On the television front, the prospects were now looking good enough to raise the question of whether I could plausibly continue to be a TV critic much longer, lest I be faced with the awkward likelihood of having to review my own programmes. For LWT, Barry Cox asked me to write and present a documentary about Sydney. I didn’t do my part of it all that well. There was a lot of clunky walking around my childhood haunts while I droned on about the past. A sequence set in Luna Park had me pointing out that it was a funfair while the camera was showing it to be a funfair. I said that it was falling apart while the camera closed in to show that it was falling apart. But I quickly saw that I could have done better if I had talked about something else while the pictures were talking about themselves. Unfortunately Barry, when we got back to London with the footage, made the mistake of telling me that he thought me hopeless when talking to camera. I thought I was just bad, which is not quite the same thing. Another LWT executive producer, Richard Drewett, thought I was even worse than Barry said. But Drewett also thought that ways could be found to ensure that I would improve. I should hasten to say that Barry had probably taken the more responsible view. It is an expensive business, pouring in the resources while someone improves on air: a company can bankrupt itself while it waits for a few new presenters to come good. But Drewett was running an outfit called Special Programmes that was actually briefed to do the irresponsible thing. He had been given the job because he was a miracle man with the practicalities and a reliable inventor of high-yield formats: the first Parkinson series and the Audience With specials had both been his idea. If the unpredictable was required, he was the man to call on. A racing-car nut who had been put out of competition by a smashed foot, Drewett now slaked his craving for danger by building programmes around me. I sometimes had to be hosed out of the studio when things went sideways, but he got me into the salutary habit of sitting down with him after the programme and analysing exactly what had gone right or wrong. For quite a while the wrong outweighed the right. A meticulous producer called Nick Barratt was assigned to me for a short series of little clip-shows about television. I almost drove him nuts with my new and purely nervous habit of stopping dead in rehearsal when I fluffed a word. I chewed up time as if I was paying for it myself. In my defence I can say that the set might have been designed to make me as nervous as a trainee human cannonball. I had an egg-cup plastic chair into which I fitted like Humpty Dumpty, an impression added to by my excessive weight and the new, tailored three-piece suit that had been chosen to suit the set rather than my figure. But the show got better despite these drawbacks, and there was talk of a future one-hour version of the format, perhaps to be called Clive James on Television. I liked the sound of that.
Even in its short version, though, the show about television did something to offset the debacle of a series called A Question of Sex, which I fronted with Anna Raeburn, Fleet Street’s all-time most-presentable agony aunt. The two of us sat around – or, even worse, stood around, or, even worse than that, walked around – pontificating about the differences between the sexes, as established by various scientists, some of whom came walking on in white coats, threading their way along complicated paths between large styrofoam models of chromosomes marked X and Y. Various animals were wheeled on in cages, supposedly to demonstrate their different approaches, according to gender, to such tasks as ramming their heads against a rubber button in order to earn the peanut. Unfortunately some of the animals were apes and the only task they had in mind was screwing each other. Denied the opportunity to do this, they retired to the back corners of their cages and would not come forward even when threatened. Anna and I coped stoically, I thought, especially when compared with the senior executive, whose name I have finally succeeded in forgetting after years of hypnosis. He went berserk, shouting into the floor manager’s earphones and finally appearing in the studio so that he could shout at everybody. He did everything that the apes were supposed to do when excited. Finally the studio crew declined to go on. Since the apes had decided the same thing already, there was nothing left to do except wrap up the episode. Eventually, after much editing, a truncated version of the series got to air, where it was universally ignored. But I actually learned a lot from it. Apart from gaining confirmation for the basic principle of never working with a senior executive who has a more volatile artistic temperament than you, I started getting the measure of how to be an asset on studio day, rather than a liability. The show had a studio audience, and during the frequent pauses while the apes were being unsuccessfully persuaded out of their corners, or the scientists were being taught to walk and talk simultaneously without knocking the chromosomes over, or the senior executive was being put under sedation, I had an opportunity, indeed an obligation, to keep the people in the bleachers happy. In the course of time I got good enough at doing it to dispense with the services of a warm-up man. Although I hadn’t formulated it as a rule yet, here was an example of the importance of turning a disaster into a training ground. It’s only a variation of the Czech philosopher Martina Navratilova’s great central maxim that applies to all creative activities and not just to her own sport: What matters is not how well you play when you’re playing well, it’s how well you play when you’re playing badly. With those early shows for LWT, I got my average up.
The television shows were only in an embryo stage but they had the useful effect of getting me away from the Observer often enough so that I didn’t get bored with what was becoming, after ten years, a predictable weekly task. Perhaps the effect was deleterious: with fewer distractions I might have faced facts sooner. As things were, the nimbus granted me by Unreliable Memoirs made it easier to follow up any prospect that took my fancy, thus conferring a feeling of invulnerability which was potentially dangerous, had I but known it. Exactly the same feeling led Napoleon to invade Russia. He was pursuing one of his own sound principles – the army that never leaves its defences is bound to be defeated – but he pursued it too far. I was still well short of doing anything conspicuously crazy, but the descent to hell is easy. Not that it felt like hell when I teamed up with David Bailey to produce a series of illustrated profiles for Ritz magazine. Ritz proved to be short lived, partly because its owner and editor was a Willy Donaldson type who was always moving on, and who is now probably somewhere in the Andes, running an export agency for condor eggs. But the magazine’s quick demise was a pity, because it was the most convincing British example ever of a glossy magazine on newsprint – a form that otherwise only the French have ever mastered. Newsprint makes female glamour look more human and therefore, to my mind, even more glamorous. Bailey understood that – he is a very sharp character, behind his thuggish persona – and did some of his best photo shoots. One of them was of the young Meryl Streep, then in the early stage of her career.
Having spotted her on her way up and persuaded her to sit for her portrait, I ushered her into Bailey’s house in Chalk Farm and he asked, well within her hearing, ‘Ooze iss?’ Usually he could be depended on to be kidding when he said stuff like that but this time he wasn’t. Luckily she loved the idea of posing for someone who had never heard of her. The following week she received me for lunch at Claridge’s so that she could fulfil the written part of the portrait. For any actress, no matter how intelligent – and they don’t come any smarter than Meryl Streep – the pictures are always more important than the words. The last thing any actress needs is some hack speculating about her inner life. But this actress couldn’t have been more gracious. Highly literate as well as funny, she talked easily of modern English and Irish poets as well as of American ones. Well aware that I was dippy about her, she told lots of stories about her wonderful husband after she had ordered the sole, asking for it to be boned. Forever green about the finer points of life, I thought ‘boned’ meant with the bones left in, so I neglected to ask for the same thing, because I wanted them taken out. Still determined to play an indispensable part in the life of this angelically lovely and lyrically gifted person, I began
an anecdote designed to illustrate my poetically sensitive nature, an aesthetic responsiveness enhanced, rather than injured, by my easy familiarity with the literary world. By then I had discovered the bones in the sole, but I was operating on the assumption that I would be able to tease out enough of the flesh between them to provide a few bone-free mouthfuls so that I could talk safely while I ate. ‘And then,’ I said, ‘Lowell hauled this enormous manuscript out of his pocket and began to ark! Ark! Ngggh!’ A trident of needle-hard small bones had gone vertically into my palate. I had to reach in and pull them out individually. The next twenty minutes were agony until she insisted that I order something else and quit trying to be suave. I liked the way she did that.
I liked her too much, of course. As ever, the combination of beauty and talent reduced me to an idiot. Bailey, who was surrounded by celestially lovely women at all times, used to get a big bang out of seeing me bite the back of my hand. One evening I walked into Langan’s Brasserie for a business dinner and without warning I was confronted by the spectacle of Bailey lolling on a velvet banquette with Catherine Deneuve on one side of him and Marie Helvin on the other. It was such an assault on elementary justice that I closed my eyes with the pain. When I opened them again, Bailey was laughing his head off, a rusticated cherub with a bad shave. But it was another cockney photographer, Terence Donovan, who dug deeper into my psychology. Donovan was physically very big: six feet plus of judo-trained muscle packed into a Dougie Hayward grey suit, he made his drop-head dark-blue Rolls-Royce Corniche look like a pedal car. It was his delight to take me for rides around London while he wised me up on the realities of life in the spotlight. ‘Them upmarket birds are going to go on doing your head in,’ he announced, ‘until you realize that they’re just human. I mean, they do a poo every morning, don’t they? What you need is Paris.’ Donovan, a married man himself, was by no means impervious to the allure of a bright female. Not all of the models were dumb. There were several famous ones who were as bright as he was, and Donovan, though he had quit school early, was fully as clever as Bailey. But Donovan clearly had life in perspective, otherwise he would have turned into King Kong’s dangerous younger brother the first time he saw Tatiana Patitz with her clothes off. So I respected his opinion.
Donovan had directed a movie in Japan that had crashed in flames. Now he was eager to get started again by directing a television documentary. Drewett thought it would be a good idea if I should make a programme about the Paris cat-walk shows, because the material would be so attractive that I could spend most of my time in voice over, with no need of the dreaded ‘piece to camera’, a clumsy technique that he and I were agreed should be avoided by anyone, let alone me. Drewett took a punt when he assigned me to the job, but he took an even bigger punt when he hired Donovan to direct. Donovan had the entrée into the Paris fashion world, but he was easily bored, which is a dangerous characteristic in a film director, because there is a lot of humdrum detail that can’t be skimped. For the Clive James Paris Fashion Show, the first mainstream television programme ever devoted to the subject, Donovan invented a new kind of shot by which the camera was positioned at the end of the catwalk and the models were filmed walking towards a long lens. A long lens slows things down, so the models appear to float. The shot later became a staple and is now seen in every film or TV show about the catwalk ever made anywhere in the world, but I was there on the day Donovan thought of it. He was that original. Unfortunately he was also very impatient, and didn’t want to do the standard bread-and-butter shots of me arriving at the shows and leaving, or ringing the doorbell of Sonya Rykiel’s apartment and walking away afterwards, or, as he put it, ‘any of that’. In other words, he was out to make a film that couldn’t be edited. I was still too green to realize the importance of what Donovan was leaving out. But when Drewett heard about it he was on the next plane to Paris, where he revealed an unsuspected but impressive command of French. He needed only English, however, to tell Donovan what was what. I saw straight away that Drewett could do what I couldn’t. His hands were trembling; he didn’t actually enjoy speaking uncomfortable truths; but he did it. I decided right then that he was the man for me, and I hope it is not giving too much away if I say that he was the executive producer on every television programme I did for the next twenty years.
Donovan took his knackering well. He grumbled a bit but he got on with the business of doubling back to secure the dull stuff we couldn’t do without. And he was still unbeatable on the exciting stuff: the backstage sequence at the Lagerfeld show (now a legend in the television industry, because it was never allowed to happen again) was made possible by Donovan’s physical strength. He held off the security men while I sat there being filmed as the models went skidding by half naked. But Donovan still never managed to get a clapperboard on anything, so the van-load of unsynchronized film and audio tape that we sent back to London took about a year to sort out, leading directly to a senior editor’s death from a heart attack. I persisted, however, in thinking of Donovan as the model of sanity and good will. A few quirks aside, he walked and talked as if he had the secret of happiness. The day would come when he would take his own life, and I still can’t believe he did it. Dear man, he was so funny: one of the funniest talkers I have ever heard. And like all genuinely funny people, he was funny because he was perceptive. He had seen the look of longing in my eyes and he was right about the cure. In Paris I was bombarded by so much beauty that I finally learned to listen. Gradually it became apparent, from the flow of prattle, that a young woman of heavenly appearance was not necessarily Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morrisot just because she could paint her nails successfully. The great beauties are certainly works of art, but that doesn’t make them artists. The lovelier the woman, the less likely it is that she created herself: the genius belongs to nature, not to her. But it was still very satisfying when Donovan and I, taking a casual break for lunch between the chaos at Yves Saint Laurent and the riot at Thierry Mugler, strolled into the Coupole and sat down at the best table in the place: satisfactory because we had walked in arm in arm with Marie Helvin and Jerry Hall. There were a couple of British male gossip columnists at the next table and I saw one of them die. His body still ate, drank, talked, and eventually walked, but his soul was gone. I knew just how he felt, but I was over it. Well, almost.
While the Paris programme was in its long agony of being made ready for editing, I had so much going on that I might have forgotten it existed. But when all the miles of film and tape were finally synched up, a process began that I couldn’t, once I had tasted it, get enough of. Richard encouraged my presence in the editing room, which was still no more advanced than the one I had grown familiar with in my days at Granada. Younger readers will find it hard to realize that the footage could not be digitized and edited electronically. All the film and sound still had to be cut and spliced physically. But this time it wasn’t bits and pieces of a Hollywood movie: it was our movie, in its raw form. With alternative takes for almost every shot, there was an infinity of choice at war with a paucity of means. So it took hours in the editing room to put even the shortest sequence together. ‘If we can get that shot of me shambling down the boulevard to echo that shot of Jerry swaying down the catwalk at the Kenzo show, the audience might like the contrast.’ ‘Then we’ll have to get out of her shot a few frames earlier, before she starts to turn.’ Today, you could try the effect in thirty seconds. Then, you had to place the order and come back tomorrow. But when every tweak took so long to do, it had to be thought about hard. It was like the difference between handwriting and a word processor: there was more initial resistance from the medium, so you had to be definite. I got a lot of free tuition in the business of choosing which frame of film should go where and when. Thus I knew every foot of the rough cut when the time came to record the first draft of a commentary. It was a long, intricate, and enthralling business and it should have kept me sufficiently busy. Perhaps fatefully, however, there was enough time left over for another project. br />
The news media had been banging on for a year about the pending royal marriage. Most of the coverage was absurd but I was sufficiently in favour of constitutional monarchy as a political institution to contemplate a fourth mock epic, which would express, I hoped lightly, my views on the subject, while exploiting the comic potential as people lined up to bow, scrape, cluck and sniff. Still far too fond of giving my mock epics alliterative titles, I called the project Charles Charming’s Challenges on the Pathway to the Throne. I had, of course, no idea that the marriage itself would be one of the challenges. The piece seemed harmless enough as it grew, but it rapidly began growing too fast, like a pet baby crocodile. With illustrations once again by Mark Boxer, the poem became a newspaper serial, a book in Britain, a book in America, and then – the step into the unknown – a West End stage show. If the show had been on the small scale of the Pygge and Prykke pantomimes, danger might have been averted. Though radical acquaintances such as Christopher Hitchens would have given me the bird, the bird would have flown inside a charmed circle. But a team of impresarios moved in, and several backers, among them the erratically generous Naim Attalah, put up the money for a month’s run in a proper Shaftesbury Avenue theatre. The West End! Here was something to write home about. When I did write home about it, I assured my mother that her little boy still had his head screwed on. I had, but if I had shaken it I might have heard a rattle where the screw was working loose.