Ken Dodd died this week. Which was a shame, especially for the HMRC.
We're so used to celebrities popping off these days that sometimes the odd one flies under the radar. Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, also recently headed off to that great running track in the sky, having left many people shocked he was also a highly-regarded doctor.
Usually when a famous name trends on Twitter, it means the famous body attached to it has either died or done something scandalous, and the tone of the messages makes it easy to tell which is which: it's a world of goodies and baddies, of bouquets and bollockings, hail-marys and hastags.
One day someone's going to die in the middle of a scandal and really catch everyone on the hop. And then, just as the wave of public sympathy crests, I pop up on this very blog to say they've got a face like a butcher's perineum, the social grace of a week-old cheese sandwich and the mental agility of a cork in a milk bowl. Or maybe that's just me reading about the exploits of Joey Essex again and can't resist the urge to call him out for being a brainless moomin who deserves fame as much as Nick Clegg deserves a room of Playboy models and a bucket of rasperry jam. I don't even know what that last simile means, but it's the sort of thing I say.
A while ago I got a bit of a shock when I saw a series of tweets full of praise and admiration for the voice of sardonic humour himself; Clive James. But Clive James wasn't dead or mired in scandal: he was ill. He is ill. And he'd given a radio interview in which, among other things, he spoke about his illness in his charming characteristically erudite terms. "I'm getting near the end," he said. "I'm a man who is approaching his terminus."
I felt sad, as along with Jeremy Clarkson, Charlie Brooker and Armando Iannuchi, much of my humour and outlook on the world, as well as my love of journalism, is influenced by Clive James.
One of the few occasions I was ever allowed to stay up past midnight as a boy was watching his hilarious "End Of The Year" shows for the BBC on many a New Year's Eve in the late 80's and early 90's. I always knew that Christmas was over and it was time for a New Year when Clive James came on my TV screen and cleverly diassembled the old one with his inimitable dry witty sarcasm. Sadly, for the poor buggers who can be bothered to scrape their eyeballs across my incoherant ramblings - which right now means you - I am no Clive James.
He has a way of gliding through sentences, effortlessly ironing a series of complex points into a single easily-navigable line, illuminating here and cogitating there, before leading you face-first into an unexpected punchline that makes your brain yelp with delight. He can swallow images whole and regurgitate them later as hallucinogenic caricatures that somehow make more sense than the real thing.
He once famously described Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like "a brown condom full of walnuts", that Murray Walker used to commentate on Formula 1 races "like his trousers were on fire, whilst the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves", that participation of President Gerald Ford in a pro-celebrity golf tournament "was more than enough to remind you that the nuclear button was at one stage at the disposal of a man who might have either pressed it by mistake or else pressed it deliberately in order to obtain room service" and the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland as having “Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.”.
Everything I have ever written in the course of my life consists of me trying and failing to write anything as explosively funny as that. Which possibly explains why his stuff reads so effortlessly. The best bits simply fly into his mind without his face ever seeing them coming. All with a marvellous, warm, comforting almost treacle-like voice, listening to him was like wearing headphones made from fresh-out-of-the-oven danish pastries.
Anyway. The media-centric wing of Twitter was filling to the brim with this kind of sentiment when happily, after about 30 minutes, a spokeswoman intervened to point out that Clive James is still very much alive, is "in fact in reasonable shape", and is "looking forward to years of working". At which point the tributes died down a little, not because they weren't heartfelt, but because they suddenly looked a tad presumptuous.
But it's nice to think Clive James got to read a series of warm tributes while he's still very much with us. Too often we speak warmly of people who influenced us when it's too late for them to hear us. These days the custom for social-media addicts is to issue a sad 250-character epitaph accompanied by a link to a YouTube clip of one of their finest moments.
We're so used to celebrities popping off these days that sometimes the odd one flies under the radar. Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, also recently headed off to that great running track in the sky, having left many people shocked he was also a highly-regarded doctor.
Usually when a famous name trends on Twitter, it means the famous body attached to it has either died or done something scandalous, and the tone of the messages makes it easy to tell which is which: it's a world of goodies and baddies, of bouquets and bollockings, hail-marys and hastags.
One day someone's going to die in the middle of a scandal and really catch everyone on the hop. And then, just as the wave of public sympathy crests, I pop up on this very blog to say they've got a face like a butcher's perineum, the social grace of a week-old cheese sandwich and the mental agility of a cork in a milk bowl. Or maybe that's just me reading about the exploits of Joey Essex again and can't resist the urge to call him out for being a brainless moomin who deserves fame as much as Nick Clegg deserves a room of Playboy models and a bucket of rasperry jam. I don't even know what that last simile means, but it's the sort of thing I say.
A while ago I got a bit of a shock when I saw a series of tweets full of praise and admiration for the voice of sardonic humour himself; Clive James. But Clive James wasn't dead or mired in scandal: he was ill. He is ill. And he'd given a radio interview in which, among other things, he spoke about his illness in his charming characteristically erudite terms. "I'm getting near the end," he said. "I'm a man who is approaching his terminus."
I felt sad, as along with Jeremy Clarkson, Charlie Brooker and Armando Iannuchi, much of my humour and outlook on the world, as well as my love of journalism, is influenced by Clive James.
One of the few occasions I was ever allowed to stay up past midnight as a boy was watching his hilarious "End Of The Year" shows for the BBC on many a New Year's Eve in the late 80's and early 90's. I always knew that Christmas was over and it was time for a New Year when Clive James came on my TV screen and cleverly diassembled the old one with his inimitable dry witty sarcasm. Sadly, for the poor buggers who can be bothered to scrape their eyeballs across my incoherant ramblings - which right now means you - I am no Clive James.
He has a way of gliding through sentences, effortlessly ironing a series of complex points into a single easily-navigable line, illuminating here and cogitating there, before leading you face-first into an unexpected punchline that makes your brain yelp with delight. He can swallow images whole and regurgitate them later as hallucinogenic caricatures that somehow make more sense than the real thing.
He once famously described Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like "a brown condom full of walnuts", that Murray Walker used to commentate on Formula 1 races "like his trousers were on fire, whilst the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves", that participation of President Gerald Ford in a pro-celebrity golf tournament "was more than enough to remind you that the nuclear button was at one stage at the disposal of a man who might have either pressed it by mistake or else pressed it deliberately in order to obtain room service" and the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland as having “Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.”.
Everything I have ever written in the course of my life consists of me trying and failing to write anything as explosively funny as that. Which possibly explains why his stuff reads so effortlessly. The best bits simply fly into his mind without his face ever seeing them coming. All with a marvellous, warm, comforting almost treacle-like voice, listening to him was like wearing headphones made from fresh-out-of-the-oven danish pastries.
Anyway. The media-centric wing of Twitter was filling to the brim with this kind of sentiment when happily, after about 30 minutes, a spokeswoman intervened to point out that Clive James is still very much alive, is "in fact in reasonable shape", and is "looking forward to years of working". At which point the tributes died down a little, not because they weren't heartfelt, but because they suddenly looked a tad presumptuous.
But it's nice to think Clive James got to read a series of warm tributes while he's still very much with us. Too often we speak warmly of people who influenced us when it's too late for them to hear us. These days the custom for social-media addicts is to issue a sad 250-character epitaph accompanied by a link to a YouTube clip of one of their finest moments.
Much more fruitful, if not very British, to gush at them while they're still in the room. Not every day, that would be nauseating. But now and then. Hence the uncharacteristic and frankly mawkish level of online fawning I'm displaying right now.
Thank you, Clive James; thank you, for not doing a Ken Dodd.
Thank you, Clive James; thank you, for not doing a Ken Dodd.