Clive James

Clive James dies aged 80

Clive James, the Australian writer and broadcaster known around the world for his dry wit, has died at the age of 80.

While this Jason Manford-helmed retrospective of annual events hardly seems a comparable tradition to Clive James's satirical compendiums of yesteryear, AFOY has nethertheless become a regular annual entry in the schedules. Joined by some of the biggest names in British comedy, Manford cocks a wry Mancunian snook at py]2014[/y]'s most exciting and exasperating moments. Expect the Suárez bite, Ukip, and bendy iPhones to be given the full treatent.

In The Trip to Italy, Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan took their competitive impersonation skills to a new level when one of them impersonated Saddam Hussein impersonating Frank Spencer, and the other impersonated Roger Moore impersonating Tony Blair.

I lost track of who was which, but it was virtuoso stuff. Meanwhile they were eating the greatest of Italian food while surrounded with British upmarket honey-blonde chalet girls.

More mature by the episode, Steve retired to bed alone for a nap. Rob pulled one of the girls but might have dished his chances by showing her a picture of his daughter. By now the chaps are so well established in their characters that they can do uncharacteristic things. I have seldom seen a British comedy series quite so inventive.

W1A continued to do what it had done before, but it was still very funny. As the amiably bumbling intern Will, Hugh Skinner mastered the art of putting his verbal tics together into complete arias. "Cool, yeah, no worries, yeah, cool." Then the reality of his own personality suddenly became clear to him. "Sometimes I'm completely useless." But he was never aware for long of his own limitless potential for chaos.

In Will's continuing struggle to match the envelopes with the invitations, the invitation for David Cameron turned out to be in the envelope addressed to the Prince of Wales. Then the envelope addressed to David Cameron turned out to contain an invitation to Joan Bakewell. I hope I got that right. Will, of course, had no such hopes until too late. The show was a hoot like the voice of Siobhan Sharpe, but let's not forget that the Beeb is really like that.

Clive James: Why I went for vintage comedy this Xmas

Clive James reviews last week's Christmas TV including Victoria Wood's Mid Life Christmas (BBC Two), Tommy Cooper's Christmas Special (Channel 5) and Morecambe and Wise (BBC Two).

In its second episode, Ambassadors (BBC Two) really started to motor.

Highly enjoyable, The Wrong Mans (BBC Two) is also highly recognisable, as if it had been designed to fulfil all the requirements of British screen comedy.

Chapters of The Trip (BBC Two), starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, are still churning around on the repeat circuit. At a low moment during my viewing week I happened to switch on the show in which the boys unleash their Michael Caine impersonations, and in no time I was feeling better about life.

Radio Times review

I've watched Dave Allen: God's Own Comedian (Monday BBC2; iPlayer) twice now. I'll probably watch it another eight or nine times, in the hope that any of Allen's essence can somehow enter my soul. This was less a film about how to be a TV comedian, more a film about how to be.

Dave Allen had a spark, a glint. He had no fear. He knew he had his s**t straight. He trusted his mind. He was always looking for mischief. He was curious. He loved his family. He never stopped thinking. If it was funny, he'd say it.

You could see it as he bounded onto the stage to present his first big TV show, in Sydney in 1963. At 26, in his second foreign country - he'd left Ireland at 16 and left his friends The Beatles behind in England ten years later - he was brazenly flirting with the studio audience. He had it. Soon Australia had given Dave, unutterably sexy at that point with his black hair and charmed eyes, his own chat show, which from the clips in God's Own Comedian seemed to consist of him larking about aimlessly and assuredly with female co-hosts and, in one extended sequence, risking his life to demonstrate how to escape from a submerged car. Advised to stay in Australia and build on his success, Allen followed his first wife back to England and simply repeated it there.

This documentary about one of the best stand-up comedians in British TV history didn't actually contain very much of his stand-up, because what audiences were buying wasn't a series of jokes, but time with Dave Allen - a share of the drink that was normally in his hand, on and off stage. "They wanted him to like them," explained Mark Thomas, a writer for Allen's later shows. Allen's honest independence was alluring but it took him, quite naturally, to extremely controversial places.

The flint inside the laconic exterior was formed young. Allen's newspaper-editor dad, a major local celebrity, had died when his son was 12, leaving the family struggling. But before that, a Catholic education had woken Allen up. "They hit me. They pulled my hair. They punched me. They demeaned me. None of them were qualified teachers."

Allen's material about the Catholic church wasn't revenge, exactly. The Pope stripteasing, the "nuns farting next to lilies" and the rest came more from his fascination with humans at their hypocritical worst. He grinned widely when asked which of his routines about religion had offended the IRA: "Most of them!" If it was true, he'd say it. Allen was a mainstream household name but did sketches about Apartheid, because he wanted to. His popularity kept rising.

Craven celebs would have consolidated with safe options. Allen wandered off to present a series of proto-Theroux documentaries on eccentric and marginalised people, drawing on his equal fascination with humans at their best. He took a straight acting role as a man in mid-life crisis in an Alan Bennett TV play. Allen was "looking for the meaning of life", said one of his collaborators, and that didn't sound ridiculous.

About the only black note in this fantastic programme - which may have glossed over all sorts of monstrous flaws in Allen's character, although I suspect it didn't and don't much care - was his last full series for the BBC in 1990, which was dogged by green-inkers moaning about the swearing. We saw Allen eruditely explain in a Clive James interview that there are more important things in the world to worry about than "rude sounds", but the Beeb caved and Allen was wounded. It was an ironic, pathetic, trivial but illuminating example of what Allen stood against and why he mattered.

Not that he thought he mattered much, Dave Allen being one of the few things in which Dave Allen didn't take too much interest. He made the best show he could but then went home, exchanged his smart stage garb for scruffy linen, and got on with reading, painting, drawing, and hosting sprawling weekenders for his extended family and friends. The ghost stories he would petrify the kids with at the Allen house in Devon sounded like better gigs than any of the TV ones.

"He had these many many abilities but he held them quietly," observed his widow Karin. Allen knew it was just a ride and, as Cyril Connolly ambiguously said, you can't be too serious. Finally, God's Own Comedian dealt with the mystery of the missing forefinger on Allen's left hand, by refusing to answer it. He'd told everyone something different: as his associates related the tale they'd heard, they had his glint in their eye.

So this is the time to point out to the furiously shouting Charlie that he himself is part of the entertainment on the box and that it therefore can't be all bad. He has a way of putting things that makes a funfair out of the apocalypse.