Television
Monsters
Richard Ingrams
When I reviewed Clive James's dreadful book Unreliable Memoirs recently for the late lamented Books and Bookmen— what a gap the demise of that magazine has left in one's life — I expressed the pious hope that James should and could do better. I am afraid it was not to be. I was suitably appalled by ' his recent savage and quite uncalled for attack on J illy Cooper — 'the caved-in nose, the rotten skin and square boobs' — but was not prepared for the terrible transformation that has taken place in James, as revealed on Saturday's Parkinson. The fact is that God has decided to punish him by making his rubbishy book a best-seller with dreadful results for the man himself.
I said last week that I had to learn to live with the fact that I was now a terrible old bore with little to contribute. Well, all I can say is that at least I am not such a bore as James who 1 think is actually a few years my junior. For a start he has grown fat and jowly like Edward Heath with huge thighs that bulge out of his trousers. In every sense, physically and spiritually, he is full of himself; and all because of his beastly book, now, we learn, to become a film.
Following, I presume, a • triumphant round of chat shows he even comes, like Robert Morley, complete with well rehearsed anecdotes; anecdotes about his Australian childhood, his early sexual experiments, his national service, all of them long and none too pointful, all of them springing from a strongly rooted conviction that he, C. James, is a thoroughly famous, and fascinating fellow. All I can say is that the actor Donald Sinden, who followed as Parky's third guest, seemed like Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in comparison with the smug Antipodean. I was again reminded of an excellent remark that Kingsley Amis made recently about someone — who? — 'See him on Parkinson? Best place for him'. It would make a good epitaph for poor old James.
I had been hoping to catch Vanessa Redgrave doing her Auschwitz play on Sunday but after Watching Esther earlier in the evening felt unable to cope with any more atrocities. That's Life is supposed to be on the side of the angels because it exposes this, that and the other, but I wonder if the people responsible ever think it might be counter-productive. The last two programmes have latched rather strongly onto the Year of the Disabled, making what ought to be helpful suggestions e.g. why not a public telephone box that someone in a wheelchair can use? But I find that Esther is so frightful, so Jamesian in her self-righteousness, that I always begin to bridle. By the end of Sunday's programme I was feeling quite hostile towards disabled people. So what if the lavatory in the new Covent Garden complex is down three flights of stairs? Why can't disabled people make sure they go to the loo before they come out shopping? Unworthy thoughts, perhaps. But That's Life is presented with so • little real humour that one ends up thinking in this way. I am sure I am not the only one. Though possibly on second thoughts and with The History Man in mind it could be that I am again in a minority of one.
For some time I have been reading about something called The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, originally a radio programme, then, like Clive James, a best-selling book and now adapted for the television screen. Once again I found myself watching something allegedly hilarious and 'widely acclaimed' etc.etc,with a growing sense of bafflement. As far as I can make out it is a kind of comic Dr Who featuring two rather wet-looking men voyaging through space and meeting various monsters and grotesques along the way. I am afraid to say I didn't laugh once. I feel in any case that there are enough monsters on earth without searching the extra-terrestrial regions for examples. Could one imagine any more frightening creature than Esther Rantzen, complete with her three tame accolytes as a possible adversary for Dr Who? Could he encounter anything as nightmarish and grotesque as the outsize Clive James with his jowly shorn bonce, burbling on into the night with endless unfunny stories about himself?
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