ROLLING with the PUNCHES II

A large part of my journalism career was spent writing about television. As someone who grew up with the medium’s golden age, I eagerly cast myself in the 1970s as its print champion. It seemed to me that television was not yet written about well enough: where were the weighty books and where was the newspaper criticism that did it justice? In fact there was already a pretty strong tradition of thoughtful arts section writing about television, but I couldn’t know then that such thoughtfulness would die out rather than deepen.

Apart from a year on the trade magazine Broadcast, I never got to write regular reviews of television or any other art form. Reviewing jobs are very tricky to come by. Basically, you need to be standing by the arts editor’s desk beaming benignly when the baton is passed on. Such opportunities are almost always bestowed before anyone outside the paper knows there is one. Suddenly, a critic’s column ends with a sign-off and a commendation to follow the critic’s anointed successor. When an unplanned vacancy occurs, there is a mad scramble. The long-time theatre critic of The Daily Mail, Jack Tinker, died suddenly. I zipped down to Northcliffe House and delivered a letter to Paul Dacre, the veteran editor, applying for the job. He wrote me an unexpectedly charming, personal and modest reply, apologetic that he couldn’t give me an immediate answer. But I didn’t get the gig.

Most of my journalism about television was previewing and reporting. Previewing never had the status of reviewing, though Time Out magazine, whose third television editor I was, and Elkan Allan at The Sunday Times considerably raised the game for the penetration of previewing into programme-makers’ consciousnesses. And such was the pertinence of the news-gossip-and-preview format that Pattie Williams and I worked up in the Time Out television section that we became remarkably influential. One BBC producer told me that each week on publication day Television Centre fell silent while everyone absorbed our latest fusillades. When The Guardian ran a piece on Bruce Forsyth with the headline “The Most Important Man in British Television”, someone at Time Out cut the headline out and stuck it over my pigeonhole.

The point was that Pattie and I were serious about television. We thought that it should be covered with the same expertise, discrimination and passion as any other art form. We developed an auteur theory of programme-makers and we wrote about the mechanics of montage, camerawork, genre and transmission modes, in order to encourage our readers to understand better why some programmes worked more effectively than others and why programme-makers made the decisions that they did.

After less than eighteen months, I got headhunted by The Observer which was expanding its coverage of television. I wrote a more extensive selection of weekly previews than the paper had ever carried before, along with a comment column. Colour pieces were supplied on a fortnightly turnaround by Russell Harty and Melvyn Bragg, and there was also a review column. This was the only element that I had a problem with. The review was by Clive James. I considered James to be the destroyer of proper criticism of the medium; and James was – important distinction – a reviewer, not a critic.

Clive James, a serious critic

The Observer had a fine tradition of television critics: TC Worsley, Maurice Richardson, George Melly. Each of these was serious about television. James wasn’t. He was serious about wanting to get onto television, which he duly did. But his writing about television was, in fact, a blog avant la lettre in which he mused about the world. Thus he merely used television as a sounding board against which to bounce his worldview. Tragically, many people were seduced by this, even otherwise sensible people who worked in television. It was claimed by some at the paper that James accounted for a quarter of the paper’s sales all by himself. I ground my teeth.

Inevitably, James’ notion of how to write about television became the template for others to follow: AA Gill, Stephen Pile, Charlie Brooker. The critics who, in my time, assessed the medium on its own terms rather than as a thing over there to be mocked – Peter Black, Peter Fiddick, Séan Day-Lewis, Jimmy Thomas, Shaun Usher, Dennis Potter, Jennifer Selway, Chris Dunkley, even (in her own sweet way) Nancy Banks-Smith – have no successors.

Grace Dent, with whom I had a Twitter spat described in the previous posting, writes about television in the Guide section of the Saturday edition of The Guardian. I read her for the first and last time last weekend. She wrote about a programme called Four Rooms, employing the kind of look-at-me-ma allusions and comparisons that were staple Clive James. The programme being about antiques, she began with a clod-hopping assault on Antiques Roadshow (so timely 32 years into its run), including an elaborate conceit about it being on at tea-time that was somewhat scuppered by the fact that transmission was moved out of the tea-time slot some three years ago.

She described one of Four Rooms presenters as “foisting dice in some hapless victim’s face”, clearly unaware of the meaning of “to foist” – maybe she was thinking of “hoist”. Her characteristic showy riffs are extended way past their effect and only scratch, never bite. In sum, she’s a lightweight. She has no seriousness of purpose. She cares diddly-squat about television for its own sake and is, like her predecessor in the slot Charlie Brooker, merely looking for an all-purpose on-screen career delivering banter. I expect she’ll get it too. If you want to read her column, it may be found at

http://bit.ly/lMBiTw

Grace Dent: last appearance (I promise)

Cheap show-offs like Dent are terribly sensitive about any remarks made about them, however determinedly they maintain a scornful attitude to all of television’s output. Indeed, reviewers generally dish it out readily but take it badly. Dusty Hughes was theatre editor when I was on Time Out, went on to run the Bush Theatre and then became a playwright. I reviewed a play of his at the National Theatre. Its director, Richard Eyre, actually went to the trouble of dropping me a line to thank me for my remarks. Dusty, by contrast, rang my home and demanded of my partner to be allowed to speak to me (I was out) because he wanted to call me a cunt. Same review. But Richard Eyre hadn’t been a reviewer.

Whenever the “victim” of a bad review hits back, however briefly, the critic always wants the last word. The latest example is the theatre critic on The Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer, another ineffable lightweight. Spencer’s only moment of limelight beyond the tiny proportion of Telegraph types who read about the arts came when he described Nicole Kidman’s brief nudity on the London stage as “pure theatrical Viagra”. Though the phrase was widely quoted – by far the most by Spencer himself who evidently felt he was Oscar Wilde reincarnated – it survives no examination as a meaningful metaphor, even if you wanted to go down that road.

In the present nonsense, Spencer had given his usual snotty review to the latest production of Deborah Warner, whose work he doesn’t have the capacity to understand. Warner, perhaps a touch ad hominem, accounted Spencer “a toad” (the resemblance is not wholly far-fetched). The amphibian, while declaring that “I’d hoped to take her anger on the chin like a man and keep quiet”, naturally could not forbear to write a whole column of reply, justifying it by essaying that “this spat does raise interesting questions”. Sadly he never wrote about any of those. I did laugh, though, when he described Warner’s work as “self-advertising”. Pure theatrical myopia, anyone?

Charles Spencer, the theatre critic, not the former brother-in-law of the Prince of Wales

Read it if you must at http://tgr.ph/iuip5T

Also last Saturday, Clive James returned to reviewing television. He had been secured by The Daily Telegraph under the banner or “world’s greatest television critic”, though of course this was probably demanded as part of the deal by his agent. James has in all probability returned to reviewing because he is ill with leukaemia and it’s a job he can do as and when his health allows (unlike his television interviewing). James’ return has been hailed by his friends on Twitter. I can’t raise much anger about it now, partly because he’s dying, mostly because the battle to establish a useful body of television criticism is long lost.

James’ first column is here:

http://bit.ly/lKuIu1

It’s vintage in the sense that everything I hated about his stuff is intact. He always wrote like a man who could listen to the sound of his own voice all day and he still does. The chief topic of his column is the drama serial The Shadow Line about which he actually says almost nothing. There is an absurdly elaborated detour on the movie tropes of John Woo in order to make a tiny point about a directorial tic of the television serial’s writer-director Hugo Blick. And of course James comes back to a non-televisual experience of his own at the end. Yes, his metasubject is the same as ever: it’s Clive James.