Season by season, however, the show did a more persuasive job of setting the style for television about television. The set was all television: a kind of television heaven. As the software got more comprehensive, it was possible to charge the stack of monitors not just with a different image each, but with a different part of the same image, to get the effect of a churning cyclorama alive with information. In the middle of all this razzle-dazzle I sat in my blue suit: the human element. Other humans came on as guests, but I was the only human who was there all the time. Everything else was electronic, including the far-flung guest who magically appeared up there on the back wall. The effect was of technical know-how carried to its apogee, like a big rocket crackling upwards into orbit. The reality, however, could be dead dodgy, especially early on, when the window for getting a satellite interview was as short as twenty minutes. You had that much time to shoot enough clean stuff that could be edited into a five-minute spot. One to four was an almost unworkably small ratio. Even in the USA, where every big city had hundreds of spare technicians who could be hired ahead of time, it would still take five or ten of the precious minutes just to get the guest rigged for sound. Usually, on studio day, we had to tape a satellite interview in the afternoon, when the time was right for a guest on the east coast, where it was still morning. A guest on the west coast would have to be taped in our early evening, just before the audience came in for the show, which would be taped too, but shot as-for-live. There could be nothing as-for-live about the satellite interviews, which were bound to be full of stops and starts. The trick was to ensure that the stops didn’t cancel all the starts until there was nothing left to edit. But at least there was no studio audience to worry about.
So I was free to worry about everything else. The satellite-interview system was a potential ace in the hole, because it was a pipeline to America, where all the best guests were, as they still are. But for just that reason, the system had to work, and it was so expensive that even a single crack-up could screw the budget. Making it harder was the fact that some of the American guests weren’t just up-front, they were out to lunch. It occurred to me that I had never known real tension before the day I interviewed Tammy Faye Bakker by satellite. Tammy Faye was the wife of Jim Bakker, the gate-mouthed television evangelist (‘Praise the Lord!’) who had grown famous for the amount of money he could get out of his enormous congregation, but he had spoiled it all by spending some of it on a woman of easy virtue. The credibility of his ministry was irreversibly undermined. His wife, who had started off as a simple choir-girl spell-bound by the soaring spirituality of her pastor, was reluctant to accept that the dream was over. There was nothing easy about Tammy Faye’s virtue, but she had forgiven Jim at the top of her voice, and was eager to do so again just for me and all the wonderful people of Great Britain. Unfortunately she was inaudible, because the clip-on microphone slid off the discreetly scooped neckline of her spangled top and fell between her ample breasts, where it reattached itself to the underwiring of her bra. The microphone needed a designated female member of the Teamsters Union to dig it out. When it was finally retrieved, covered in talcum, it turned out that she couldn’t hear anything, because there was something wrong with her earpiece. The sound engineer at our end said that she must have talcum in her ears. Through my own earpiece came instructions from the gallery that I should suggest to the production staff at the other end that they should suggest to Tammy Faye that she might like to scrape her eardrum with a wodge of Kleenex or a Q-tip. You have to imagine that I was looking at Tammy Faye’s face multiplied to the size of a squash court, and that she was a pretty daunting sight even from a distance. The conglomerate of false eyelashes and mascara both below and above each eye gave the combined effect of two extreme astronomical events occurring in close proximity, and the weight of the lipstick dragging her mouth downwards gave the impression of too many people clinging to one side of a rubber raft.
You will notice that I make no mention of the physical characteristics underlying her panoply of cosmetic effect. I would like to be able to say that I never broke that rule. Certainly I haven’t broken it in recent years, but I have to confess that in my early days I sometimes did, although mostly inadvertently. I only once did it deliberately. A famous British novelist, after a visit to Australia, wrote a feature article for one of the British colour supplements in which she gave the impression that the Australian media had been not quite up to the task of assessing her sophistication. In particular, she described one of her Australian female interviewers as looking anorexic. The interviewer was a friend of mine and did have an eating disorder, so next time I was in Australia I took revenge by making a few disparaging remarks about the personal appearance of the novelist. I made the remarks to a journalist in full knowledge that what I said would soon get back to London: that, indeed, was my plan. My idea was to remind the novelist that it was a small world. The plan succeeded only too well. My remarks were quoted, accurately, in the British press the next day, and I realized very quickly that I was the one who had been taught a lesson, because in cold print they sounded mean and witless. Revenge was laid bare as a very bad reason for writing anything, so I tried not to do it again.
Nor was the lure of accurate evocation sufficient excuse for a cruel remark. I should never have compared Montserrat Caballé to the battleship Missouri. The soprano didn’t have to look like that – she could have eaten less – but she still had feelings. The same applied to the young American tennis player Andrea Jaeger. When I said she had a smile like a car crash, I was referring to the braces on her teeth. I thought the observation permissible because one day the braces would be removed, so I wasn’t really referring to anything permanent. She might have felt, however, that they were there forever, and had invited the lightning. My general defence in such cases was that no journalist was ever quite as pitiless about my own physical appearance as I was myself. But it gradually became apparent to me that the defence would not quite do. If I didn’t mind very much about cutting an awkward figure, other people might mind if I said they did, so I tried to rein in the personal remarks, except for those cases where there had been a flagrant display of wilful self-mutilation by someone who was proud of the result. I wasn’t calling Barbara Cartland ugly when I said that the makeup so lavishly applied to the area of her eyes made them look like the corpses of two small crows that had flown into a chalk cliff. She chose to look like that. Nor was I calling Arnold Schwarzenegger innately deformed when I said that when stripped for action he looked like a brown condom full of walnuts. He chose to look like that. Both those remarks, however, have remained lastingly notorious as examples of how I am without mercy when pouring carbolic scorn on people’s personal appearance. In fact I have always spent most of my time being careful to do no such thing, but a dog with a bad name finds it hard to outrun. Enough of that. Where was I? Oh yes. With Tammy Faye. She was up there on the wall, she was looking as off the wall as hell, and time was running out.
We were within seconds of having to call off the deal, but suddenly, as in all the best melodramas, the machinery repaired itself, and Tammy Faye was ready to do her thing. She did it surprisingly well. She expressed herself almost exclusively in quasi-biblical bromides but it didn’t matter. Television gives a general impression. Nobody ever remembers what you said, but everybody remembers how you came over, and Tammy Faye was, well, kind of nice, even dainty. Hence the surprise, because if her personality had fitted her face it would have been like hearing from a candy store reaching critical mass. Instead she sounded like a good woman coping with bewilderment. The main thrust of her argument was that the embarrassments visited on her adorable Jim were unfair but they must all be part of God’s plan. There could be no doubt that she genuinely loved the sanctimonious little creep. I refrained from asking her the question that would be on the lips of everyone in the audience: how could she have ever looked at that whimpering, wheedling face of his and imagined that he had a religious calling? The reason not to ask th
e question was that she was giving the answer with every word she said. Love is blind, even when its eyes aren’t full of melting makeup. As the satellite image at last winked out, I didn’t precisely have to choke back a sob, but I was sincerely moved. Plainly the satellite interview would be a powerful instrument. It was clumsy – there was a full second of delay that made it hard to keep question and answer from awkwardly overlapping – but it gave you a close-up. In Tammy Faye’s case, it was a close-up of a wedding cake that had been hit by a hurricane, but the soul shining through was good, and a useful reminder that there is a crucial difference between fundamentalism and extremism. Tammy Faye’s beliefs were as fundamentalist as they come, but she wouldn’t have killed you for not sharing them, except perhaps when she sang.
It took a couple of seasons to streamline the satellite-interview system and it was always touch and go. We almost lost a spot with Billy Connolly in Los Angeles because Billy had turned up in a silk shirt and we found out the hard way that clip-on microphones react badly to silk. He launched into his first answer and within half a minute the lurching and skirling image up there on the screen sounded as if it was being attacked by locusts. The crew at his end wrapped the microphone with insulation tape and he launched into his first answer again. This time the locusts had been joined by angry wasps. It took half a dozen false starts before somebody figured out that the thing to change wasn’t the microphone, but the shirt. Billy swapped shirts with one of the American production staff and launched into his first answer yet again, just in time for his earpiece to start receiving police reports. So he started responding to those. In came the slate, chalked ‘Take 16’. Being Billy, he got better all the time. He couldn’t control his merriment at the accumulated cock-ups but he is one of those lucky few who are funnier still when fighting their own laughter. Time was running out, however, and I found the tension tough on my cool, although I was steadily getting better at maintaining continuity through the glitches.
Time ran all the way out with Willie Nelson. A beard in a hat, with plenty of hair hanging down from the back of the hat to make him look even more like Wyatt Earp’s scapegrace brother, he was somewhere near the rim of the Grand Canyon, and our idea for the set-up was centred on his identity as a taciturn man of the West. He would ride toward the camera on a white horse, lithely dismount, and be interviewed. Willie Nelson is not just an accomplished singer-songwriter, he is a gifted natural actor – watch him stealing scenes in Wag the Dog – but the horse couldn’t act for a bale of hay. Willie rode towards the camera and the horse screeched to a halt too late, so that the lithely dismounting rider filled the lens with his belt-buckle. Willie rode towards the camera and the horse screeched to a halt too early, so that the lithely dismounting rider had to trek forward into position from the middle distance. Willie rode towards the camera and the horse didn’t screech to a halt at all. It just kept going past the camera and disappeared, leaving the lens with nothing to look at. Had the horse, with Willie on board, gone over the edge of the canyon? Where was our star? But wait a minute: there he was again, riding towards the camera. The horse screeched to a halt in exactly the right spot. Willie lithely dismounted and his earpiece didn’t work, so instead of answering my first question he merely smiled, a man of the West not just taciturn but mysteriously bereft of the power of speech. Time wasn’t just running out, it ran out. We had to book an extra window, at painful cost, so as to get an interview that would marry up to the arrival shot. A regular actor would have had to be paid twice, which would have blown the budget right out. But Willie was a gentleman. He was also, I later discovered, broke to the wide, so he wasn’t just a gentleman, he was a saint. As for the horse, I hope it is rotting in hell. We had some good footage of Willie giving it a serious talking-to, but there was no time to put together a sequence of everything going wrong. It would have been a lot more eloquent than the interview, which consisted largely of Willie saying ‘Yep’ and ‘Nope’, like Gary Cooper. Once again, however, the words mattered less than the mere presence. Faces from space! It looked fabulous.
12. DESTINATION TOKYO
With the weekly show raking in the ratings, we had earned our upgrade to the shimmering cliffs of White City, where we were given half an acre of the Beeb’s unstained new floor-space in which to spread our staff, who revelled in the unfamiliar luxury of being able to sit down without touching each other. Much to my embarrassment, the whole operation was called the Clive James Unit. Feeling a bit overbilled, I resolved to redouble my efforts, but soon found that I was obliged to triple them. Having got our wish for a bumper ration of Postcard programmes, we now had to make them. It was soon clear to me that they would consume the last vestiges of my spare time. If I hadn’t learned to write on board the aircraft, and during every hour of downtime on location, I would have got no literary work done at all. By now I was composing the last of the reviews and essays that went into my book Snakecharmers in Texas. I got better at writing them in snatched hours, and their range of reference benefited from the second-hand books I bought wherever I flew. On location, collecting books and stacking them up on the cafe table at which I wrote was a way of staying sane, or perhaps just a way of resting from one kind of hyperactivity by burying myself in another. The cafe table could be anywhere, and today I can’t always remember which city came in which order, or even whether it was the BBC paying the hotel bills, or else that previous bunch. I never kept a logbook because it would have scared me to look at it. I could phone around all the old staff – half of them are tycoons by now, but they might still take my calls – and I could work out the actual order of events, but there would be no point: things didn’t feel sequential even then. As in every other area of my life, simultaneity was the keynote. The places we filmed were all different, but filming itself was just one place on its own. I loved being there, but often felt that I didn’t know where it was in the world. It had a hotel where you had breakfast, and there was a car that appeared on schedule, and then you appeared on schedule and climbed into the car, and then the car took you from one sequence to the next until it took you back to the hotel to have dinner and lie down for a couple of hours before staying awake half the night while you mugged up for next day. The call-sheet being always such a killer, it was essential to know something about the country’s past before going in, because when you got there you would see nothing except the present.
I already knew a bit about Japan before we flew to Tokyo. I had once been there on assignment for the Observer, and since then I had read quite a lot about Japanese history; and lately I had sat through several hundred miles of footage showing young Japanese game-show contestants performing routines out of a cabaret devised by Dante. That last thing, of course, was the principal reason somebody decided that we should make not just one film in Japan, but two of them on the trot. Our advance party returned with a thick folder full of sure-fire suggestions, and off we flew to make them real. I forget what I wrote on the plane. It should have been my will.
Barely had we moved into our skyscraper hotel in the Aoyama district of Tokyo when we made our first mistake. It was decided that I should carry a bag in the first few sequences, as if I was still looking for the hotel after having emerged from the subway system. We thus constructed a needless continuity problem, because when we got back to the editing room and duly reshuffled all the sequences into a different order, the bag mysteriously appeared and disappeared throughout the movie, always needing to be explained. (Memo: it isn’t enough to dress the same throughout. Don’t carry anything, because you never know if a walking shot from one sequence might not need to be patched into another, and if something even as slight as a hot dog magically appears in your hand, it will need an extra, awkward line of voice-over. ‘On my way to the shrine I bought a hot dog which I consumed instantly.’ Cue the sound of people switching off by the million.) But that lay in the future. At the time, I wondered if I would ever get home at all. My Japanese game-show expertise dictated that I should participate in,
guess what, a Japanese game show. It was called Takeshi’s Castle: far and away the most popular game show on Japanese television, out-rating even the dreaded Endurance. The castle was a pasteboard cut-out standing in a patch of waste land, but it looked convincing beside Takeshi himself, who was dressed like Michael Jackson in the later, militarized stages of his madness and did a lot of jumping about and crouching while pulling the Japanese front-man’s standard idea of a subtly threatening face. Imagine Kirk Douglas feigning apoplexy and you’ve got it.