From The Sunday Times
October 11, 2009
The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years by Clive James

The Sunday Times review by Roland White

This is Clive James’s fifth volume of memoirs, which is one more book than Winston Churchill required to tackle the history of the English-speaking peoples from the Roman invasion to the first world war. And that’s not the only reason James’s book has a lot to live up to. John Carey, who knows a thing or two about these matters, named the first volume, Unreliable Memoirs, as one of the 20th century’s most enjoyable reads.
It is 20 years since I read Unreliable Memoirs, but one piece of comic writing is still vivid. One day, James and his boyhood friends joined their wooden carts together, and raced down a steep pavement. I can still picture the carts, and their surprised passengers as, one by one, they detached on a bend and went their separate ways. For anybody who can do that with a cart ride, the absurd world of television is easy pickings.

Here is the story so far. James has arrived in Britain from Australia and made his name as a writer and journalist. Most notably, he was the television critic for The Observer. Archeologists will no doubt prove one day that television critics existed before James, and that they treated their subject with great solemnity. James’s trick was to be as entertaining as television itself.
In 1982 he defected to the enemy, and The Blaze of Obscurity is essentially James the critic’s assessment of James the presenter. He doesn’t spare his own feelings.

This is the man, remember, who wrote that Arnold Schwarzenegger resembled “walnuts wrapped in a condom” and described Barbara Cartland’s make-up as “twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff”. “When I smiled on screen,” says James about James, “it was the silent agony of a man facing a sandstorm. My hair, thin on top, had to be cut close if my head were not to look like a hard-boiled egg being squeezed into an astrakhan glove”.

He began his presenting career on London Weekend Television, where he’d previously had a half-hour show called Clive James on Television (which introduced a British audience to a Japanese game show called Endurance). That programme not only extended to an hour on Sunday prime time, but also marked the beginning of a long partnership with Richard Drewett, a former Parkinson producer who took on the task of squeezing James the egghead into the astrakhan glove of television.

Read the full review at The Times online.