We went home too, on the last plane before Shanghai airport closed. At the time, I would have said that nothing could ever break the monolithic grip of the Chinese Communist Party, and in fact, even now, nothing yet has. But the Shanghai Hilton had already started to change the country. It just never occurred to me that the hotel we were staying in was the real story. Blind to the implications, I felt that our only course was to make the best possible movie out of what we had, and I was all too conscious of the subjects we had been unable to explore, for fear of getting innocent people into trouble. We had met a wonderful young woman who ran a small theatre company. I can’t be more specific than that even now, just in case some sharp security officer gets the urge to track her down and re-educate her. (If you think it unlikely that someone could be punished for what they might have said out of turn twenty years ago, you have a very rosy view of how a police state works: the spooks are never off the case, and they have nothing else to do.) When I was safely back in England I got a letter from her saying that she was in despair for her country and wanted to leave. I was all set to send her a reply and an air ticket when a Chinese refugee I knew said: don’t. ‘They’ might conceivably have not read her letter on its way out, but they would certainly read any reply on its way in. I managed some direct help for exactly one person out of a billion. Our amateur archaeologist Yi Bin got a scholarship to London and he defected when he arrived. My family made a friend of him and I wrote the occasional reference. In return he gave me a set of Chinese classical poetry anthologies which are still on my shelves, closed books that I will never now learn to read.
And that was it. Apart, of course, from the movie, which turned out to be a crowd-pleaser. There was plenty of comedy as One Fat Important Man rode around on his bicycle, its tyres dutifully bursting when the scene required. And there was the resolutely cheerful yet infinitely sad face of the music teacher, back from such a living hell under the Gang of Four that she thought the China of 1989 a miracle of liberalism. Beyond help, beyond hope, her tired eyes were a reminder that pity was useless: and she would have been the first to say that she was the lucky one, when so many of her friends had died of heartbreak, pounded into despair by Madame Mao’s insane vision of the future of mankind. And behind Madame Mao had been the old man himself, now long dead but still preserved in his full corporeal splendour inside the mausoleum that occupies the centre of the same square where that lone student faced down a tank, immortalizing himself in a stretch of footage which has since been screened a million times everywhere in the world except China. The significance of that last fact didn’t become fully evident until somebody invented the World Wide Web. The Chinese leaders had kept the pictures out because they were scared of the possible effect. It followed that if the day arrived when they could not keep the pictures out, they would have to modify their behaviour. They still do everything they can, however, to slow the pictures down: the Web routes into China are more closely guarded than the Great Wall ever was. As of this writing, the Great Helmsman’s shining corpse is still the touchstone of authority for each new batch of gerontocrats preaching modernization. Until they melt that waxwork down for candles, you can’t trust them for a thing.
Being a good Samaritan is a calling for some, and truly they shall see God; but I have always been too selfish with my time. There are occasions, though, when keeping yourself to yourself will shrink the space that you are trying to protect. As the weekly show’s satellite interview slot became more flexible, we got into Russia, where the system, agitated by the benign example of Gorbachev, was breaking up with increasing speed. A stocky young journalist called Vitaly Vitaliev became our regular correspondent from Moscow, and quickly earned the love of the British and Australian public. Vitaly’s English was pretty good but it never modified the inexhaustibly abundant personality that so many Russians bring to the task of celebrating victory in war, or the birth of a new baby, or just a new day. He always looked and sounded as if he drank vodka for water. He could throw an arm around you from three time zones away. From a clapped-out Moscow TV studio still decorated to match Stalin’s personal warmth, Vitaly grunted, chortled and gurgled the story of what was really going on. It was better than anything on the news. After the Chernobyl disaster he walked into the area without a protective suit and still came out glowing with energy, although by rights he should have been glowing with radioactivity and lying on a stretcher. It seemed remarkable how much he was able to say, but it soon turned out that the new freedom of speech under glasnost had its limits. The KGB was phoning him in the night, and in their fine old style they reserved their most obscene threatening calls for his wife and little son. Vitaly was hard to scare, but anyone can be scared by a threat to his family, and the day arrived when he felt it prudent to do a runner. When he came to us in Cambridge on the weekends he was a huge hit with both our daughters. He made ‘avuncular’ sound like a Russian word, but then, he did the same for every word in the English language. His accent was so catching that even I caught myself wishing him Myerry Chryistmas. Like the refugee dissidents of the old regime, however, those who fled the new one were bound to encounter employment problems. For a while Vitaly was in demand by the BBC and the upmarket press for his opinions on the new dispensation in Russia, but it soon emerged that his opinions did not suit. Nobody knew what he was on about when he said the next big thing in his homeland would be gangsterism, not democracy. He would be proved dead right in the course of time, but for now he was thought to be a bit of a crank, and he soon decided that his chances might be better in Australia. At this point my celebrity status came in handy for once, because I was able to get him fast-tracked through the immigration process. My recommendation read like science fiction but it was all true. Off he went to the future, from which we were later saddened to hear that he had started another family along with another life. It often happens that way: when the pressure that a couple faced together relaxes, it turns out that they were never quite as together as they thought.
Since the majority of divorces are instigated by wives rather than husbands, a man with feminist sympathies – I count myself as one such, despite my Neanderthal instincts – is bound to take a liberal view of the subject, and try to believe that the liberating effects often outweigh the destructive ones. By that time, a lot of the people I had known when I was young were moving into their second marriage, leaving the first in ruins. From a philosopher’s viewpoint, this could only be a welcome development in the propagation of human rights. But I couldn’t help noticing that my own children cared little for a philosopher’s opinion. What they wanted was reassurance from their father that they were living in a proper house and not a bouncy castle. Divorce was getting so fashionable that it wasn’t a surprise even when Charles and Diana showed public signs that all was not well. Young people couldn’t be blamed for wondering if their parents might not catch the fashion too. I did my best to sound like a man who would always come home no matter what, but it’s not an idea that can be very convincingly projected from a distance, and all too often I was away. Being away when I had to be away was perhaps forgivable, but being away when I didn’t have to felt like treason even to me. I had become so caught up with learning to read Japanese, however, that I would stop off in Tokyo even if I was flying home from Valparaiso. In a Jin Bo Cho coffee shop I would sit down with my latest batch of second-hand books about the Pacific war and transcribe characters until my eyes bled. Why was it so hard, and how would I ever get anywhere unless I gave it everything?
Somewhere about then, I was having my portrait painted by a prodigiously gifted young artist called Sarah Raphael, daughter of the writer Frederic Raphael, who was of an age with me, which meant that Sarah was not all that much older than my elder daughter. I had seen Sarah’s first exhibition and written a piece in which I said that for her to be called Sarah Raphael didn’t quite meet the case: she ought to be called Sarah L. da Vinci. She liked the joke and offered to paint my portrait as a reward. After a long taxi ride I
arrived at her far-flung studio to discover that she was good-looking far beyond the job description. She had all the intelligence and wit of her famous father, but they were contained, if he will forgive me, in a more disarming package. Married, with a couple of children of her own, she was pushed for time if she was going to get any work done, but I soon learned to value every visit. I hoped the portrait would take forever, like Penelope’s tapestry or the tale-telling of Scheherazade. My admiration was apparent but she sweetly put up with it. She’d had plenty of practice. Quite apart from her suitably handsome young husband, her admirers were countless: William Boyd, Terry Jones, Tom Conti, Daniel Day-Lewis, the list went on and on, all of them helplessly, hopelessly doting on her beauty and genius. That last word was, for once, not excessive. Clearly she was going to be a great painter. She was well aware of this – the great always know they are, because they are never unaware that their gift comes from heaven – but she could be charmingly apprehensive about the burden of her duty. ‘You really think I’m quite good, don’t you?’ I did indeed, but I loved her for the question.
Stewing in the turmoil of a Platonic vision was made easier by the fact that my family loved her too. My wife owns more pictures by Sarah than I do, including the portrait of me, which I have to ask permission to look at. When, a few years later, my elder daughter, after taking a Ph.D. in molecular biology, turned from science to painting, she made it clear that Sarah’s towering example was one of the reasons. Sarah brought out the best in everyone who knew her. Her father and I had been literary enemies before I met her – the quarrel had been my fault, not his – but when I became a proponent of her work he forgave me my sins. For me, apart from the intoxication of her delightful company, the example of her dedication to her art was a constant lesson in how to focus every tension of your life into a single task and make something of it. She suffered terribly from migraines but she found a way of working even through the pain. When one of her daughters needed eye surgery she would put down her brush, take the patient off to hospital for a harrowing day and pick up the brush again when she got back. She valued everything that happened to her because eventually it would go into her work. Time had improved me anyway: when I was at home, I was of more use around the house. But Sarah’s example made me happier about pulling at least part of my weight in a domestic context when there was no camera present to watch me doing so. When my younger daughter and I set off every Saturday morning to do the weekend shopping – a ritual expedition that we still pursue today – I felt blessed, and doubly blessed because it gave my wife a vital extra hour at the computer to nail some crucial point in Dante’s Monarchia. No wonder she and Sarah adored each other: they were of the same stamp.
Playing the stalwart might have been easier if I had always been on the spot, but even if my temperament had allowed that, my trade seldom did. From that angle, a new format called the End of the Year Show had the merit of pinning me to the ground for the three months it took to write. The weekly show had always been a taxing job to script, to such an extent that a professional had finally been brought in to help me. His name was Colin Bostock-Smith and he was an inspired appointment on Richard’s part, because he wasn’t only a fountain of skilled gags, he had a practical sense that kept me to schedule. An awareness of timing, in the show-business sense of putting words in the right order, and an awareness of time, in the horological sense of little hands advancing around the clock’s face, are two things that very rarely go together in the one personality. Bostock, as I immediately took to calling him, could do both. In addition, he was hilarious company, and we both looked forward so much to being locked away together in my inner office that some of the women in the outer office started to wonder if we weren’t getting our rocks off in there – the snorts and giggles sounded like a bath-house bacchanal. I never met a man who entertained me more. More important, what we wrote together entertained the public. I still took the responsibility for the script. My power of veto was unquestioned, and if something unsuitable had threatened to get into the script I had the authority to keep it out. But it was an authority I never needed to use because Bostock’s taste was impeccable, like his ear: working together, we created a complete grammar for putting words to images that is still, today, in such wide use throughout the industry that it is taken for granted, and although modesty dictates that I should disclaim my share in its invention, duty demands that I credit Bostock with his painstaking ingenuity. It was meticulous work, but in short order we were motoring at such a rate that Richard started wondering whether we might not need a bigger format to soak up all the scintillation. Hence the idea for an annual round-up was born. The show would be broadcast on New Year’s Eve, ending as Big Ben struck twelve. It would be built around all the news footage that we could rake in and suitably misrepresent. Computers could already do a lot but they couldn’t yet sort images. If you wanted to choose the right (i.e. wrong) moments from the recent history of Ronald Reagan, you had to collect miles of footage and look at it in real time. Elementary calculation revealed that it would take at least nine months to process the footage and the actual writing would have to start in September. Entrusted with the mission of framing every prominent villain, buffoon or misguided celebrity, a whole team of ferrets was assigned to tracking down the last potentially usable frame of such natural stars as our old friend Yasmin Arafat. That mission, though huge, had a clear aim. Another aim was less clear, but potentially just as rewarding. If Bostock and I could build a sufficiently portentous context, a perfectly banal statement from one of our gallery of the questionably famous could yield rich results. We wrote a test link about the ending of the Cold War, speculated as to the identity of the single historical voice that had brought this desirable termination about, and followed up the paragraph with some footage of the deeply beige Australian pop star Jason Donovan declaring that there would be less war if people stopped hating each other. The results were uncanny. But the idea was very hard to research, because the ferrets would have to see, in an incongruous historical context, the possible resonance of statements that otherwise meant next to nothing. Statements or actions: any footage of Ronald Reagan walking through a doorway, or just picking up a glass of water, might be the start of something: so fill out the forms and get hold of it. We expected such prodigies of endeavour from the researchers that it was sometimes easy to forget they were a bunch of kids. Their den-mother, who I shall call Jean Twoshoes for purposes of respect, was a whiz at digging stuff up and getting the permissions, but she had a tendency to witter on. Richard made a gag out of looking at his watch while she wittered, and it made her witter worse. But she could do the business and I loved her for it. An excess of zeal is exactly what you want from a researcher: too great a sense of proportion and they come up short.
Months before it went to air, the first New Year show felt right, and I even got home on the weekends, radiating the contentment of a balanced life. Or I would have done, except there was always a new Postcard to be prepared for early the year after. It had been noticed that my lack of ability to drive a car could sometimes be a limitation when we were filming me getting about in a foreign capital. Riding on the subway system looked OK in Tokyo or Paris – in either city, only an idiot drives – but it would be a problem if we ever went to Los Angeles, which obviously we would one day have to do. How to find time to have driving lessons was the question. I had always had a theoretical interest in cars – provided I don’t have to fix it, there is almost no form of technology that doesn’t fascinate me, garbage-disposal units included – but for some reason I had never learned to drive. Probably the reason was a sound professional instinct: a writer might possibly read at the wheel, but if he did much writing at the wheel there would be a crash. From the practical viewpoint of filming, however, the inability to drive was a severe handicap. How to eliminate it?
18. WHEELS AT SPEED
The obvious answer was to buckle the learning period into the subject matter of a show. The chance to do this ca
me when someone proposed a Postcard programme called Clive James Racing Driver. The Adelaide Grand Prix had invited my participation in the Celebrity Saloon Car Challenge race, one of the sideshow races to the main F1 event. The Adelaide organizers had been inspired by the knowledge of F1 that I had demonstrated when narrating the annual FOCA (Formula One Constructors’ Association) video round-up for Bernie Ecclestone, who more or less owned the whole GP circus. Richard, who had known Bernie since he was only a millionaire, had rowed me in on the narration job before Bernie had a chance to find out that I couldn’t drive a golf cart. But I must have talked a good game. The Adelaide people clearly had no clue. Without bothering to disabuse them, we worked out a format where I would qualify for my road licence in England at the start of the programme so that I could move straight on to the racing-driver school in Adelaide, there to learn track technique along with the other celebrities, who had all been driving ordinary cars on the road ever since they were teenagers. It would be a good joke to watch me learning what they learned, provided I didn’t kill myself or anyone else when we zoomed around the speed bowl. But before I did any zooming in Adelaide, I would have to learn to drive an ordinary car in England, and the question arose of how we could make my driving lessons visually entertaining. Who would do the teaching? Richard, searching further into his contact bag, came up with the answer: Stirling Moss.