Comic writer with few equals
Clive James is dead. He wrote so well that the best way to honour him would be just to quote him. But he wrote so much and in so many forms it’s hard to know what to quote from. James saw himself as a poet first and everything else second. But I prefer the everything else. Little of his poetry sings to me, except the splendidly bitchy, ‘‘The book of my enemy has been remaindered, And I am pleased.’’
He wrote three novels. I once read half of one of them. I think he knew they were no good. Though he was a writer to the core of his being he was neither a novelist nor a poet.
I wouldn’t quote from his television shows, either. They were popular and no doubt lucrative but they weren’t as funny as they set out to be. TV is visual. Clive James was verbal. On screen his face got between the viewer and the joke. He wasn’t a comic: he was a comic writer. And what a comic writer.
He may not have been funny on television but he was the funniest ever about television. I first came across him as a TV critic in the 70s. What he wrote transcended what he wrote about. The programmes he eviscerated were forgotten the next day. The eviscerations live on. Open a collection of them and the blood’s still fresh on the knife.
I do that right now and land on a review of the Christmas specials of 1977. ‘‘Perry Como gave his usual impersonation of a man who’s been simultaneously told to say ‘cheese’ and shot in the back with a poisoned arrow . . . The Best of Benny Hill showed no more signs than usual of being significantly different from the worst . . . The Osmonds aren’t even phoney: they’re sincerely vacuous.’’
As a reader you find yourself grateful for both the truth and the laugh. And that’s the point of Clive James: the truth and the laugh were the same thing. James himself said that a sense of humour is just ‘‘common sense dancing’’. And he urged us to distrust the humourless like Trump. They were subhuman.
I never met Clive James nor heard him speak in the flesh, nor wanted to. You don’t get more from a Brandenburg concerto by meeting Bach. The point is the art, not the man. And it seems that Clive James the man was as flawed as the rest of us: unfaithful to his wife; beset with vainglory; terrified of dogs. But that’s the soil from which the rose grows.
His masterpiece was his autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs. It begins ‘‘I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War.’’ There you have James in two sentences: the cocksure masculine vanity and the mockery of cocksure masculine vanity. A fool whose fuel is his own folly. It’s funny, but the fun is revelatory truth.
I used to teach Unreliable Memoirs to 16-year-old boys. It didn’t take much teaching. Most relished it, and not just because, though certainly partly because, there’s a whole magnificent chapter on masturbation.
There are few things James didn’t write about and none that he couldn’t. He delighted in making the language sparkle. And he blew up the myth that comedy and seriousness are mutually exclusive and that seriousness matters more. He’ll still be read for his comic truth when a thousand earnest writers have shrivelled to nothing.
James had been knocking on death’s door for a decade. Now it’s opened and let him in. In Auden’s words he’s ‘‘become his admirers’’. I’ll always be one of them.
We live in times where facts are regularly not verified before being broadcast to a wide audience. Here in New Zealand, one of the best examples of this is in regard to the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter. People seem to be able to grasp that it employs nearly 1000 people but that is about where consensus stops and mythology starts to creep in.
Since Rio Tinto’s announcement that it is going to conduct a strategic review of the smelter, we have seen a flurry of opinion pieces declaring that a postTiwai New Zealand will be better without the smelter.
A short history lesson is always a good way to revert to facts and a more evidence based reality.
The hydro power station in Fiordland now owned by Meridian Energy was built expressly to power the smelter. Successive New Zealand governments recognised the incredible resource at Manapo¯ uri but also that you need someone to buy all that power once it is generated.
So it entered into a 99-year contract with the smelter’s owners; the Government would build the hydro scheme and an international consortium would build the smelter.
However, in 1976 – only five years after the smelter started operating – Robert Muldoon demanded that contract be re-negotiated and therein began the endless negotiation between the smelter’s owners and whoever controls Manapo¯ uri power station.
The smelter’s owner now say it pays one of the highest prices for power and transmission paid by a smelter anywhere in the world.
When you face costs that are greatly higher than your competitors you will always find it tough to be commercially sustainable.
The owners of the Manapo¯ uri scheme are, however, faring much better, posting record profits this year.
Also doing OK is state owned Transpower which owns and operates the grid and collects money from all customers to do that.
The smelter’s owner now say it pays one of the highest prices for power and transmission paid by a smelter anywhere in the world.
In the 2017/18 financial year, it paid the Government a dividend of $165 million. In that year the smelter’s transmission costs were $66m.
If the smelter was to stop taking power from the hydro scheme built to power it, that power really can’t benefit anyone else in the meantime.
According to Transpower it would take three summers to get the power out of Manapo¯ uri to even the rest of the lower South Island.
But here’s the rub – without the smelter there is no-one there who needs it.
To get the power to Auckland would require further grid upgrades including another Cook Strait cable, taking at the very least five to eight years and costing electricity consumers $600 million.
Customers would also have to divvy up amongst themselves the $60m to $70m annual transmission costs the smelter faces.
When the strategic review of the smelter was announced last month anyone with shares in the NZ electricity companies found they fell sharply, wiping out $2 billion in value on the NZX.
It is time for someone to step up and take a New Zealand Inc. approach here.
The smelter’s owners have made it very clear that all they want from the Government is a fair price on transmission.
Their commercial negotiations with Meridian are another matter – but it would seem that a more even playing field could benefit both players and New Zealand.
If the Government can take a smaller dividend from Transpower then other customers wouldn’t have to pay more for transmission or face the huge bill to upgrade the grid.
With just a small amount of pragmatism New Zealand could continue producing its single largest export item to Japan, some of the lowest carbon, highest-purity aluminium in the world.
Virginia Nicholls is the chief executive of the Otago Southland Employers’ Association, which has lobbied the Government on this issue.