Renowned Critic and TV Host Clive James Dies at 80

(Bloomberg) -- Clive James, the Australian expatriate who forged a career in the U.K. as a television chat-show host and as a writer of more than 30 books for five decades, has died. He was 80.

He died at home in Cambridge, England, on Nov. 24, according to the Associated Press, citing his representatives, United Agents. James was diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema in 2010, and also suffered from kidney failure.

James was among a group of prominent Australian intellectuals, including author Germaine Greer and Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, who left their homeland in the 1960s to make a name for themselves in “Swinging” London, a magnet for young people challenging the social mores of the day. Like Greer and Hughes, James remained abroad for most of his life.

He started as a television presenter on the U.K. pop-music program “So It Goes” in the 1970s, later hosting the comedy chat shows “Clive James on Television” and “Saturday Night Clive.” James expanded his range by writing lyrics on six albums of songs with his Cambridge University friend Pete Atkin, and also worked on radio shows, such as “A Point of View,” a British Broadcasting Corp. opinion-based production.

Autobiography Series

James’s biggest success came with his five-volume autobiography that began in 1979 with “Unreliable Memoirs,” which covered his childhood. The second installment, “Falling Towards England” (1985), chronicled his move to London in 1962 carrying just a suitcase and 10 pounds in his pocket. The third part, “May Week Was in June” (1990), dealt with his time at Cambridge University. The series was continued with “North Face of Soho” (2006) to cover his years of fame, though he remained characteristically modest: The last part was titled “The Blaze of Obscurity” in 2009.

“All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light,” he wrote in his third volume of the autobiography. “Everything I say is obvious, although I like to think that some of the obvious things I have said were not so obvious until I said them.” The books became best-sellers and included four novels, poetry, sport and travel writing and literary criticism.

Early Life

Vivian Leopold James was born in Sydney on Oct. 7, 1939. His father died in a plane crash returning from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Clive, as he preferred to be known, was raised by his mother, who was a factory worker.

James studied psychology at the University of Sydney then worked as an editor on the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper before leaving Australia. After arriving in the U.K. in 1962, he studied English literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he wrote for student magazines and was president of the Footlights theater group.

The Australian writer was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2012, a U.K. honor directly below a knighthood.

In 2012, James said in a BBC interview that that he was “getting near the end” of his life. He was so sick that he wasn’t allowed to travel by air. Tabloid newspapers reporting then that his death was imminent had exaggerated his condition by taking his words out of context, he wrote in an article headlined, “Still Here.”

A writer of poems, his many volumes included “The Book of My Enemy” and a translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which was published in 2013.

A 2014 poem, “Sentenced to Life,” longs for the “glowing colors” of the Pacific Ocean sky above Sydney. Another, published in 2011 and titled “Procedure for Disposal,” had the closing words:

If I, that is, should finally succumb
To these infirmities I’m slow to learn
The names of lest my brain be rendered numb
With boredom even as I toss and turn,
Then send my ashes home, where they can fall
In their own sweet time from the harbour wall.

James was married to Prue Shaw, a philology professor, and had two daughters, Claerwen and Lucinda.

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