One of the most ruefully remembered moments of my life was missing 'running into' (i.e. being in the same room as) Clive James by this much one morning at Melbourne radio station Triple R's studios. Evidently - as I wasn't aware he was being interviewed - he left literally a minute before I arrived to do my bit. I was, in a word, gutted, because for this little black duck, meeting Clive James would've been akin to meeting god.

I've always been a fan of ol' squinty, in both his writerly/television criticism mode and his television presenting incarnation (I can take or leave his poetry). I can regularly be found laughing to myself for no apparent reason - at least to the observer - other than recalling my uproarious reaction to his line from Postcards From Berlin, regarding the ultimate auto lemon the Trabant, "The controls fell easily to hand, and from there onto the floor."

Possibly his highest profile - and, thus, most uneasily regarded - television moment (at least in the eyes of Gen XYZzz) was The Clive James Show, a glossy chat show that showcased everyone from The Spice Girls to Graeme Garden and Les Patterson (which is actually not that broad a variety of guests, really). While we're on the topic of the former, if you ever wanted to see Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham pretend to hump Clive James while he kisses Sporty Spice, here's your chance:




Thanks largely to James' formidable brain and deadpan-to-the-point-of-horizontal delivery, The Clive James Show was a lot better than most chat shows/tonight shows of the mid-to-late-'90s, but the reasons I remember it most fondly were James' occasional (if slightly indulgent) dips into hysterical video moments and offbeat "personalities". If for no other reason, we should thank him and the show's producers for giving us the magnificent Margarita Pracatan:


You see, we now cack ourselves at video snippets of online phenomena like Chocolate Rain and Chaccaron, but James was far ahead of that particular internet eight-ball back when we were amazed just to type our own names into AltaVista and AskJeeves.com.

Sure, his hiring of Pracatan (who, yes, is 100% For Real) was for freak show value, but what might seem mean or snide in retrospect looks incredibly prescient in these days of questionable online "fame" dealt via backhanded compliments and earnest idiots like William Hung who think they're actually being celebrated as great artists when in fact they are the video equivalent of laughing at a primary school "spastic" impression. Pracatan and James were willing and complicit in their trashmongering.

But it struck me, while recounting a classic Clive James Show moment a week or so back, that James was - in essence - "doing" YouTube before the infamous video purgatory's developers were even finished their secondary schooling.

Because technically and more compellingly for my argument this began with his 1982 - 1988 stint hosting ITV's ...On Television, essentially a clip show highlighting hilarious ephemera from world television (the show continued without James' hosting for many years, and was in some ways responsible for introducing The Jerry Springer Show to a wider audience in the early '90s). Here's a snippet from the Christmas special in 1987:



"Be careful little eyes what you see" indeed.

James primary motivation for dredging up these video oddities was surely point-and-laugh value (indeed, he was installed as host of ...On Television rather than collating it per se), but there's something much deeper at work. It might be a celebration of low culture, or the society of the spectacle, or whatever, but James' offerings were hardly the precursor to Mike Goldman's Download. 

In a pleasingly circular way, James devotes a corner of his website to "Video Finds", the bits and pieces he's dredged from his cinematic/televisual/musical memory via the wonders of the internet. He also provides a potted, if thin-on, selection of his own greatest hits on film.

YouTube itself is unfortunately less forthcoming when it comes to classic James moments and so, frustratingly, you'll just have to take my word for it when it comes to some of The Clive James Show's greatest video finds, including a hysterical etiquette video that earnestly detailed how a lady should never wear a strapless gown to the dinner table, lest she "appear naked above the centrepiece" (with helpful visual example of said dinner/fashion faux pas).

James returned from the vid, squinting, with the wryly delivered, "The last time I wore a strapless gown at the dinner table" - and I'm not sure if there was actually a punchline to that anecdote, as everyone - my household and the studio audience included - was laughing too much to hear anything.

It was a situation that occurred, frequently, some ten years later when we started discovering the wonders of YouTube and the room would collapse in gales of LOL, but whenever I see people forwarding a wacky '80s self-help video or a tone-deaf international diva, I fondly recall when Clive James' video finds fell straight to hand, and from there we fell onto the floor.