s hair transplant as looking like “a gorilla’s armpit”, and the tennis player Andrea Jaeger, who was then aged 15 and wore braces on her teeth, as having “a smile like a car crash”.
Though he mocked the medium extravagantly, James relished appearing on it, and was a natural performer. To begin with he effectively transferred his column to the screen, in Clive James on Television, on which he offered droll highbrow commentary on lowbrow television footage, particularly of Japanese game shows.
Exploiting to comic effect his own marked lack of physical glamour – it was said of him that he looked like a bank robber who had forgotten to remove the stocking from his head, and as a burly Australian he was inevitably compared to Abel Magwitch – he branched out into documentaries about his encounters with beautiful women: The Clive James Paris Fashion Show; Clive James and the Calendar Girls; The Clive James Great American Beauty Pageant; Clive James Meets the Supermodels.
Some of these he later regretted, writing of Clive James at the Playboy Mansion (1987): “In less time than it takes for a man to make a fool of himself I was in the hot tub with three of the magazine’s centrefold lovelies … But as some Greek philosopher once said, all images are binding images, and from then on I was the guy who jumped into the jacuzzi with the crumpet.”
Thus established, James went on to present such late-night chat shows as The Late Clive James, The Late Show with Clive James, Saturday Night Clive and Sunday Night Clive, on which he combined the impression of irreverence with a degree of obsequiousness, thereby doubly flattering his guests. “I don’t like the celebrity culture. I’m against it,” he said. “On the other hand, I’m for it when it works for me.”
The mixture of knowing, satirical wisecracks and more traditional prime-time fare – high-kicking women in feathered headgear featured in one show – proved hugely popular with audiences. His New Year’s Eve review of the year for the BBC became a fixture in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A similar tone was apparent in his various verse satires – The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media (1975); Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World (1976); and Charles Charming’s Challenges on the Pathway to the Throne (1981). Felicity Fark and Peregrine Prykke were ostensibly lampoons, with famous names parodied (“Des Coxcomb” for Des O’connor, “Tina
Braun” for Tina Brown), but were affectionate, too.
Charles Charming’s Challenges was written in anticipation of the Prince of Wales’s marriage to Lady Diana Spencer. James was not invited to the wedding, but he did become an informal adviser to the Prince of Wales and a confidant of the Princess. Diana used to watch his chat shows being recorded, and in an essay in The New Yorker published two weeks after her death, James remembered how she had once told him, giggling: “I think it’s terrible what you do to those Japanese people. You are terrible.” By his own account, he loved her “to distraction”, and felt as if he had been “an obscure, besotted walk-on mesmerised by the trajectory of a burning angel”.
James himself was the target of sustained mockery, particularly during his years on prime-time television, from the critics and from Private Eye, which nicknamed him “Jaws”. In an attempt to pre-empt it, he cast himself in The Remake, his second novel, as “the Widmerpool from Woolloomooloo … a sad sort of guy. The last freelance literary journalist … Writes poetry that sounds the way reproduction furniture looks.”
The mockery continued. “Of course it hurts,” he told an interviewer. “The thing to do is keep a stiff upper lip and bore your friends with it. Or in my case, because I eventually bored my friends too much, go into the bathroom, lock the door tightly and scream very loudly into the washbowl.”
James’s ambition to be a famous person was locked in mortal combat with his desire to be a private one. The former impulse was evident to anyone who met him. “After Joan Collins was on his show,” a girlfriend recalled, “he rang to ask my opinion. Then he said: ‘Do you know, 12 million people watched my show tonight. That’s more than went to Gandhi’s funeral.’”
The latter impulse was evident to any interviewer who inquired about James’s personal life. “I don’t talk about my private life,” was his stock response. “The fact that I haven’t is probably the reason I’m still married.” The fact that he was married was news to readers of his Who’s Who entry, which omitted to mention his wife and children.
James fell seriously ill in 2010 – first with emphysema (he had been a heavy smoker) and then, in 2012, with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia – and in the subsequent years there were signs that he was taking stock. His public mood became increasingly introspective. He announced in 2012 that he was “a man who is approaching his terminus” (although the end turned out to be farther away than he had thought) and he concentrated on writing verse even while he lay in hospital beds.
One simple, touching poem, “Japanese maple”, about a tree planted in the garden of the family home in Cambridge, struck a chord and went viral: “My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new. / Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame./what I must do/is live to see that. That will end the game / For me, though life continues all the same.”
Clive Vivian Leopold James was born in Sydney on October 7 1939. His father was taken prisoner as an Australian serviceman during the fall of Singapore in 1942. Liberated three years later, he died in an air crash on his way home – a crushing blow to the young Clive, and to his mother, who suffered a nervous breakdown.
Seeing his mother’s distress and being unable to do anything about it had a devastating effect. “I couldn’t help her, and I had been helpless ever since,” he recalled years later. “I sometimes thought … that everything I had ever written, built or achieved had been in order to offset that corrosive guilt, and that I loved the world of women because I feared the world of men.”
He called his father’s death the “defining event” of his life. “I never saw him. I think I was in his arms as a baby for one day before he sailed away.”
By his own account a compulsive attention-seeker as a child, Clive was educated at Sydney Technical High School, where he had his first sexual fumblings, and at Sydney University, where he was literary editor of Honi Soit magazine.
In 1961, after a year as assistant editor on the magazine page of the
Sydney Morning Herald, he sailed to
London, where for three years he lived a quasi-bohemian existence before going up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read English. Grinning, bearded and already balding, he became a familiar figure at the university, particularly in the Footlights, of which he was president.
He met his compatriot Germaine Greer, and his future wife, Prue Shaw. He dabbled in drugs (“only pot”), and began writing lyrics for Pete Atkin, with whom he recorded six albums of jazz-folk music, including A King at Nightfall, Secret
Drinker and The Master of the Revels.
After Cambridge he became a book reviewer in London. “His prominence in extra-curricular activities having attracted the attention of the London literary editors,” as he put it in the biographical note on his website, “the byline ‘Clive James’ was soon appearing in The Listener, New Statesman, The Review and several other periodicals, all of them keen to tap into the erudite verve which had been showing up so unexpectedly in Varsity and The Cambridge Review.”
If there were aspects of James that rang false, his love of literature did not. His literary name-dropping sometimes grated on English ears – a typical sentence would be clotted with such names as Sartre, Brodsky, Nabokov and Steiner
– but he had actually read them, and often met them. “I’ve read all my life,” he declared in his sixties. “Devoured whole literatures. Why should I apologise for that?”
Philip Larkin was an admirer. Quoting James’s observation that “originality is not an ingredient of poetry, it is poetry” in a letter to a friend, Larkin remarked approvingly: “Now and again he says something really penetrating.”
In 1972 James was appointed television critic of The Observer, where he remained for 10 years and attracted a devoted readership. The TV review had until then been a negligible form, but James packed it with all the wit and erudition at his disposal, and many regard those columns as his best work. They were collected in Visions Before Midnight (1977), The Crystal Bucket (1981) and Glued to the Box (1982).
They also translated him into that medium. In addition to his documentaries and chat shows, from 1989 he made Postcards, a well-regarded series of travel programmes, and in 1994 he founded Watchmaker, his own television production company.
In 1980 had James published Unreliable Memoirs, the first volume of his autobiography. A knockabout and salty account of his Australian childhood (parodied by Private Eye as “The Day I Wanged My Donger in the Kedgeree”), it was true to its title, but thoroughly entertaining, and it sold well. It was followed by Falling Towards England (1985); May Week Was in June (1990); Always Unreliable (2001); North Face of Soho (2006); and The Blaze of Obscurity (2009).
His first novel, Brilliant Creatures (1983), was a roman à clef about literary London, as was his second, The Remake (1987). Undeterred by poor sales and the savagery of the critics (“solid cardboard”, “emotionally thin”), in 1991 he published his third, Brrm! Brrm!, about the adventures of a Japanese businessman called Suzuki (hence the title), sent by his company to England to acquire polish, though his manners are far superior to those of the English. James fared slightly better with The Silver Castle (1996), about a Bombay street urchin who becomes a Bollywood star.
James’s own opinion of his fiction, as of his other achievements, oscillated between vanity and humility, depending on the circumstances. He did not write for posterity, he explained: “Writers go mad when they try to do that. One of the things that keeps me sane is I want it now. I want to become immortal now, and then die.” He told the critic Bryan Appleyard that he was content to be categorised as “an entertainer … there are worse things to be called”.
On another occasion he remarked: “I rate my fiction nowhere against people like Barnes and Mcewan. It is more like a decorated essay.” Julian Barnes and Ian Mcewan were dining companions of his, as was Martin Amis, and he always treated them with lavish deference.
His three earlier volumes of verse, Fan-mail (1977), Poem of the Year (1983) and Other Passports (1986), were collected in The Book of My Enemy in 2003. Cultural Amnesia (2007) was a diverse collection of biographical essays.
Outside literature and television, James’s interests included Formula One motor racing, American football, ice-skating and the tango. His abiding passion, though, was for attractive young women, which was evident at parties, in his television programmes, and in his novels and verse.
In Brilliant Creatures, for example, his alter ego Lancelot Windhover is married to a beautiful don, but manages to seduce Sally Draycott, TV’S golden girl, who bears a passing resemblance to Selina Scott, and also to enjoy the favours of the pert young Samantha Copperglaze, “to prove a girl like her could be a moderately famous man’s companion”.
In his poem “Budge Up” an ageing lecher assists a nymph with her toilette: “She anoints herself with liberal Oil of Ulay/it looks like fun/her curved fingers leave a few streaks not rubbed in/he says: here, let me help. The night is young but not as young as she is/and he is older than the hills.”
James’s last years saw intense bursts of productivity when he was not blocked by illness. More poems appeared in Nefertiti in the Flak Tower; his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy into rhyming quatrains was published; and a collection of essays, Poetry Notebook 2006-2014.
Sentenced to Life, published in 2015, was a valedictory collection of poems, mostly taking in themes of sadness, remorse and decline.
The volume was dedicated to his wife, Prue, as was the translation of Dante, though a few years earlier an Australian television channel had exposed James’s eight-year affair with Leanne Edelsten, a former model; he was estranged from his family for a period and, finally, reconciled. (From “Balcony Scene”: “There is a man here you might care to save / From too much solitude. He calls for you.”)
For three years from 2011 James wrote a weekly television column for The Daily Telegraph. At 74 he reflected that “at this age and in this condition – when I’m short of breath and perhaps not long for this world – my ambition now is to live until box four of Game of Thrones”, adding that his love of the series broke his lifelong rule “to have nothing to do with any art form which has dragons in it”.
In the end he had time to binge-watch all eight seasons, and many more box sets besides, rating The Sopranos the greatest.
Clive James acknowledged that he was likely to be remembered for his television work rather than his writing. “Television paid for the groceries,” he said. “As a poet I would have starved.”
He was appointed to the Order of Australia in 1992, CBE in 2012, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010.
He married Prudence Shaw, who taught Italian at Cambridge and London; they had two daughters.
‘You know, 12 million people watched my show tonight. That’s more than went to Gandhi’s funeral’
‘I don’t like celebrity culture. I’m against it. On the other hand, I’m for it when it works for me’
Clive James, born October 7 1939, died November 24 2019