No wonder Clive James thought he was writing his own obituary when he was interviewed by John Wilson for the Radio 4 series, Meeting Myself Coming Back (Saturday night). Wilson played him a clip from a recent Mastermind programme on which one of the Specialist Subjects was…Clive James. ‘I was halfway between being amazed and appalled,’ he told us. ‘I’m already being treated like some kind of historic monument.’
His mistake was to have agreed to do the programme in the first place. The series is made by the Archive on 4 team, whose job is to ferret around in the BBC’s repository of lost conversations, old achievements, forgotten soundtracks like audio archaeologists searching for mummies in the Valley of the Kings. After being forced to listen again to an hour’s worth of clips from his past, James, like an ancient pharaoh, began to wonder, ‘How much of this stuff can I take with me?’
From the off he sounded as if he was preparing us for his own imminent demise: ‘I’m getting near the end…I’m a man who is approaching his terminus.’
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