Even though I am, of course, a brilliant television critic here’s something I promise I’ll never do. Never in the future, no matter how desperate I am for material nor how vain I have become, will I write an autobiography which sets out to analyse what it is that makes me such a great critic or wonders aloud just how it is I come to write such choice phrases. In fact I’ll scarcely touch on the business of churning out journalism at all — not the process, not the personalities of the editors, not the ups and downs of contracts, not any of these things because frankly, even as a journalist, I find this sort of detail dull beyond measure, so what an actual non-journalist would make of it God only knows.
Clive James, though, clearly is not of this persuasion because in the fourth (!) volume of his memoirs he does all of the above — and how! And what I kept asking myself as I ploughed on through his anecdotage and carefully worked phrase-making was: is it a generational thing or is it a Clive James thing? A bit of both, I decided.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.