Clive James was a genius…and I’m just his most brazen tribute act
IF life does indeed come down to just a single moment, mine probably arrived on a random Sunday in the late 1970s when I discovered my dad helpless with laughter underneath a copy of The Observer.
Words were almost beyond him by this stage. Between gasps for air, though, he managed to hand the paper over with a single instruction.
“Read that.” I did.
It was a review written by Clive James, The Observer’s legendary television critic, who died this week, at the age of 80.
The year, I now discover from a collection of his work called The Crystal Bucket, was 1978 and it must have been slim pickings for him that Sunday.
There was no Eurovision Song Contest or Miss World or even an episode of The Incredible Hulk for him to dismantle. Instead he was setting the scene on a men’s downhill skiing race, at Kitzbuhel, covered by BBC1’s Grandstand.
MY MIND WAS BLOWN
“A man referred to as ‘Britain’s sole representative’ came plummeting down the Streif. ‘He won’t be looking for a first place today’, said David Vine, ‘he’ll be looking for experience’.
“At that very instant — not a bit later, but while David was actually saying it — Britain’s sole representative was upside down and travelling into the crowd at 60mph. Spectators were mown down as if by grapeshot.
"The air was full of snow, beanies, mittens, bits of wood. You had to be watching to get the full impact. It was kind of perfection.”
The writing, it’s fair to say, hit me with the same force.
My tiny, ten-year-old mind was officially blown. I’d no idea newspapers could be funny, until that moment. They were places behind which grown-up men went to hide and frown and tutt, not to be reduced to helpless, weeping wrecks.
Nor did I have any idea watching the television could be a job. Paid? To watch Grandstand?
AN AMBITIOUS OUTSIDER
It was beyond anyone’s comprehension then and, slightly weirdly, after 20 years in the job, it’s still almost beyond my comprehension now.
All of that is thanks to Clive James reinventing the role of television reviewer which, up until his arrival in 1972, was a stuffy, reverential task performed by men, at the flat-lining end of their careers, who were still slightly in awe of the magic box in the corner of the living room.
Clive James was none of those things. An Australian, he was an ambitious outsider and populist who had the honesty to point out that TV might well be a miracle of technology and incredibly popular but it wasn’t half rubbish as well.
That’s the easy bit, of course. What set James apart from every other writer in Fleet Street was the poetic style and wit he did it with every single week.
Since his death, from cancer, the obituaries have rightly flagged up all the one-liners which have set the industry standard ever since.
He famously referred to Arnold Schwarzenegger as, “A brown condom full of walnuts”, and said of F1 commentator Murray Walker: “Even in moments of tranquility, Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.”
The incredibly galling thing for anyone who’s trained as a journalist, though, was that James was an instinctively brilliant hack without ever wasting a day on his local newspaper.
Here he is, luring me in, with another poetic intro from December 1978.
“Never since Damocles danced beneath the sword has there been anything like the World Disco Dancing Championships (Thames TV), brought to you live from the ravishing Empire Ballroom, Leicester Square.”
Not for Clive James the high falutin’ marginal stuff, on BBC2, you see, though he could do that as well. Unfashionable as it was at the time, he reviewed the television people actually watched.
It meant Sundays became an event, across the nation, and our house was a minor warzone as my sister and me plotted and fought to become the first person to read his latest reviews.
Those happy battles couldn’t last, though. The medium that bewitched Clive James eventually seduced him and, in 1982, at the peak of his writing power, he became ITV’s Clive James On Television.
THE FUTURE OF BRITISH TELEVISION
Even if you’re too young to remember this show, then you still most certainly live with the consequences of a programme where James held up for ridicule bad singing, from Margarita Pracatan, and a Japanese game show called Endurance, where contestants would be subjected to physical and mental torture with rats, lizards and water.
At the time we thought it was some weird World War Two hangover the Japanese were working out of their system.
We know now Clive James was in fact inventing the future of British television and I’m A Celebrity.
The irony of this, and the debt I owe him, is not lost on me.
Pick up any national newspaper today and you’ll find half a dozen journalists who owe their style, as well as the roof over their head and the food on the table, to the genius of Clive James.
MOST READ IN OPINION
As you’ll quickly discover if you read The Crystal Bucket and his November 21, 1976 review for another British TV staple, I just happen to be the most brazen tribute act.
“The Royal Variety Show was hosted by Max Bygraves, who tried the time-honoured gimmick of singing the finale at the start.
"‘And if you don’t like our finish, you doan have to stay for the show.’
Thanks. Click.”
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