Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  So whose fault is it? It isn’t really anybody’s. It’s an historical tendency. There used to be dozens of these people on the screen and now there are hardly any. They haven’t been bumped off. One or two of them have been edged off, but most of them seem to have just died off, with the passing of time. What alarms me is that they haven’t been replaced: not, at any rate, with people of their type. There are superficial reasons that can be adduced for this. One of them I would call the Ford Cortina fallacy: the idea that if a subject is sufficiently fascinating it can present itself, with no single narrator. But few subjects are that fascinating in themselves: as the original proponents of the presenterless, multiple-interview, flashily edited documentary feature have no doubt been painfully discovering since they became channel controllers, even for a killer whale people are more likely to switch on when it looks as if it wants to eat Sir David Attenborough. There has to be a human face there. Bob Peck’s sepulchral voice is not enough, except if the subject is the evolution of the funeral parlour through the ages.

  Another superficial reason is the Mission to Explain: a good and necessary idea, it got diverted into the news department, where there is less room for it, and away from documentary features, its proper province. Thus the impeccably overqualified John Simpson gets a few minutes to report from the battlefield and has to fufil his mission to explain in the Spectator. On screen he seems mainly to have a mission to get shot at.

  But the deep reason, I believe, is a lingering nervousness about whether an élite is justified in delivering enlightenment to the public. It’s hard to believe, at this distance, how persistently the left wing, when it existed, used to attack the broadcasting élite for its paternalism. An élite was held to be a very bad thing for a society to suffer from, and the more paternalistic it was, the more manipulative it was felt to be. What else was the Establishment but a tool of Late Capitalism? This line of thought attained the status of religious belief in the 1960s, when the youth movement turned the universities into broadcasting stations of their own. Right here in King’s, on the other side of that door at the end of the hall, in a room which is now the student bar, a Free University was set up in permanent revolutionary session. Though it had all the appearance and noise level of a Trotskyite crèche, it was taken seriously by those present. I myself attended several of its soirées and made a stirring speech against the evils of in loco parentis. But as one of the older dons remarked at the time, the parents were’t as loco as they looked. Several of the more radical undergraduates – the ones who had reduced their daily intake of food to a single bowl of rice in order to proclaim their solidarity with Chairman Mao’s struggle for world freedom – condemned the Machiavellian cynicism of King’s in having provided the Free University with a room and tea-making facilities. They called this an act of repressive tolerance.

  It was. On the whole, and in all its institutions, repressive tolerance was the way the Establishment neutralized attacks from the left. The unspoken assumption was that there was a solidarity between the ruling élite and its critics, the more promising of whom, it was correctly anticipated, would one day join its ranks. There was a large measure of tacit agreement that the ruling élites were as permeable as they needed to be and that there was enough social mobility to ensure that talent would rise. That it would want to rise was supposed to be guaranteed by an educational system that imparted knowlege not for utilitarian ends but as an absolute good. The broadcasting system was meant to play a large part in this process and largely did. Attacks mounted from the left thus found themselves short of ammunition, and had to make up for it by shouting slogans. Although the broadcasters exhausted themselves keeping a cool head in the hubbub, accusations that they were too much in thrall to the market answered themselves. What nobody expected, until Mrs Thatcher came to power, was the accusation that the broadcasters were too little in thrall to the market.

  I don’t think that the camel’s back was broken, but perhaps its heart was. Vilified from two directions, the older generation of mandarins lost some of their confidence, and the younger generation started off without it. There was a loss of belief, and especially in the area I am talking about tonight. The left wing’s simplistic loathing of paternalism, and the right wing’s disingenuous advocacy of the sovereign people, combined to produce a lasting, toxic residue: a fear of putting anyone on the screen for long who might look or sound as if he or she (especially she, sadly enough) has been blessed – whether by background, education or the hand of God – with an air of authority not shared by the viewers at home. One result was this fading away of the old soldiers. Another was their partial replacement by these disembodied voices. And perhaps the most disturbing result of all, visible in all too many fields of television now, has been the gradual but seemingly unstoppable emergence of fresh faces with nothing to say for themselves. I’m not here to mock them: not just because I don’t want them to mock me back for my own faults, but because I’m sure most of them are nice, honest people. I don’t belong to the school of thought that says Terry Christian was invented by the X-Files special effects department. He looks to me like a brave young man struggling deperately against odds. What I question is the notion that television personalities chosen to be unthreatening present no threat.

  If so seductive but wrong-headed a notion is to be countered, the first thing to say is that this isn’t the way the viewers at home feel. It’s the way the broadcasters feel on their behalf. We already know that whichever party can make education educational again will probably win the next election. We should also already know, but have been slow to catch on, that a television screen populated exlusively by specialized media creatures who have studied nothing seriously in their lives except how to read an autocue is going to leave the whole system looking poverty-stricken, however lavish the graphics. The viewers give their loyalty to people who impress them, not to ciphers. The evidence is already in. In the case of game shows, an area which is as close to a pure market as television offers, the viewers won’t switch on just for the game. They want to see the person who runs it, and it has to be a person who looks and sounds like something more than just an automaton invented for the screen. At the moment the person most people switch on is Michael Barrymore. Better than the format he fronts, he’s a naturally bright, gifted and elegant man, with a real personality rather than a manufactured one, and with a life beyond the screen – rather more life beyond the screen, it turns out, than we at first thought, although I doubt if revelations of his personal complexity will make him less popular. In America, where the daily press is not so virulent as ours but the television executives are more timid, he might have been destroyed: but that’s America’s problem, like their network television system as a whole.

  American network TV is a very dangerous analogy to draw upon when discussing the British equivalent. It was on the American analogy, I suspect, that the BBC began making its ill-advised prophecies about the necessary shrinkage of the audience share for the four main channels vis-à-vis cable and satellite. But the reason why the US network audience was ripe to shrivel was that nobody with an IQ in three figures could bear to watch. The commercials were so close together that any alternative arrangement was bound to find favour. For British television executives to make a prophecy on the basis of the American experience merely risked the prophecy’s fulfilling itself without ever having validated the analogy. The only part of the analogy that really might come true concerns the American network anchor men. As the audience for each network shrank, the anchor men’s salaries expanded, because the difference they made became more decisive. The remaining audience for CBS news switched on because Dan Rather was anchoring it, with the result that a man with a tenth the qualifications of Jon Snow ended up earning a hundred times the money. It got to the point where Rather’s salary increased at double the rate of the audience’s decline, just as long as he kept the share. Earlier this year, no doubt more by luck than judgement, I myself was fronting a prime-time show that kept
an audience share of never less that 40 per cent for the entire run. If somebody told me that I could have a bigger pay cheque every time the audience grew smaller, just as long as I kept the share, my first response would be ‘Where do I sign?’ But I would like to think that my second response would be desperation. We’re in this for more than the money, aren’t we?

  Well, aren’t we? Of course we are. Even the faceless moguls who won the franchises turn out to have faces after all, and they want to be able to shave in the morning with their eyes open. We want to go on having a broacasting system worth working a long day for, and we want to restore it where it has lapsed. In this one area I have picked on – the supply, or lack of it, of overqualifed screen personnel – I believe the lapse now amounts to a real crisis. Other areas will repair themselves, in the light of experience. Some lapses came from a good impulse. The justifiable idea that regional accents were insufficiently represented on the air waves led to the unjustifiable and damaging conclusion that there was no such thing as standard English. But there is, and the clearest proof lies in how well it is spoken by members of precisely those minorites who might legitimately complain of discrimination if they chose. When all the women on television speak like Zeinab Badawi, and all the men like Trevor McDonald, we’ll be all right again: and there’s an end to that discussion. But this more fundamental matter, about the failure in recruitment of authoritative figures to the screen, can only be tackled when we realize that the class war is over, and put it behind us. The public already has. The public knows that it is better to be Richard Branson than the Marquess of Blandford. The public doesn’t need our pitiable tabloid newspapers to tell them that. So why can’t we grasp it? Is it because we are still haunted by this guilty embarrassment about belonging to an élite? But the people who run television are necessarily an élite, and that is a bad thing only to the extent that the élite perpetuates itself as an oligarchy.

  Left-wing ideology died in the West because it was already dead in the East, and right-wing ideology, after its brief period of respectability under Mrs Thatcher, is already a rump. Social engineering of either kind has reacquired the status it should never have lost, that of a fantasy. If the fantasy lingers, it is because liberty so inconsiderately refuses to produce perfectly fair results. But a society, and a free society least of all, can’t be homogenized in pursuit of absolute justice. Such a course must always lead to greater inequalities than ever, when the last, self-seeking élite retreats to an enclave, there to rule by decree or cower within its walls. Society can’t be regimented in any lasting way, not even by Hitler or Josef Stalin. Nor can it be atomized in any profitable way, not even for Bill Gates. Society can only be bound together, in its common humanity. In that continuing task, the broadcasting system, and especially television, has a responsibility. There is no escaping from it: not into personal wealth, desirable though that might be; not into management systems, scientific though they might sound; and never into the idle supposition that the majority audience consists entirely of minorities each of which can be appealed to if its needs are identified. The final minority is the individual, and he or she is a person like us. If we sometimes don’t know what we want or need until we are shown it, how can the audience? What individuals want and what they need are two terms neither of which can be entirely resolved in terms of the other. So the broadcasting élite is stuck with its dilemma, and the dilemma is the job. We can never be certain, and yet we must act with certitude. Finally we have to do what we feel like and hope they like it. The charge of irresponsibility will always be hard to dodge. That’s the responsibility, and we might as well call it a privilege. After all, even if we’re leading a life of sacrifice, it doesn’t look that way tonight.

  King’s College, Cambridge, 15 September, 1995

  PRESENTING THE RICHARD DIMBLEBY AWARD

  It’s my honour to present this award to a man who writes so well that his art criticism and cultural comment would have made great television even if they had never left the printed page. Everything he writes has pictures in it. To write so vividly you have to see vividly in the first place. Blessed with the incomparable advantage of having been born and raised in Australia, he got clear blue sky into his eyes when young and has been seeing the world through it ever since.

  Above all he could see how the art of painting reflected the world. Setting up a powerful base in New York, he wrote art criticism which brought in the whole society that produced the art. Though his intellectual resources threatened to burst the bounds of any medium to which they were confined, it never occurred to him that television, even American television, was beneath him: it was there, to be entered at its weak point – its growing dearth of the authoritative voice. Through that weak point could be made the strongest effect, and his effect was instantaneous. Just when we thought that the great tradition of the comprehensive television arts essay established by Kenneth Clark was fading, suddenly there was The Shock of the New to prove that it could be not just recapitulated but even transcended. About the notorious pile of bricks in the Tate Gallery our award-winner said everything necessary in a single sentence: ‘Anyone except a child can make such things.’ This was better than wisdom. It was wit: wisdom with wings.

  His most recent BBC series, American Visions, was a gift to America for which not only Americans should be grateful. Anyone who watches television anywhere in the hope that it can still make life better instead of just more bearable should be glad that there is still someone who incarnates what cultural comment ought to be: overqualified yet uncondescending, serious without solemnity, packed tight yet with unimpeded flow, providing us, as if it were our birthright, with the priceless bonus of television’s simplest yet most precious blessing – the talking head who brings words alive. I have known this man since we were students together and have never ceased to wonder at his gifts, yet the millions of people throughout the world who have watched and listened to him in delight know the best thing about him as well as I do. Tonight I am proud to represent them in paying tribute to a prince of the English language. The Richard Dimbleby Award for Outstanding Contribution to Factual Television goes very deservedly to – Robert Hughes.

  From a presentation speech at the BAFTA Awards, 1997

  ANZAC DAY DAWN SERVICE ADDRESS

  It’s said that whenever Winston Churchill fell prey to the fits of intense depression he called Black Dog, he would dream about Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, of the dead soldiers in the water and on the cliffs. The Dardanelles campaign had been his idea, and it was a brilliant idea: if it had been successful it would have altered the course of the war, breaking the murderous stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front. It would have stemmed the slaughter. But it wasn’t successful, the enemy was waiting, and all that was altered was the course of many young lives – and of those, too many belonged to us, to Australia and New Zealand, little dominions with not much population, and certainly none of it to spare.

  There was a harvest of our tallest poppies. A bitter harvest. Recently – by commentators with their own, no doubt heartfelt and even admirable purposes – the notion has been encouraged that the Anzacs were fed into the battle to save British lives, as Imperial cannon-fodder. The cruel fact was that three times as many British troops as Anzacs went into that cauldron and never came out. But the British were counting their troops in millions anyway, and soon they would be counting their dead by the same measure. For us, young men dead by the thousand was a lot, an awful lot, and the same was still true in the second war, and always will be true if it happens again.

  But nothing quite like those wars, not even Vietnam, ever has happened again, or is likely to, and that consideration, perhaps, is nearer the heart of this ceremony than we might easily realize. The memory is fading, even as the myth grows, and it is fading precisely because we have got the world our parents dreamed of. In our generation and probably for all the generations to come, the privileged nations no longer fight each other, or will fight each other. It is, an
d will be, the sad fate of the underprivileged nations to do all that. In the meanwhile the way is open for our children to misinterpret history, and believe that a ceremony like this honours militarism. Except by our participation in this moment of solemnity – the solemnity that always courts pomposity, unless we can forget ourselves and remember those who never lived to stand on ceremony – how can we convince our children that the opposite is true?

  Militarism, in both the great wars, was the enemy. It was why the enemy had to be fought. Almost all our dead were civilians in peacetime, and the aching gaps they left were not in the barracks but on the farms and in the factories, in the suburbs and the little towns with one pub. The thousands of Australian aircrew who died over Europe, and are commemorated here by this stone, would, had they lived, have made an important contribution to Australia’s burgeoning creative energy after World War Two. We might have found our full confidence much sooner. But without their valour and generosity we might never have found it at all. Had Hitler prevailed, and Britain gone under, nowhere in the world, not even America, would have remained free of his virulent influence. Those of us who are very properly concerned with what the Aborigines suffered at the hands of Anglo-Saxon culture should at least consider what they might have suffered at the hands of a Nazi culture, as it would undoubtedly have been transmitted by the occupying army of Hitler’s admiring ally. They would have been regarded as a problem with only one solution – a final solution.

  When we say that the lives of any of our young men and women under arms were wasted we should be very careful what we mean. We who are lucky enough to live in the world they helped to make safe from institutionalized evil can’t expect any prizes for pronouncing that war is not glorious. They knew that. They fought the wars anyway, and that was their glory. It’s obviously true that the world would have been a better place if the wars had never happened, but it’s profoundly true that it would have been an infinitely worse place if they had not been fought and won.