Saturday Night Clive
ABC-TV, Saturday
Denton
Channel 7, Tuesday and Thursday
Reviewed by Dave Riley
The sentence, for Clive James, is something to carry across the goal line. This is how to score. Listen and laugh because the words speak for themselves.
The words spoken by James are reheated concoctions of past mental effort, recycled as he repeats the lines scripted beforehand. So on television he leans towards us and in a somewhat stilted fashion the sentences are switched to replay. It is radio with pictures.
Somewhere between the cadence of television newspeak and the reading of the Sunday epistle comes the voice of Clive James. You are forced to ponder why James is on television in the first place. The most indifferent of interviewers — the guesting personalities usually must wind themselves up — he prefers to hide his stiff presence behind an expanse of BBC desk rather than work up a repertoire of gestures.
But Clive owns the words. He is the master of smart. In verse and in prose he patents more quotable quotes than most.
While such word power is conducive to a certain smugness, Clive James is nonetheless addicted to populism. Regardless of his cultural pursuits and his stature as a frequently published critic, his sense of standard and of judgment are attributes he skilfully applies before a broad audience. Culture for James is not high tea but survives on the edge of kitsch and crassness.
He is therefore a rarity on television — a professional intellectual who prefers to slum it on the idiot box. But the boy who grew up under a Mascot flight path and who so readily raises his voice to the masses is keen to seek his allies elsewhere. Of the same generation of Australian expatriates as Germaine Greer and John Pilger, James joins Edna Everidge as official jester to the court of Baroness Thatcher, indifferent to the social carnage of their time.
British society on Saturday Night Clive receives little scrutiny. The English look outward and laugh, smugly enjoying the fruits of their language. Foreigners, as captain Clive of the English team suggests, are much better at being silly and stupid than we are.
For all his populist bent and restless addiction to fame, James has failed to merit essential media status. Either as local-boy-makes-good or master of the verb to wit he is unlikely to warrant a Logie in his home country. No one under 30 is going to sacrifice their Saturday night rage to tune into Clive James.
Andrew Denton, having already made the cover of Rolling Stone, seems now to be consolidating the niche he has carved for himself on television. He doesn't sing or play a musical instrument, nor has he a bullet on the charts, but as the management of Channel 7 recognised, behind those bottle top glasses was a youth icon. Denton, perhaps in spite of himself, can deliver a large audience of young consumers.
Seven has been experimenting with the laughter market for some time, but its efforts were always lacklustre compared to the risks taken at the ABC. Cult youth comedy has always been the forte of the national broadcaster as far back as Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Indigenous comedy production only really took off when The Gillies Report screened in the early '80s, but the wave it engendered led directly to Denton. Through Blah Blah Blah, The Money or the Gun and Alive and Sweaty, he accumulated a loyal following because his tongue was neither mindless nor cheap and he seemed a signatory to the convention on political correctness. Not for Denton the easy turn to the racist, sexist or homophobic phrase. This guy had principle.
So Seven has recruited someone whose brash and resonant satire will hardly gel with the outlook of the boys upstairs. But the fact that his loyalties are a key aspect of his appeal guarantees Denton a certain freedom and even longevity on commercial TV.
He is not foolish, so he is unlikely to blow it. The sharpest gabber on television, his quick mind is a joy to listen to. Historically — as far as the boys go — his mouth roars with the same skill as Norman Gunston and Graham Kennedy.
No doubt Denton has all the star attributes of ambition and self-importance, but in spite of this he has an extraordinary talent for listening. Denton waits his turn, so that his interviews are always personalised and the more interesting because of it.
As each managed chat proceeds, the interview slips out of celebrity mode and into a dialogue we can all share. The chats on Denton are memorable because there is more than air between him and his guests. Behind the career figure or artiste of some form or another, Denton always manages to elicit another dimension so that these personalities become more personable and less creatures of media hype.
In contrast, Clive James seems preoccupied with the nature of fame — he even did a whole television series on it. Generally, he gives the impression that he wishes more of it to rub off on himself.
James' television performance contrasts sharply with Denton's keenness to wear his humanity on all occasions. For Clive James that would be soppy. In spite of his thoughtful essays and delightful memoirs, the rest of the world is kept at a smug and comic distance.