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Meeting Myself Coming Back; Archive On 4
Topic Started: Jun 21 2012, 12:43 PM (203 Views)
becky sharp
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This coming Saturday at 8pm

Clive James was seldom off our television screens in the 80s and 90s. His shows like "Saturday Night Clive" and "Clive James on Television", featured clips of TV around the world and pioneered many techniques that we take for granted today.

But throughout this time, he was also writing memoirs, poems and critical essays. After leaving his native Australia, he began his career writing for literary magazines and later became the TV critic of "The Observer".

This more serious side has often been overlooked because of his TV fame. But, having left TV presenting behind and now having been diagnosed with leukaemia, Clive is re-assessing his life and legacy.

In "Meeting Myself Coming Back", Clive hears clips from moments in his life and discusses his reaction to them with John Wilson. We hear a recording from his student days in Cambridge performing a comic monologue at a college "Smoker" event. There are clips from early appearances on radio, in the company of the novelist Kingsley Amis and also his first attempts at writing and performing on television.

We also hear extracts from his TV shows of the 80s and 90s, when, in addition to his shows about television, he presented travel programmes and a series considering the nature and history of fame in the 20th century.

In an honest and penetrating look back at his life, Clive discusses his achievements, his past mistakes and his illness.




http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01k1ls1


Michael Deacon on Twitter this morning

‏@MichaelPDeacon

I've just spoken to Clive James by email and he'd like to reassure everyone that he's in "reasonable shape and keen to go on writing"
Edited by becky sharp, Jun 21 2012, 12:43 PM.
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dai Cottomy
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Clive's perceptive and acerbic crits of TV programmes appear in the Review section of the Saturday Telegraph.
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rumbaba
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I haven't really paid much attention to Clive James for years. I used to sort of like him but he could be a bit irritating. I remember his TV reviews in the Observer years ago, which were useless if you wanted to know something about the programmes he was reviewing and sometimes he didn't even bother to spell out which programme he was referring to. He could be a bit of a smug smartarse, carried away by the 'brilliance' of his own wit. My dad used to always say that writing about what was on TV last night was a job for a junior reporter but he made it his own and set a bit of a trend. Like a lot of critics, who like to dish it out, he was quite thin-skinned when anybody had a pop at him. He wrote 'an epic poem' about Prince Charles in 1981 called 'Charles Charming's Challenges on the Pathway to the Throne', which was a dreadful piece of doggerel and I remember he got quite shirty when someone gave it a less than favourable review. He was involved in a lot of rubbishy popular TV, which I never understood for somebody so smart - I guess money. That said, I wish him well for the time he has left.
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becky sharp
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rumbaba
Jun 25 2012, 12:53 PM
That said,
<laugh> <laugh>
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rumbaba
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I'm not sure that came out quite as I intended :)
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