RIP kind Clive James
SIR: For 12 years, I worked closely with Clive James as the co-writer of his comedic television shows.
Our happy state of affairs crashed and burned in 1999 when, as we began planning Clive’s last ever show, a Review of the Twentieth Century, I was sacked.
When I asked him why, Clive mumbled and looked away. And I was too proud to pursue the matter.
I did find out why, through the grapevine. Apparently some pointy-headed BBC executive wanted to give two new young writers a chance. Perhaps they were friends of his. I didn’t enquire further. I walked. Years later, Clive asked me to lunch. At that lunch in the Groucho Club, Clive looked me in the eye, referred to that last show seven years earlier – and apologised. And this was a real apology.
I sat and listened, open-mouthed. When I attempted to interrupt, to say I knew it wasn’t his fault personally, that some BBC wonk had insisted I go, Clive stopped me with the same deft ease that he had used in our writing days together when I had made a false suggestion.
No, he told me. It was his fault. He could have defied the BBC. He could have insisted on keeping me. He should have insisted on keeping me. But he didn’t. And he was sorry.
By the end of the lunch we were what we had not been before. Friends.
More lunches and meetings, especially when his later books were published, followed. He frequently sent me his latest poem, and we were still exchanging cheerful emails up to two months ago.
In 2009, he published the fifth volume of his Unreliable Memoirs, The Blaze of Obscurity, which covered our years together, and which included a laudatory passage about me which, even for someone with as big an ego as mine, went well over the top. I knew what he was doing, employing such extravagant praise. He was helping me validate my life as a writer.
He was like that. A kind man. Colin Bostock-smith, Ridgewood, Uckfield, East Sussex