The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Clive James dies after writing own obituary
TRIBUTE: Family and friends honour broadcaster who had terminal illness
Author, critic and broadcaster Clive James has died at the age of 80, one month after laying down his pen.
The Australian-born star of The Clive James Show was diagnosed with leukaemia, kidney failure and lung disease in 2010, and over the years wrote and updated his own obituary.
He died at home in Cambridge on November 24 and a private funeral attended by family and close friends took place in the chapel at Pembroke College, Cambridge, yesterday.
A statement on behalf of his family, released by his agents, said: “Clive died almost 10 years after his first terminal diagnosis, and one month after he laid down his pen for the last time.
“He was grateful to the staff at Addenbrooke’s Hospital for their care and kindness, which unexpectedly allowed him so much extra time.”
James became the television critic for The Observer in 1972 and selections from his column, which he wrote for more than 10 years.
He ventured into memoir in 1980, when he published the first book of his autobiography, and it was followed by four other volumes, and four novels.
He found fame on television as the host of Clive James On Television, Saturday Night Clive and The Clive James Show and he fronted the BBC’S Review Of The Year programmes in the late 1980s, as part of the channel’s New Year’s Eve broadcast.
He ventured into travel programmes and made the major documentary series Fame In The 20th Century in 1993, and presented the Formula One review videos in the 1980s. He also presented BBC Radio 4’s A Point Of View.
During his long illness he increasingly focused on writing poetry, including the collection Nefertiti In The Flak Tower and the poem Japanese Maple, which was published in The New Yorker in 2014 and went viral before appearing in best-seller Sentenced to Life in 2015.
His self-penned obituary revealed that an unsuccessful operation to remove a cancer on his cheek in February 2019 left him frail and almost blind.
He spent the spring and summer of 2019 writing and editing an autobiographical anthology called The Fire Of Joy, which he described as a raid on “the treasure-house of his mind”.
The book contain notes on each poem and was finished a month before his death. It will be published in 2020.
BBC director-general Lord Tony Hall said James had “a huge range of talents and everything he did was essential listening or viewing. He is irreplaceable”.