With all of us in the editing room simultaneously lost in thought and yelling with disbelief, we watched through to the end of the reel, after which we decided that there was about five minutes of sure-fire material distributed amongst the chaos. Even then, what we chose had to be further edited so as to make sense as separate clips. It would be a large, long, finicky task to bring a few shaped moments out of the mayhem, but our producers immediately sent the orders to Tokyo to keep the stuff coming. Back in his office, Richard asked how I would handle the commentary. He was understandably worried about the racism angle. I said what I still believe today, that there was no question of racism. It was a question of culture, and what we were seeing was a cultural nightmare being turned into a playground before our eyes. Japan, after all, was a successful nation – rather more successful than Britain, if the truth be told – and to overdo the respect for the supposed unfortunates would be to belittle them. Besides (this was my clincher), if the Japanese themselves thought they were being funny, why couldn’t we agree?
So I got the green light. It was a crucial decision on Richard’s part, and it sharply demonstrated the weight of the heaviest can any executive producer has to carry, because with this new kind of programme the moral issue would never go away. To condense my account of how we treated a dilemma that would extend into the years to come, let me say now that our biggest problem was Africa. Egypt was tough enough. Egyptian soap operas were so awful that you looked as if you were calling into question the intelligence of an entire population simply by screening them. There was one Egyptian light-entertainment programme based on practical jokes, in which the capering and winking star turn would plant a ticking suitcase in a railway station and they would film the panic when the commuters thought it might be a bomb. At the time this seemed too ridiculous to be harmful, so we screened it. But the real problems started further south. In the sub-Saharan countries, local television featured some wonderfully clumsy commercials. Quiz contestants competed for a packet of biscuits. The current-affairs programmes consisted almost entirely of politicians sitting facing each other in armchairs, doing nothing except getting filmed. We decided that it would look patronizing to screen this stuff, so we didn’t. Underdeveloped television was no fun if it came from underdeveloped countries. For as long as I headlined the programme, that was the principle we stuck to. Critics never ceased to sum up my attitude as knowingly parochial, but that was because most critics, like most journalists of any kind, would rather change gender than change a story. To anyone capable of objective judgement, it was obvious that we were bending over backwards to be fair. When in doubt, we left it out, and we didn’t need theories of imperialism to tell us to do so: a sense of common humanity was enough to do the trick.
But the constant awareness that we were on the lip of an ethical precipice proved nerve-racking, and eventually racked nerves wear you out more thoroughly than taxed muscles. The constant work of editing for impact was comparatively less tiresome. It had to be done, though, and with unrelenting concentration. You couldn’t just shove stuff on the air because it was generally funny. The footage you screened had to be specifically so. A good example was the cinematic oeuvre of the renowned American director Ed Wood, who had spent a dedicated career fighting the closely connected handicaps of insufficient finance and a total absence of gift. We were the first to screen Ed Wood’s movies for a television audience, and no other programme but ours ever managed to screen them successfully, because the awkward truth about Wood’s justly celebrated lack of talent was that it peaked only intermittently. His masterpiece Plan 9 from Outer Space was merely boring if you looked at the whole thing, or even at any long sequence. He had never, in his whole career, got anything right, but the bits that were hilariously wrong were heavily wrapped in mere tedium, and had to be picked out and mounted lovingly for inspection, like treasure from a dump. I liked to think that my intervening commentary gave Ed Wood some of the brio which he had mistakenly assumed was his hallmark.
What was true for Ed Wood was true for almost everything else we screened. Editing is an essentially poetic process akin to compressing carbon until you get diamonds. In our case we were compressing dross to get zircons, but that made the job even more difficult. It was nothing, though, compared to the effort of watching fifty hopeless African current-affairs programmes and deciding you couldn’t screen anything. The waste of time was so pure that it ached. With the Japanese game shows, however, we were in heaven, and precisely because all the participants were having such a ball being in hell.
When our first programme to feature excerpts from Endurance went to air in the new Sunday night prime-time format, the audience consolidated immediately at ten million plus. In my previous volume of memoirs I recounted how I had a local-area cult hit with my riffs about the South American killer bees in the disastrous disaster movie The Swarm, but the Japanese cockroaches were a success of a different order. This time the notoriety was on a national scale – I got an offer of marriage from a man in the Shetlands – and I had very little time to learn how it might be handled. The first thing I learned was that it can’t: not beyond a certain point, which is placed very low down on the rising scale to insanity. If everyone in the country recognizes your face, your only hope of normality is to find another country where they don’t, but you might be too late. When Elton John first stood on the Great Wall of China, he told the attendant British press pack – trailing him around the earth as if he were a more tractable version of royalty – that it was a relief to be somewhere where a thousand million people didn’t know him from Adam. But he was almost certainly bluffing. Poor sap, he had already got to where it felt strange when someone didn’t know who he was. I already had a mild sense of that before I left on my next foreign assignment. Kenya was bigger than Britain but blessedly had slightly fewer people in it, and very few of those had seen me explicating on screen the motivation of a bunch of Japanese adolescents as they roasted each other over a bed of embers while their testicles were being colonized by starving maggots.
3. WHITE KNUCKLES OF AFRICA
The Kenya show was to be a documentary special called Clive James on Safari. From now on, in this book, I will try to leave my name out of the title of the shows, thus to circumvent the twin fears of wasting space and sounding more than necessarily like a self-glorifying pantaloon. But you can take it for granted that every programme I made for the next couple of decades, whether in the studio or on location, had my name in the title somewhere. Neither I nor my agent ever pressed for this. My agent, Norman North at A. D. Peters, looked very young in those days and remarkably he retains his keen, lean appearance to this day. Some people have access to the fountain of youth. Norman also had access to the fountain of wisdom, and would have scotched the use of my name in the title if he had thought it would be counterproductive. But Richard had no trouble convincing him, and indeed me, that we might as well use what cachet my name had already built up, and try to increase it. ‘Never trust anybody with two first names’ was a maxim of mine that I tried to make current until I realized it applied to me. (If you start a list in your own mind, don’t forget Bruce Willis and Victor Hugo.) But if the public does trust someone’s name for something, the name becomes what the PR people call a Brand. The only drawback is that its possessor has to live up to it. My Postcard travel articles for the Observer had established a reputation for a certain kind of eager curiosity that started out clueless but came back with what at least sounded like a reasonable set of opinions. This threatened to be harder to achieve on film, where the temptation to clown it up could easily make the cluelessness look like a pose.
Nevertheless, though still devoted to the ideal of evoking a picture with a few words, I was attracted by the prospect of combining a real picture with even fewer. In an Observer Postcard about Jerusalem, I had given a faithful report of what it was like for an overweight man to take a running dive into the Dead Sea and find himself lying on top of it, having failed to submerge or even scratch
the surface. But at the time I wrote the paragraph I was already thinking that to actually show this happening would have left a chance to say something extra and more interesting at the very moment when the audience was absorbing the mixed signals about the state of my body. I could have been talking about the state of Israel. There would be opportunities to get more said, with a blend of expression like the texture of a song, in which the words and the music reinforce each other. I was thinking this again when we landed in Nairobi and ran full tilt into the comfortable remnants of the old white empire as they clung on to the last of their privileges among the poverty-stricken shambles of the new black state. The slums teemed. Presumably the natives out in the hinterland were leading more dignified lives. Meanwhile the whites in or near town were still taking tea, hitting the bottle and betting on the horses. The British upper crust are never more dauntingly self-assured than when presiding over the wreckage of the superseded order. This lot looked as if they had all once regarded Princess Margaret as a dangerous radical. The worst I can say about my young producer, Helen Fraser, is that she looked as if she would fit right in. When she stepped off the plane, it was as if the Baroness Blixen had returned. Pretty, elegant and well spoken, she immediately had the local beau monde eating out of her finely manicured hand. They loved her.
She found it harder to love them. Partly it was a generation thing: nice girls like her nowadays had real jobs, whereas the old colonial set-up would have condemned them to come out to places like this and help their husbands lord it over the benighted. But largely it was a difference in behavioural evolution: she wasn’t a snob, and this lot were. All the great names of the White Mischief era still drew their expected plenitude of mutual respect. The men, especially, seemed to like each other better than ever, just because their immediate ancestors had led the life in which there was nothing to do with the day except screw each other’s wives when not hanging around the clubs that had been built to keep the natives out. Let me hasten to say that there had once been something to admire about British rule in Kenya, even though the Mau Mau might not have agreed. Compared to, say, Belgian rule in the Congo, British rule had been benevolent, and precisely because the landowners and the administrative class put more time into living well than into belting the locals. Certainly there are plenty of locals today who wouldn’t mind having their erstwhile oppressors back on the case, at least to the extent of running the courts of justice. When I arrived, the white pecking order was still in full swing even though the system it had once imposed was long gone. It seemed to occur to few of its drawling members that the privileged life they still possessed was an historical anomaly, tainted as it was by the misery leaking in from all around them. Again, the misery could have been worse, but the slums were hard to ignore even if you drove around them in a Land Rover. Helen’s principal weapon against the plummy accents was a raised eyebrow. They didn’t notice. Tomorrow the horses would be racing and the gentry looked forward to meeting us there.
Waiting for that big day, we took the camera to dinner at a restaurant serving nothing but African game of every type and stripe. Hugely heaped plates of grilled and roasted meat were served. Everything was uniformly inedible, and not just because the original animal had never been designed to be eaten by humans in the first place. The topkapi, or whatever it was called, probably tasted like a whoopee cushion no matter what you did with it, but this bunch couldn’t even bring a tender touch to some form of gazelle that they billed as the most succulent dish south of the Sahara. You would have been better off chewing an anorak. The probable cause was that the cooks had no means of preparing anything except to leave it in the fire until its last drop of moisture evaporated. Over more than a quarter of a century of world travel I was eventually to formulate the rule that in any country blessed with an abundance of prime-quality meat roaming around in unprocessed form, nobody knows how to cook it. To make anything taste good, you have to freeze it, load it on to a ship and send it to France. While Helen laughed at my increasingly desperate expression – she had the rare gift of laughing at your face without laughing in your face, I was glad to note – our camera caught the scene, which was densely populated by the younger generation of the local whites out for their idea of a dangerously exotic night. Surely the racing horses of tomorrow would be more interesting. At least they would not be cooked.
A day at the races unfolded like a message from God that we had better get out of Nairobi pronto or we would never get to Kenya. Unless you film it from space, a horse race in Africa looks exactly like a horse race at Ascot, especially when the white women present are dressed for the Queen’s Garden Party. The white male elders stood around in tight groups, still discussing whether it had really been Jock Delves Broughton who had shot the Earl of Erroll. It was a wonder that they hadn’t shot each other, if a day like this had been the principal alternative to peeling the silk knickers off the expatriate vamps.
Next day, before we took off for the wilds, I had another message from on high. Out on my own wandering in the slums, I found a tiny street stall selling exactly one miniature rhinoceros carved out of wood. I presumed from its singularity that it was a rare artefact, and certainly it was accurately carved: nothing about it was not like a rhinoceros except its size. The stall owner, whose refined Nilotic features suggested that he might be a connoisseur dealing only in palace-quality bibelots with which he himself could hardly bear to part, assured me it was ‘Rare, very rare.’ It would be welcomed in my family home, where my daughters were still young enough to look on miniature animals with favour, and my wife had an eye for sculpture. So I bought the thing from the impassive vendor. He remained impassive at the sheaf of notes I proffered, so I doubled it into a bundle. Eventually he smiled, while shaking his head, presumably taking pity on the condition of a world in which a true work of art could be valued in terms of mere money. Michelangelo probably felt the same when he handed over his finished statue of David.
You can guess what happened next. A hundred yards further on, I wandered into a kind of indoor bazaar – half souk, half swamp – which in turn opened up into a long, low factory. Lining the walls of the factory was shelf upon shelf stacked with thousands of copies of my carved rhinoceros. Shaking and roaring on the floor of the factory, a machine the size of a Fleet Street printing press was turning out carved rhinoceroses which were touched by human hand only when a team of women loaders and stackers lifted them off the belt and found a place for them on the groaning shelves. I thought of running back to the hotel to tell the crew that I had stumbled on a great story about the Kenyan economy, but the deeper message had already hit me. The real rhinoceroses, or rhinoceri, were out there waiting.
Our light aircraft dropped out of the sky in the Mara country, where we were met at the grass-strip airport by Denis Zaphiro, our guide for the safari. Denis, last of the Great White Hunters, was now a Great White Guide, a condition he preferred, because he had never really liked killing animals. He especially hadn’t liked the kind of people who do like killing them. I presumed that he had made an exception in the case of Ernest Hemingway, whom he had accompanied on his last safari, the one that had culminated in the plane crash that had finally reduced Papa’s lethal urge to a glimmer. Until then, the Great White Writer had put a lot of time, effort and overblown prose into seeking out at least one of every animal that breathed and making sure that its head ended up on a wall of his house in Cuba. That had to have been interesting and I looked forward to getting the story, but meanwhile we were faced with the challenge of getting Denis to act.
When it comes to documentary television, ‘challenge’ is a bad word, just as ‘time was running out’ is a bad sentence. (‘We had not yet met our challenge and time was running out’ is an even worse sentence.) But this really was a challenge, and time really was running out, because soon the sun would be in the wrong part of the sky and we would have to reposition the aircraft in order to do the whole thing again. The thing we had to do seemed simple at first blush. Tho
ugh Denis was old enough to be my father, he was still in good shape: flat stomach, loping stride, hawk-like features, the works. He even had the mandatory cut-glass voice, ideal for making polite suggestions in either English or Swahili. He was also very clever. In his lightweight khaki safari outfit and bush hat, he looked and sounded better qualified than Stewart Granger playing roughly the same role in King Solomon’s Mines. But Denis was no actor. Hardly anybody with an authentic personality is, but Denis was an extreme case of not being an actor. His challenge, after I got back alone into the passenger compartment of the aircraft, was to stride towards it while our crew, who had all got out of it, filmed him coming up to me as I stepped down.
He wasn’t too bad at the walking bit. He got it right on about the tenth take, after the standard nine different takes of the non-actor’s walk. Suddenly rendered self-conscious, the non-actor, when asked to walk for the camera, fatally starts to think about how walking is done, so he has to go through every variation of moving the legs and arms in the wrong combination. Since there are many more than nine combinations, Denis had done that part quite well. But he also had a line to say. ‘Well, Clive, you’re finally here. Welcome to the real Africa.’ He had to do this in a medium close-up while the rifle microphone was aimed from off-camera at his tanned and distinguished face. A rifle microphone will throw anyone who hasn’t seen one before, even when he has been carrying a real rifle all his life. ‘Well, James, you . . .’ Cut. Helen moved in to explain to Denis how we were taking for granted that he and I had already become acquainted on the telephone, and that he would therefore address me by my first name. Denis apologized profusely, saying that he had already known that but he had forgotten. Take two. ‘Well, Clive James, you . . .’ Cut. ‘Sorry, sorry. But I got the “Clive” in that time. Let’s do it again. I’m ready. Sorry.’ Denis did it again. ‘Well, Clive, we’re really in Africa. Welcome to here, finally. Oh God.’ The sun was charging across the sky. Time was running out. Soon we would have to reposition the aircraft and not just the camera. But Denis finally met the challenge. He was that kind of guy, and I already knew that I could bet on him not to abandon me when the rhino charged: the real rhino, very large and definitely not carved from wood.