Vivian Leopold James

[Jittlebags]

Brown bread.

[littlefoot]

FIRST!!

[Cuellar]

I actually wondered whether he was still alive the other day (I suppose the other day he was), remarkable that he lasted as long as he did really.

[SpiderChrist]

Gutted.

[Icehaven]

FIRST!!

Nope, beat him by 4 minutes.
https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,76579.0.html
And RIP Mr James of course.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

His TV shows really encouraged me to learn how to cook.

[Blumf]

Looked for a link, found Smooth Radio as first result:

https://www.smoothradio.com/news/entertainment/clive-james-death-tributes/

[Bizarro Mark Bosnich]

James and Miller on the same day? Very sad day all round.

[SpiderChrist]

He was one of my regular customers in HMV Cambridge many many many years ago. Lovely bloke.

[Norton Canes]

Cdead James

Sorry, can't keep up

[Bizarro Mark Bosnich]

I know people mean well but do hate it when people say "the collective IQ of the nation has just taken a blow". As if their value lay mainly in their mental gymnastics, as opposed to their actual accomplishments, or how ignorant they made people feel by comparison.

[EOLAN]

James and Miller on the same day? Very sad day all round.

Agreed
Hell throw in Rhodes for the fun date I had in one of his restaurants. More to do with my company than the restaurant itself.

[pigamus]

AAAARRRGH

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,76572.msg4023095.html#msg4023095

[wosl]

James and Miller on the same day? Very sad day all round.

Immediately made me think of Bergman and Antonioni pegging out on the same day.  Great writer, James. I can't begin - haven't the energy - to say why at this point, beyond noting that his books are of the sort that make for very good company indeed.  This news has been on the cards for a long time, and I've been gearing up for it to break for a while, but it's still a huge blow, and yes, one made harder by Miller's passing happening at the same time.

[Bennett Brauer]

AAAARRRGH

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,76572.msg4023095.html#msg4023095

I mentioned him turning 80 last month https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,64184.msg3976576.html#msg3976576 so I'm glad you got in there to take the blame.

Great writer, James. I can't begin - haven't the energy - to say why at this point, beyond noting that his books are of the sort that make for very good company indeed.  This news has been on the cards for a long time, and I've been gearing up for it to break for a while, but it's still a huge blow, and yes, one made harder by Miller's passing happening at the same time.

He kept on writing almost to the end, showing remarkable stoicism despite his physical deterioration, going blind and enduring several operations.

He said he was close to finishing his last volume of memoirs a few months ago. I hope he managed it.

[Keebleman]

Crikey, this one hits me hard.  Last time I was this shaken by the death of someone I had never met it was Kubrick, but Kubrick only made movies that I watched and admired, through his work I think Clive James actually changed me as a person, made me think differently, or at least made me realise that there were different ways to think.

He was as good an essayist as Orwell, and he could be funnier than Wodehouse.

[pigamus]

Completely agree. If anyone doesn't own a copy of On Television, get it now before it starts going for silly money on Amazon. Or I'll lend you mine.

[Bizarro Mark Bosnich]

I feel like I'm one of the few who sympathises with him during that Aspel appearance. I didn't think him asking why Reed drinks was that stupid a question (might have got an interesting answer out of him). Everyone else seems to side with Reed for some reason.

[wosl]

It gets obscured by what he achieved later on in other fields, but he wrote some fine song lyrics early on in his career (working in partnership with Pete Atkin): Julie Covington - The Magic Wasn't There

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

He's up there now, showing clips of Japanese Game Show contestants acting like cunts, and pointing out how crass those programmes are.

Fair play to him for lasting as long as he did with that dread disease. " Endurance", right enough.

[Satchmo Distel]

Is there a recording online of the interview Mark Lawson did with him around 2006? I thought there may be some tension in it due to Lawson feeling that James had gone too mainstream.

[Keebleman]

At least a dozen books of essays, several volumes of poetry, plus memoirs, travel writing, song lyrics, novels, radio broadcasts, all that TV work: his output was colossal! It could be that his status in the 80s and early 90s as a TV star meant he has been taken for granted and under appreciated, but as the TV memories fade his skill with the language, the wit and precision with which he expressed himself, and the sheer joy he took in being a part of this world and exploring the output - good, bad and ridiculous - of humanity will, I think, become clearer and endure.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if he is still being read a hundred years from now.

[kngen]

He was one of my regular customers in HMV Cambridge many many many years ago. Lovely bloke.

He really, really was. You don't expect to have an email from Clive James pop up in your inbox praising you for the 'lovely job' you did on one of his pieces (whether it be editing, which was the easiest job in the world, as, naturally, you wouldn't want or need to change even a comma - or laying out one of his longer reads for the Graun). But he was so unexpectedly and uniquely generous with his praise for lowly production serfs such as my self that, in my eyes, he went from already godlike status to some kind of crazy cuckoo super-god. He was the perfect inversion of the journalistic truism (as embodied by the likes of Giles Coren): 'The worse the writer, the bigger the arsehole.'

I feel honoured to have worked with/for him, however fleeting our actual professional connection was. I was thinking about him just the other day, and I felt a sadness wash over me because I knew he'd be leaving us fairly soon (as it had been in the post for a while). Still didn't stop me feeling utterly gutted when the news actually broke, though. And mostly, but not entirely, on the strength of a couple of nice emails he slung my way - that's the kind of effect he had on people, I suppose. RIP

[SpiderChrist]

I watched that Front Row interview with Mary Beard that they showed the day his death was announced. He reads part of The River In The Sky that had me in absolute floods. Fucking hell.

All is not lost, despite the quietness
That comes like nightfall now as the last strength
Ebbs from my limbs, and feebleness of breath
Makes even focusing my eyes a task –
As when, before the merciful excision
Of my mist-generating cataracts,
That money-spiders dwindled in their webs
Between one iron spandrel and the next
On my flagstone verandah, each frail web
The intermittent image of a disc
That glittered like the Facel Vega's wheel
Still spinning when Camus gave up his life,
Out past the journey's edge. Just such a dish,
Set off with dew-drops like pin-points of chrome,
Monopolises my attention here
In Cambridge as I sit wrapped in the quiet,
Stock still and planning my last strategies
For how I will employ these closing hours.
But no complaints. Simply because enforced,
This pause is valuable. Few people read
Poetry any more but I still wish
To write its seedlings down, if only for the lull
Of gathering: no less a harvest season
For being the last time.