Former Observer TV critic defies cancer to wow an audience with wit and erudition
Clive James: typical mix of wit and Aussie exuberance. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris
Clive James blew into London on Saturday with a quiver full of highly polished barbs, of the kind he deployed when he was the Observer's celebrated TV critic. Billed as a high noon, it was mainly a shootout with imminent mortality. Not that you'd have known it. "Ah, well," he began, with the sardonic smile of the old trouper, "another farewell appearance."
Why was he doing it? "Like any red-blooded Australian male," he said, in a joke designed to resonate in his home country, "I'm doing it to impress [prime minister] Tony Abbott's daughters."
After that, fully up and running, he wowed his audience at the Australia and New Zealand literature festival in the Strand in much the same old way, with a mix of exuberance, show-off allusion, topical wisecracks and Aussie irreverence.
Few critics and poets (Clive James, the polymath, is both) could bring off a monologue which effortlessly referenced "that great philosopher Kirk Douglas", the Renaissance artist Uccello, Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, Game of Thrones, Pushkin, UA Fanthorpe, the pope, Japanese poetry, Jeffrey Archer and Meriam Ibrahim.
There was, inevitably, one big difference. The spirit of Clive James was as undimmed, and as witty as ever, but his tempo was rallentando, not rubato, conducted in a minor key of reflective and poignant sweetness.
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