CRITICAL CONDITIONS

Back in the day (as the fashionable phrase has it), I really craved a berth as a full-time critic on a national newspaper. During more than thirty years of journalism, I wrote quite a lot of reviews across what I reckoned were my three areas of expertise: theatre, film and television (I wrote about the odd book too). Most of these pieces appeared in magazines but now and again there’d be a one-off in a newspaper or a stint of holiday-relieving. As a proper first-stringer, I pictured myself diligently criss-crossing the country (indeed, the world), covering theatre in a scrupulously anti-London-centric manner; or rounding up wide swathes of televisual genres in regular packages, as I did when passing a happy year as reviewer for the trade mag Broadcast three decades ago; or constructing a new auteur theory of film out of the post-post-movie-brat generation of Hollywood directors and indeed of indie production companies, but always leading my movie columns on the state of the perpetually dying British industry and the ever changing picture in non-English language cinema.

I fancied myself pretty damned good at reviewing. At least, I had a clear and determined view of what was the critic’s function and of what constituted bad reviewing (of which there was always plenty and now there is little else). “Ok, clever-clogs”, I hear you cry, “so how come you didn’t get a proper reviewing gig?” There’s really not much mystery to it. You won’t be surprised to learn that reviewing jobs don’t get advertised (“Opera critic required by national Sunday newspaper: must be able to read a score and know some good jokes” – I don’t think so).


Nancy with the laughing face

The first most of us learn of a critical changing of the guard is the column that ends thus: “Well, that’s my final piece for this newspaper. I’ve enjoyed every minute of the last 28 years. Next week, Stuart Maconie will be reviewing dance in this slot. I wish him well”. And you think “Oh bugger, I’ve been waiting 28 years for that useless old bitch to move on and suddenly it’s all done and dusted and I never even got my cv in the post”.

In the old days, arts editors deliberated long and hard over which particular learned authority might be persuaded to stoop to contributing notices on a regular basis. That began to change in the 1960s: new critics tended to be appointed from among those artsy types who happened to be hovering near the arts editor’s desk looking winsome at the moment when the incumbent suddenly dropped dead, had a last and decisive hissy fit or got a more lucrative offer from The International Herald Tribune. Some time in the late ‘80s, that shifted again. Newspapers no longer wanted people who could write out of passion, discrimination, erudition and long absorption in the particular art to be reviewed. Instead they wanted some jackass who knew diddly-shit but who could be relied on to be funny. This is precisely how someone as empty-headed as Toby Young gets to be a theatre critic. The rumbles you hear are Ken Tynan and Harold Hobson stomping out of their graves before the houselights come up.

One reason why I fancied myself a worthwhile critic was precisely because I was interested in film and television and theatre. After all, if you were Richard Eyre or David Hare, Ralph or Ian or Miranda or Joely Richardson, you worked all these beats. Isn’t it appropriate for the critic of one to be versed in all? They’re not, though. Very few movie reviewers ever set foot in a theatre, almost no theatre critics get to watch mainstream evening television and television reviewers … well, they know nothing about anything.

It happens all the time that even the liveliest critics in one of those spheres reveal woeful ignorance of the allied arts. I remember the peerless Nancy Banks-Smith in the 1970s reviewing a Play for Today whose cast was led by Robert Lang and that led to her perplexed cry: “Where has this wonderful actor been all my life?” Well, Nancy, the answer is that he was leading Olivier’s National Theatre company at the Old Vic. If you’d been to almost any production there in the previous dozen years, you would have known that.


Billington, the fat owl of the stalls

Though he’s hardly what you’d call an inspired theatre critic, The Guardian’s veteran Michael Billington consistently writes with shrewd judgment and immense knowledge (I do wish he wouldn’t always expect plays to make “points”, though) and much of that authority derives from his history of reviewing film and television as well as theatre. He also – and this helps immensely – has occasionally taken a turn as a director.

During my time as a journalist, I alternated with jobs in television and I continued to submit projects (though rarely with any result) to theatres and movie production companies. I like to think that my reviewing was informed by a feel for how work was made and by a certain amount of objective (and I hope interesting) assessment of technique. If a play or musical or movie or programme works, there are usually discernible reasons why that should be the case; and often enough there are explicable flaws that militate against its success. A critic ought to be specialist enough to tease out these factors, or so it seems to me.

If there is one critic who changed all that, I submit that it was Clive James. James, who happens to be about five weeks older than Michael Billington, had a ten-year platform as designated television reviewer on The Observer. For a while, in the middle of that time, I shared a page with him as the paper’s television previewer. Demand for this latter function had grown in the national press, partly in response to the success of the television previewing on Time Out, from the executing of which I was duly recruited.

The view I had developed was that reviews of all the other arts except for live concerts were read like television previews: in other words, you read the critique and got to see the show afterwards, as you did with a movie, book, ballet, exhibition and so on. So it was legitimate to write fully and critically about a programme yet to be transmitted because in practise the advantage you enjoyed over your readers was not significantly more than that of critics of the other arts. Evidently the arts editors were beginning to accept this philosophy.


The young(ish) Renaissance Man, James

I have no idea what James thought of my previewing: we had very little contact during my time at The Observer. Perhaps he sensed my hostility. At any rate, I thought he carried no torch for the medium whatsoever. He just used television as a vehicle via which to write about the world and/or whatever he wished. He had no feel for what programme-makers were trying to do. While I am sure he subscribed to the auteur theory of the movies – as we all did in those days – he was blithely uninterested in any notion of a hierarchy or a hall of fame of television programme-makers.

There was one episode – immensely enjoyable for me at least – when James loftily attacked the documentarist Angela Pope because, out of his ignorance of technique, he assumed that she could not have gathered the footage that appeared in her film without some degree of manipulation. She sued him. I recall him rampaging around the newspaper’s open-plan office, fulminating against this “cunt”; not that this was anything new, because I had already learned that James’s generic term for women was “cunts”. The paper duly withdrew his observation and apologized. I was a bit disappointed. I had been hoping that he would go to jail.

What I always suspected duly came to pass. James really wanted to be on television himself. I imagine his broadcasting career has been less glittering than he would have wanted or imagined. He’s probably pleased with it but it’s objectively the case that almost nothing memorable came out of it, especially the feeble LWT documentaries that he fronted.

But James’s column was very popular, even in some parts of the business. He made readers laugh. They thought the world of him at the paper. I even heard one of the executives claim that James accounted for a quarter of the paper’s sales. As one who felt that his own mission was to champion television, to make it “better” by chiding programme-makers when they weren’t stepping up to the mark and to make it more “readable” to viewers by writing about its tropes and techniques, I thought James was vulgar, down-market and self-regarding. But look around the critical landscape today and all you see are those who want to emulate James: writers like AA Gill, Charlie Brooker and Charles “theatrical viagra” Spencer.


Milton Agonistes

Plying my own trade in the ‘70s, I bore a suspicion that some of my seniors took a rather dim view of their readers. I remember covering an opening at the Greenwich Theatre, at the interval of which most of my fellow critics lolled in the stalls chewing the fat. Unremarked, I remained among them and listened in, hoping to learn something. Most vociferous on this occasion was Milton Shulman. This Canadian Jewish ex-pat was, for donkey’s years, chief theatre reviewer for The London Evening Standard, always wielding a straight bat on behalf of the unchanging values. No new play, unless it be written by William Douglas-Home, escaped the lash of Milton’s scorn. Your work had to be at least fifty years old before he would consider it worthy of revival.

On this occasion, everything Milton had to say was witty, wise and to the point. His fellows – Billington, Benedict Nightingale, John Elsom, Robert Cushman – had nothing remotely as perceptive to say. I looked forward eagerly to Milton’s notice the next day. And not a whit of this gossamer gold appeared in the paper. It was his habitual, curmudgeonly drone.

The Guardian is presently running its third annual competition for “young critics” and as the top age limit is 18 I guess I’ll have to rule myself out. In a feature earlier this week, various established critics reminisced about getting started and about the critics who inspired them, an unsurprisingly dispiriting exercise. One reviewer thus hailed as a heroine was notorious in her day for having her copy made coherent by her journalist boyfriend. Tragically, the couple suddenly broke up. “How will she cope?” we wondered, to which the noted wit John Lyttle replied: “She’ll soon be back in the social swim, looking for Mr Rewrite”.

Peter Bradshaw, far from my favourite movie reviewer, complained in his piece that his parents took The Daily Telegraph in the 1970s and “I would no more want to read their reviews than to read the lines of stock market prices in The Financial Times”. Certainly no one at that time would have made a decision about what to see in the theatre based on the opinions of “Colonel” John Barber, but The Telegraph did then have one of the most incisive and diligent television critics in the business in the form of Séan Day-Lewis.

Bradshaw offers as his critical hero – yes, you guessed – Clive James. “James more or less invented the critic-columnist trope of riffing, digressing, zooming off at a tangent” reckons Bradshaw, which pretty much encapsulates everything I deplore in reviewing.

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Perhaps you clocked the hint of enquiry I offered about the sexuality of David Laws in the posting ‘Cabinet in the Sky’ on May 12th. If you want to keep abreast, just keep watching this space …