Bedside Books Number 3

I first encountered Clive James as the TV critic of The Observer, back in the early 1970s. I loved the fact that he wrote so wittily and well about television, and took it as  seriously as other people took books and films. Somewhere in the house (for which read probably stashed away in the loft) we have copies of the three volumes of his collected columns from 1972-82. You would think that collections of TV criticism would date and I suppose in a way they did, but for me and others of my generation that didn't matter because they were a warm reminder of some of the amazing, and amazingly awful, TV that we watched.  

James eventually left The Observer and went on to other things; writing poetry, making TV documentaries and becoming a general cultural critic, but he obviously never lost his love for TV as this book attests. It concerns the phenomenon of the Box Set; the binge watching of which he freely admits to during his current illness, and he has plenty of things to say about it, both as a form in general and  why there is an audience for it, and about the things such series tell us about the society we live in, or the one that  we gaze upon from across the pond.  All the big blockbusters are here from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones, taking in on the way Breaking Bad, The West Wing,  The Wire and many others. Some I have watched, some I haven't, but I have enjoyed reading James' comments on them all. 

He's still witty and he's still perceptive. No-one else for me has summed up so precisely the basis on which the world of Game of Thrones works, but it is,  as James says 'a world in which the law has not yet formed'. A brilliant précis. 

The book is full of such pithy insights and is a totally entertaining read. It may be that this will be James' last book, and if so how fitting that his fial work should take him back to praise and critique the medium he has, all his life, done so much to champion. 

I might add that one of his throw away lines in a review decades ago about how eastern European contestants were preparing themselves to enter for Miss World now that they were able to do so, became a precept which I try to abide by, -  not always successfully, but I make the effort. 'People are not to be despised' said James,'simply because their dreams are cheap'. Just so.