North Face of Soho

Stratford-upon-Avon Civic Hall

There’s no doubt that Clive James is as good a talker as he is a writer - and he’s a brilliant writer - and as funny on his feet as he is on the printed page, which is a pretty good combination. Last Thursday evening (9th November) at the Civic Hall, he entertained a capacity audience for well over the allotted time of ninety minutes, which, according to James’ driver means he’s enjoying himself as much as the audience.

These so called ‘audiences’ are invariably little more than a showcase for a celebrity to sell a new and usually badly written book, which often results in a half-hearted, and lack-luster affair, where the celeb in question recounts all too familiar anecdotes, the veracity of which is often questionable. They are there, not to talk to and entertain an audience (who will have spent £15 - £18 on a ticket) but to fulfill the demands of a publisher’s contract.

Like the rest of them Clive James has a book to sell, but in this case it’s a rather good one called North Face of Soho, which is the fourth in his series of Unreliable Memoirs. And he got stuck into selling the thing from the start with an off-handed antipodean wit that could drag the required £17.99 out of the most scrooge-like of pockets. And let’s remember that James is a writer, so writing, and, when he gets the chance, selling books - his books - is what he does for a living. And you get the impression he has, and still does make a pretty good living.

A good living that was undoubtedly helped along by being one of the most familiar figures on our TV screens, interviewing the likes of Robert Mitchum and Richard Burton. That is until 2001 when mainstream TV (with the exception of becoming a ‘professional’ guest on just about every chat show going, and where, if the host loses the plot, he’ll ask himself questions) didn’t want his kind of literate and engaging shows any more. And as James made it clear on Thursday - after his documentary about Cuba was shelved by a 12 year old executive producer - it was the worst and the best thing that ever happened to him. He now hosts a chat show for Sky from his own living-room.

And you will see in this new and intimate chat show the irreverent wit and highly cultured base from which James has built his reputation over the last forty odd years; an irreverence and culture that was also the basis of his audience on Thursday, which dealt hilariously with everything from smoking, drinking, weight, sex and the balding man, a discourse on Australian culture, plus some wonderful readings from his new book, especially one about men’s fashions and the world of the 1970s…

” If, during the course of this volume, I refer to my mode of dress as if I looked outstanding, the reader should grasp in advance that standing out, in that period, was unusually hard to do. We all looked like that: or, at any rate, the younger men did. The Duke of Edinburgh never dressed to get attention. If he didn’t, why did we? It is a very hard thing to evoke an era. Pick up a notebook and a pen right now, stick your head outside the door, and command yourself to evoke your era. How, for example, would you capture your era’s atmosphere of squalid menace in public places? Where would you start? As the sixties slithered into the seventies, the streets were still almost incomparably safer than they are now, but the post-punk body-piercing hoodies of today look diffident, almost self-effacing, compared to the young males of that time. With few exceptions, we all looked more amazing than anything seen in Britain since the Restoration brought in horned wigs and stilt heels. You can’t really tell from photographs how universal the bizarrerie actually was, to the extent that nobody noticed because everybody was doing it…

” The fashion dictated long and thick sideboards to the hair, as if the head had been joined on each side by a small sofa deprived of its covering and tilted on end. There were velvet jackets, flared trousers, zip-sided boots. With the possible exception of the hair, all these elements entailed a lavish use of industrially generated materials, especially polyester. It meant that the average young male was carrying a greater proportion of artificial fabrics than an airliner’s interior…

” My own range of shirts included an electric blue number that made the unwary spectator’s eyes ache. As its proud owner, I thought it looked particularly good with a cravat. The cravats I favoured were of a chemically derived material printed with a paisley pattern…They sometimes delivered electric shocks when touched, but so did almost everything else I was wearing. When charged up by walking on the right kind of nylon carpet, I could be seen in the dark…”

Lovely stuff.

A good piece of advice Clive James gave on Thursday night is that would-be interviewers and chat show hosts must never ask a question of a guest and then answer it themselves, because, quite naturally, it leaves the interviewee nothing to say. Good basic advice that sadly - during the question and answer period toward the end of the evening - fell on the deaf ears of a well known local journalist who gave an embarrassing two minute answer to his own embarrassing five minute question. I shall read his next column with interest.

It was a super evening with some very thoughtful nonpcness that went to the humorous heart of things. I, along with my two old friends Lawrence and Byron, enjoyed it hugely.

Congratulations to Fiona, Claude, and the rest of the gang at the Civic Hall for getting Clive to Stratford.

If you want to see Clive’s new chat show from his own home click onto Clive James dot com.