News has arrived today of the death of Clive James, the great Australian poet, author, critic and television poet. It was my good fortune to see him perform and to interview him. Here’s that interview, which was originally published in The Sunday Mail in August 2007.

CLIVE James has found the secret to immortality, and it’s called the internet.

James, the celebrated expatriate Australian television host, documentary-maker, raconteur and author is building a vast online archive of his work that, he hopes, will live on after him.

The site, clivejames.com, contains not just his own writings but those of distinguished guests, including film-maker Bruce Beresford, newspaper columnist Zoe Williams and critic Bryan Appleyard.

And, suitably for a man who was a fixture on the small screen until his semi-retirement in 2001, there is a growing number of video interviews which James describes as “little television shows made right here in my living room”.

They feature James sitting on a couch talking to the likes of film-maker Terry Gilliam, writer-director Jonathan Miller, actors Cate Blanchett and Simon Callow, cultural commentator P.J. O’Rourke, poet Peter Porter and comic Ruby Wax.

“People would rather wander into my apartment and sit down and talk for half an hour than they would go to a studio,” James, 67, explains.

“All studios are like big concrete bunkers and full of fuss, and dressing rooms full of fruit, and all the nonsense and hours of makeup and hours of waiting,

“Here the guests can walk straight in, talk to me for a while, and then we’ll sit down and have a takeaway Chinese meal.”

The other benefit of making shows at home is that it frees up valuable time for James to pursue his many other interests.

“When I was working full-time in television, I’d spend a whole week in the office just to get every half-hour on the air,” he says. “It got to the point where there were things I wanted to do and, unless I retired from mainstream television, I wasn’t going to do them.”

Chief among those things was writing another book to add to his already substantial catalogue of autobiographies, poetic works, novels and volumes of criticism. This is not just any book but the mother of all Clive James books — a huge tome about everything called Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts.

It is the product of five years of research and writing, and he’s extremely proud of it.

“The best I can do is in the book,” he says. “I really can’t do better than this book.”

And so it’s the book that is bringing him back to Australia, for an extensive series of live performances billed as Clive James: Out on His Own.

The stage shows — where he promises to “carry my book on stage and then spend two hours failing to refer to it as I talk about everything else” — illustrate the versatility of the man who, by his own admission, has become a brand in his own right.

Asked how he describes himself, he says: “I’m really just a writer, and I’m writing in as many fields as I possibly can. Even when I’m on stage I’m writing it in my head before I say it.”

In today’s image-conscious world it’s hard to imagine that the bald, avuncular and well-read Australian ever got on to TV in the first place.

“That was a tribute to the imagination of the people who first employed me,” says James, who came to prominence in Britain as the TV critic for the Observer newspaper.

James went on to create the series of chat-panel-variety programs which first brought the Western world glimpses of the now infamous Japanese game show Endurance and introduced us to oddball characters like Cuban novelty singer Margarita Pracatan.

The constant threads have been James’s laconic presentation style, sharp wit, highly tuned powers of observation and lyrical way with words.

That’s the style he will bring to stage during his live show.

I spoke to Jerry Stiller on the phone early one morning, Australian time. A couple of hours later, when I was at the office, I received a call from the publicist who arranged the interview. “Brett, what did you say to Jerry Stiller?” I was immediately on the back foot, “Nothing, why? What’s wrong?” She replied: “He just told me it was the best interview he’d ever done.” In retrospect, I think it was because, while I knew people wanted to know about his famous son, Ben, I showed Jerry some respect for his own achievements. We spoke a lot about his early career because I was generally interested in that. Of course, Ben was hot back then, so the story for the Sunday Mail (published November 8, 2007) had to reflect the readers’ interests more than mine.

WHEN Hollywood superstar Ben Stiller was 14, he came up to his father, Jerry, with a very serious look on his face.

“He said, `Dad, I’d like to recite to you the parts of the body in Latin’,” says Stiller Sr (pictured). “And he did just that.”

It was the only hint, ever, that Ben — now the star of blockbusters including Reality Bites, Zoolander, Meet the Fockers and Night at the Museum — might not follow his parents into showbiz.

Jerry admits there were times he wished his son hadn’t wanted to become an actor.

“This is a tough business,” says the veteran star, who has enjoyed the highs and lows of a 60-year career. “Who would put their kids into it?”

But at the same time, it was Jerry who gave Ben a Super 8 camera when he was a teenager, allowing him and his sister Amy to make their own films — including a mini disaster epic.

“When I did Airport ’75, they did their own version,” Jerry says. “It took place in a bathtub. Amy made a paper plane and she set fire to it with matches, while Ben became (Airport ’75 star) Charlton Heston.”

Ben went on to appear in the musical Cabaret at high school, and a career in showbiz was inevitable.

Jerry says he and his wife Anne Meara were encouraging, but both Ben and Amy made it on their own.

While Stiller and Meara made it big as a comedy double act in the 1960s — including a record-breaking 36 appearances on TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show — Jerry’s now in the midst of a late-in-life career revival.

It began when he was cast as Frank Costanza, father of George (Jason Alexander), on the mega-sitcom Seinfeld, and continued with a nine-year stint on The King of Queens.

This year, he’s appeared on the big screen in the musical Hairspray and alongside Ben in The Heartbreak Kid, a gross-out comedy from sibling directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly (of There’s Something About Mary, Shallow Hal and Dumb and Dumber fame).

“It seems to me that I’m on some kind of a roll, but I just happen to be 80,” Jerry says. “I just wish I was 20 years younger.

“I think I’m just about learning how to act — and I’m getting better.”

Admittedly Jerry didn’t have to stretch too far to play the father of Ben’s character, Eddie Cantrow, a 40-year-old who despairs that all his friends — including his former fiancee — are getting married.

Eddie meets a woman he thinks is Ms Right and gets married in a hurry. On their honeymoon, in Mexico, he meets the woman of his dreams and tries to work out how to ditch his wife.

“It’s a wonderful picture,” Jerry says, adding that — as well as being very funny — it’s a reasonably accurate reflection of the changing rules of the dating game.

“These days young people have a heck of a time trying to find the right person because values have changed so much.”

While Ben has most of the funny moments in the movie, Jerry’s character Doc has an hilarious scene in a hot tub with an amply proportioned naked woman.

“It was a shocker for me,” he admits.

Although he insists that “what happens in the tub, stays in the tub”, he reveals that his wife gave him some advice about fielding media questions.

“She said, `When people ask you what you did between takes in the hot tub, tell them you talked about your grandkids’.”

A few weeks ago, I was involved in a conversation about somebody who was celebrating 30 years in the same job. I said, truthfully, that I admired the person and noted that the job was quite a difficult one to do, especially for such a length of time.

Continue reading “Here for a good time, not a long time”

A few months ago, I discovered that a friend, who is just a little younger than me, and I had both applied for the same job. It was the kind of thing we could have done equally well, because our resumes are similar and we both ticked all the boxes in the recruitment advertisement. I won’t say that I’d have been delighted for him to get the job over me, but I wouldn’t have been shocked or inconsolable.

Continue reading “‘No answer’ was the stern reply”

I’ve just spent an afternoon visiting a friend who calls herself a “crazy cat lady”.

Continue reading “The joy of herding cats”

I got annoyed the other day when someone whose writing I usually admire noted on social media that she had once thought of a particular older man as “jovial and harmless”.

Continue reading “Mostly harmless”

Allow me to put the largely artificial outrage about the use, by some, of the term “happy holidays” instead of the more specific “merry Christmas” to one side.

So, as we say in Australia, have a good one. This blog will resume sometime in the new year once I sort out what it is I want to achieve with it, and with my life.