Craft: Clive James Study #6 - TV Diarist

Not once did he lapse into a repetition of the unforgettable moment when he predicted that an athlete would shortly pull out the big one. He left that to Alan Weeks, who on the evening of the pairs figure-skating final duly delivered himself of a classic. ‘This might well be the night,’ mused Alan, ‘when Rodnina pulls everything out.’ Thereby confirming our suspicions about Russian female athletes. ("Unintelligibühl", 1976)

Early on in his career, Clive James attracted attention because of his sharp and very funny television criticism, typically presented as a diary column of his recent watching. The form allowed him to jump across stations and programmes with great freedom, and also to centre his criticism in terms of his own (however eratic) viewing patterns, crucial for James' comic style - a mix of light sarcasm and wit (classically, humour that comments as much as it produces laughter). The form of the diary permits James to make what are, after all, rather cursory and summary judgments of what he sees, just as tends to be the case when we watch television. (I know that, for this very reason, it is infuriating to watch TV with me.)

The big deal of the week was nude bathing at Brighton. The sky was the colour of washing-up water, the sea was the colour of what floats on top of washing-up water...

He was about a mile and half from the camera, but you could tell he had no pants on, unless some manufacturer has recently come up with a line of trunks in subdued shades of potato juice blotched with purple.

Somewhere in the middle of a marathon Agatha Christie mystery called Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (LWT) I had to go to Paris. Arriving in my hotel room just in time to switch on the American Grand Prix live from Long Beach, I watched the cars fall apart while the French equivalent of Murray Walker did his chose. But all the time a question was nagging me: Why didn’t they ask Evans?

 ("Nude Bathing in Britain", 1980)

Whatever Olivier had done to his front teeth left his long top lip curving downwards in a fulsome volute on each side, producing a ducky look to go with his quacky sound, since for reasons unknown he had chosen to use a speeded-up version of his Duke of Wellington voice. ("A Pound of Flash", 1974)

The last quote comes from James' viewing of Jonathan Miller's Merchant, which is perhaps given a firmer pounding than other shows because of its own underlying assumptions about being good. And, like good-for-you art, good-for-you politics is set for ridicule.

One of the leading characteristics of the not-quite-bright is their disastrous over-estimation of the role of intellect in political reality. This stricture applies full force to Women's Lib, which seems intent on supposing that unintelligent behaviour is an aberration, and that naught but a male chauvinist con­spiracy stops Miss Australia realising the desirability of being Germaine Greer. ("Liberating Miss World", 1972)

And, in fact, I like James' television writing best when he is, despite himself, liking something that isn't very good, perhaps because that's when I'm most happy in front of the TV.

A monarch operating within understood limits, Hadleigh (Yorkshire) is the perfect squire, paternalistically careful of his tenantry’s welfare, beloved in the village, respected in the council, savage with the stupid, gentle with the helpless, gorgeous in his hand-made threads. In the current series, which in my house is watched with a pretence of scornful detachment somewhat nullified by the size of the bribes offered our elder child to hit the sack before it starts. Hadleigh has taken to himself a wife, played by Hilary Dwyer – one of those leggy jobs with Botticelli shoulders and no bra. ("Squire Hadleigh", 1973)

At some point, no matter how smart you were, it became okay to like television, and not merely in an ironic way. But TV remains a site of scorn, maybe because, at the same time as it seduces and hypnotises, it also presents a total institution (to borrow Foucault) of absurdity.

Gallantly providing David with the appropriate provocation to eloquence, a condom-clad competitor got his skis crossed at 100 m.p.h. and rammed the snow with his helmet. ("Quite Slim Indeed", 1979)

Sex changes and organ transplants dominated the week. I gave the sex changes a miss, on the grounds that what’s right for some of us leaves others of us crossing and uncrossing our legs while whistling nervously. Organ transplants, however, are of vital interest to all. ("Donor Kebab", 1980)

The Nine O’Clock News (BBC1) featured a gung-ho American officer talking of ‘the capability to project Marines ashore in a hostile environment as the case may be.’ His name was Colonel Looney. On Nationwide (BBC1), Frank Bough interviewed the man who pulls the ugliest faces in Britain. His name was Ron Looney. I merely present these facts, without comment. ("Snow Job", 1981)

Sometimes, television criticism is just television description, and there's a skill in not commenting too much. James understood this when he made his own television show, predictably enough about television. But it's an understanding that also comes through in his travel writing, which is where I began these studies and where I eventually hope to return. Description is often comment enough, especially if your default mode is a rather sharp one.

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Clive James study #3: Back to Italy

Back to Italy, in a way. But more accurately, perhaps, to Italian film. My next Clive James study takes me first to Florence in 1963, when Clive James is sitting next to his future wife, watching Fellini's film 8½ for the first time. "Long before the lights went up on the stunned audience, everyone in it knew that this was a work to grow old with" (131). James, now writing in 1994 for the New Yorker, is bringing us up-to-date with the ageing process (reference below).


More specifically, though, he is revisiting the film's central theme of marital fidelity, and, at the end of the fifth of seven introductory paragraphs, ends with this: "Whether 8½ is really about Fellini is a question raised by the film itself - a question answered, in part, by the uncomfortable certitude of any married man who watches it that it is really about him. Men, we're all in this together. Fellini had us figured out."


1) The introduction closes with two paragraphs explaining Fellini's initial desire to make a film not about a film director but rather about l'homme moyen sensuel and the process by which the setting became the mondo del cinema "right up front working its charm" (133). A section break (a classic New Yorker section break) announces that we are about to learn more about the world of Italian cinema.


2) The world of Italian cinema in five paragraphs: Italy as the centre of film-making in the fifties and sixties; Italian cinema as being as important as Italian masters; the close world of collaboration; the comedies, which gave us "an education in just how comprehensive and satisfying a popular art form could be without ceasing to be either popular or artistic" (135); the postwar neo-realist cinema.

• James ends the second introductory section with this observation: "In short, the Italian cinema of those years was a lush field for someone to stand out from. Fellini did, head and shoulders." (135)
• I love the phrase "childishly hipped on their own anger", which to me stands out (head and shoulders).
• Note that by the end of the tenth paragraph we have two strands established: firstly, that Fellini's concerns about affairs are universal; secondly, that Fellini stood out, and did so in a period of intense artistic activity.

3) The film: 8½ as being at the core of Fellini's output; Fellini's use of the camera; improvisation and the use of amateur actors; Fellini's childhood and Saraghina; the "primitive" imagination - "The mind is the house of the Lord, and in the house of the Lord there are many mansions, and one of them is a honky-tonk" (139). 

• Note how the fourth paragraph in this section, beginning with "In a TV interview", marks a transition from film form to the content of the film, with James' observations about about Sandra Milo (who plays the mistress) leading to this: "If it was just the story of a man caught between wife and mistress and satisfied with neither, it would be La Dolce Vita. But 8½ isn't about the melodrama in the life of its protagonist; it's about the psychodrama in his mind." (137)
• It is this development towards psychodrama that allows James to relate the movie to the early impressions on Fellini's mind, and a light psychological analysis of the movie itself. (In terms of the last part of the essay, establishing the inner subject of the film will be used as evidence of the film's enduring importance.)

4) The film (part 2): the "interior imbroglio" is the real subject of 8½: all that Guido wants is "all the women in the world" (139), including Claudia Cardinale, who "triggers Guido's mixed vision of carnal purity" (140); Guido's poor-taste mind. 

• More memorable phrases. Of Cardinale: "Dante's Beatrice on the cover of Vogue. Petrarch's Laura with an agent" (140). 
• The section ends with Guido being recast as a monster: "It is a clear confession, on Guido's part, that his sexual imagination is an unrealizable, incurably adolescent fantasy of banal variety and impotent control." (141) This is a central sentence in developing the point made by the essay as a whole, and a key transition point in its shift from film to film-maker (and from film-maker to audience).

5) I.e., "Just as clearly, it is Fellini's confession too" (141): Fellini's marriage to Giulietta Masina; Fellini and feminism; feminism in Italy; Fellini "was saying that men should be held responsible for what they did, not for how they felt" (143), as actions can be given their proper name; the role of Guido's wife, Luisa, in 8½.

• By now, the transition points between film and the world "around" the film are so well established that James can move back and forward between without much sign-posting: he can write about Luisa/Masina and Guido/Fellini as thought they are all real and all part of the same textual universe, one which we as viewers are able to join.

6) Fellini's oeuvre and standing as a director: in the order that James discusses them, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, Roma, La Dolce Vita, Amarcord, Casanova, La Città delle Donne, E la Nave Va, and Ginger and Fred.

• It seems an unusual move to put this fairly long exposition at the end of the essay, and one could debate whether it really carries the theme of the essay or merely allows James to enjoy his (admittedly very analytical) viewing history in detail. In favour of the section is the fact that it brings us closer to James, which in this case is important given James' arguments about the universality (or, male universality) of the inner drama of 8½ and what that means for the standing of the film. 

7) The relative lack of depth in Hollywood, and the problem in forgetting about the directors of the fifties and sixties: "Fellini's is the tragic view of life, the gift of the old countries to the new ones where people think their life is over if they are not happy." (150)

• Again, I'm not sure the essay doesn't become a little too wide-ranging at this point. I first read the essay in 2003, and it's the link that James established between Fellini, Guido, and himself that has remained in my memory. Re-reading, I am surprised to find that discussion "hipped" on a slight grumpiness about modern films.

But this, after all, is an essay called "Mondo Fellini" and not "Fellini, Fidelity, and Fantasy", and my doubts about the structure of the closing sections probably misses the point, which is that a New Yorker article is always more than a study: it is an angle. In this case, the angle has been widened because of the time that has passed between the essay and its subject matter. Perhaps essays, like girths, stretch with the years.

Source:

James, Clive. "Mondo Fellini." In Even As We Speak: New Essays 1993-2001. London: Picador, 2003. 130-151. (First published in The New Yorker 21 March 1994, 154 - available here.)

The Benefits of Content

The first part of An African Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby was screened on ABC television last night, and comes as a second television travel story to delight (Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine's Last Chance to See has also been screening recently, and also on the ABC). What the programmes share is actual content: interviews, background information, research, and insights into local cultures and environments.

I know I sound old-fashioned when I say that content seems an increasingly rare element in television. But sometimes, when a show delivers more than personality (although this is not missing in either show), you really notice what we normally go without.

And, in the context of travel writing, I think we have to be told about what's going on. Without exposition and analysis, we remain on the surface of the images that we're being shown, a surface that quickly becomes unreliable if it isn't contextualized.

Travel Diary 12 July 2010

I am writing this on the train to Leeds, where I am presenting a paper at the International Medieval Congress, this year is on the theme of travel in the Middle Ages. As a boy, when I used to travel along this line to visit relatives in Doncaster, you knew you were in Yorkshire when you smelt coal. Those days are long past, and we whistle past a smokeless, green landscape.

This morning, I spent the last few hours of my flight listening to Bach concertos and watching the protracted dawn of the flight from east to west. The slow sunrise was at its most magnificent as we flew over Russia, but I also got a thrill when our flight path took us past Malmo and the southern Swedish coastline of Dag Hammarskjold's summer holidays. I glimpsed the beaches through a low cloud ridged like a glacier. The beach, the ocean, and the ice seemingly always co-present in Scandinavia, even in mid-summer.

The in-flight entertainment included a two-part travel programme by Kevin McLoud, the presenter of the British show Grand Designs - a favourite of mine (Slumming It, Channel 4). He transposed the format of the Grand Designs show onto experiences of the Mumbai slums, and Dharavi in particular - where he lived for a week - with mixed success.


In Grand Designs, McLeod usually holds out reservations about a build until the last few minutes of the show, when he generally comes around to the design, or at least tries to meet it half way. The opening (and supposedly flawed) premise of the Mumbai show was that architects (and Prince Charles) think that the slums in Dharavi have a sense of community now lost in the developed world. McLoud, as usual, began by expressing reservations. But while he did like aspects of the slums - indeed, the community feeling he had come to find - he never really managed to meet the English architectural community half-way; the dirt and hardships of the slums affected him too deeply. His horror at what he saw dominated his account, and so the programme became hostage to his disgust.


I hope I can be permitted a little boast, even after I have been harsh about Slumming It. Last week I won a Dean's teaching award for my work in my three Creative Writing subjects, a very satisfying moment for me after a big semester of teaching. Here I am accepting the award from the Dean, Sue Street, and the Assistant-Dean of teaching and learning for the Faculty, Christina Hong-Joe:

Next stop, Leeds.

Letting people speak for themselves

Another suggestion from Martin Duwell, this time a television review by the relentless and merciless A A Gill, which includes:

Indian Hill Railways could be in my top-10 list of programmes I’d lose an eye not to have to watch. The romance of steam completely passed me by. I’m a locophobic. All that Betjemanesque whimsy for branch lines and unmanned halts is simply ghastly. I can just remember steam trains for real. They were filthy and they stank. It’s a bit of Englishness I find as embarrassing as it is dull. Neither can I abide the soft nostalgia for the Raj — that imposed reverie of happy hot days playing at empire. So the combination of old India and Tariq the Tank Engine is deeply unpalatable. All it was missing was Michael Palin.

I began watching with a grim resistance, but it sort of crept up on me with observance and careful charm. The railway was a linear motif that chuntered its way through the stories of the people who work around it. It became a chance to look at lives with a care and tenderness rare in documentaries about foreigners. We tend to the anthropological, comic or sentimental when filming abroad. This was oddly old-fashioned, like Grierson or early Lindsay Anderson. It was a programme that began with what all socialist documentaries used to begin with: a respect for the dignity of lives that run uphill.

I was as much touched by the way it was made, and the assumptions about people, and the role and purpose of the television eye, as I was by the subject. Most television documentaries try to elicit empathy for or inquisitiveness about individuals. They rarely attempt to use the individual as a candle to illuminate the human condition. This was well done, not least because it was so unexpected.

The final observation resonates with William Dalrymple's aims in Nine Lives, that is, with the desire to ease the narrator or "eye" out of the frame, and so let the subjects of the piece emerge in their own right and on their own terms. I am also reminded of a much earlier work, William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, which too had the knack of letting people speak for themselves. Like Dalrymple, Heat Moon was in the mood for listening.

Source: A A Gill. "All the better to eat you with, my dear." The Sunday Times 28 March 2010.

African Ghosts

My friend Martin Duwell put me onto a lovely review of Joanna Lumley's "Nile" show. Look out for "Abdul thought she was joking, but we all know better". Wonderful, grand-motherly timing by Nancy Banks-Smith.

And this piece, I believe, I came across through Benjamin Law, senior writer for Frankie magazine and tutor at QUT: "Either/Or" by Ariel Levy in The New Yorker--very much one for lovers of the paragraph.