The TV critic who became a TV star

Clive James, who has died aged 80, was an oldfashioned 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 self-consciously 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.

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.”

“On the other hand, I’m for it when it works for me.”

He 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”.

James’s ambition to be a famous person was locked in mortal combat with his desire to be a private one.

“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.”

That he was married was news to readers of his Who’s Who entry, which omitted 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.

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.

In 1961 he sailed to London, where for three years he lived a quasibohemian 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.

After Cambridge he became a book reviewer in London.

If there were aspects of James that rang false, his love of literature did not. His 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.

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.

In addition to his documentaries and chat shows, he made , a wellregarded series of travel programmes, and in 1994 he founded Watchmaker, his own television production company. In 1980 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 a` clef about literary London, as was his second,

The Remake (1987).

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.

I don’t like the celebrity culture. I’m against it. On the other hand, I’m for it when it works for me. Clive James