"… intelligible fiction, which we discuss with one another all the more learnedly because we don't really understand what Putin is up to in Ukraine, or what, whatever it is, can be done about it." (pg. 22)

A slight, conversational ramble through our purported 'Golden Age of Television', Play All ultimately disappoints. Veteran critic Clive James does not bring his full weight to bear on an examination of our prestige-drama, binge-watching age, and limits himself to only short, passable chapters on whichever box set he and his daughter are powering through at the time.

Despite some good lines (Peter Dinklage's performance as the dwarf Tyrion in Game of Thrones is said to have such an impact "that he suddenly made all the other male actors in the world look too tall" (pg. 167)), James' insights into the various TV shows are unremarkable and the book as a whole lacks focus. He neither traces out a narrative of a 'Golden Age' of television nor skewers one, and his observation that part of the appeal of the long-form TV drama is that it allows an opportunity for longer exploration and development of a character (pg. 33) is an obvious one. The only time the reader feels animated by the commentary is when the author delivers an odd (and usually unsubstantiated) opinion, such as that Weeds is better than Breaking Bad (pg. 105) and that Walter White is dull (pg. 101), or that Mad Men is unconvincing because the men in it do not read books (pp129-30).

Ultimately, Play All fails because there's no attempt at objectivity or level-headed analysis; James delivers his verdicts based on idiosyncratic personal preference. By far the most bizarre manifestation of this is his casual lechery, harmless as it is. Just about every female actress is noted for how attractive they are, and the worth of any particular TV show heavily influenced by how 'delectable', 'voluptuous' or 'magnetic' James finds its female stars (I wasn't keeping a tally, but it became so routine that when James mentioned Elisha Cuthbert of 24 and didn't comment on her sex appeal, it stood out like a sore thumb). Breaking Bad became less interesting for him when the 'beauty' Jane left the show (pg. 104), and Weeds was a better show because it had a female lead to hold his red-blooded interest (pg. 105).

I don't have a problem with James being toothlessly leering in this way, as clumsy as it is, though I can't say I'm a fan of it either. Certainly, the TV shows today don't have any qualms about using sex to sell their product, so it shouldn't be an issue that James, the consumer, repays them in kind by judging them on that basis. The problem here is twofold: firstly, that this superficial drooling forms about 40% of the total content in Play All, which is far too much; and secondly, James allows it to influence his commentary to a ridiculous extent. As with the rationale above that Weeds is better than Breaking Bad because of the interesting female, it is worth noting that James is entirely dismissive of True Detective (pg. 111). He provides no argument for this, but the vast majority of his writing on this particular show (which amounts to just a single page) concerns the sex scene with Alexandra Daddario, despite this being one entirely gratuitous scene unconnected to the wider story. I asked myself, not for the first time and not for the last, why I should care about James' thoughts on any of this.

James' peculiarity, then, has a detrimental impact on the quality of his book as a whole, and the lusty cataloguing of various actresses' delectability makes it even more bewildering when he criticises Mad Men for providing a 'parody' of a sexual woman in Christina Hendricks' Joan (pp128-9). In truth, it is James who is falling into a self-made trap of self-parody, and the flaky icing on the poorly-conceived cake comes at the end, when he delivers a ham-fisted and entirely left-field speech on "justice for women", not only in TV or entertainment but in politics and society as a whole, for when men step aside, we will find that the women are "wiser than us" (pg. 197).

Tacked on at the end, this mealy-mouthed appeal did nothing to remedy the fact that the book had lacked a coherent through-line. Even without a theme, the book could have retained some value had it provided some originality when discussing its pick-'n'-mix of TV shows. Success in a book like this would be if the reader went away wanting to know what the author would think about other TV shows that have emerged since, but, though James is genial company, we don't. Often we don't even know what he thinks – in sufficient depth – about those he has mentioned. ( )

My interest in long-form drama is relatively recent . I went almost a decade in my 20s without a television. Without articulating it, I think I was drawn to the format by the potential for both pacing and proportion. Perhaps it was the adaptation of Little Dorrit, it was certainly The Wire. Historically I have slated these binges for the summer when futbol takes a brief hiatus and those frequent, fleeting spots of holiday.

Clive James freely admits he's living on borrowed time and that he's steeped in the vices and virtues of the small screen. An unfortunate aspect of this text is that while praising a series he gives away critical plot developments. That said I am now looking to view the Arne Dahl adaptations in the near future.
Here are my favorite shows of the last year:
Preacher
Silk
Mr. Robot
I think without emphasis, James is also attracted to the binge as a shared activity. He vividly paints the viewing and ensuing conversations with his daughters. I can relate to that with my nerdy interest in philosophy and Jean-Luc Godard. It is nice watching Indian Summers with my wife and then talking about such on a long walk. That said, I can't fake it. Outlander and Peaky Blinders fail to move me. Cue the final line from Some Like It Hot. ( )

Wondering what Clive James would have thought of Game of Thrones feels a bit like wondering what Ruskin would have thought of Banksy, and yet here, delightedly, we are. As James likes to remind us in his columns, he isn't actually dead yet, despite a nasty leukaemia that's looked like finishing him off any day for the last five years. And what better way to pass this borrowed time than by sitting with his two daughters and binge-watching our new golden age of TV programmes. The Sopranos, The Good Wife, 30 Rock, Breaking Bad and dozens more are all here, filtered through his customary sardonic learning, impossible to read without hearing the cadences of his nasal, mellow Australian tones.

It should be no surprise that he's turned his attention to these shows: his Observer column in the 70s so revolutionised television criticism that it practically invented it. Indeed his glee at engaging with what used to be called ‘low culture’ is one of his most appealing traits, the more so because he approaches it with a more formidable arsenal of high culture than almost any other critic around. When he compares Don Draper to Truffaut's L'homme qui aimait les femmes, part of the pleasure is in recognising that he would also review Truffaut with reference to Don Draper, and probably has.

Not that what he is actually saying is particularly new. When he comments that Mad Men allows us to ‘revel in the opportunity to look back and patronize the clever for not being quite clever enough to be living now’, or that the show ‘is a marketing campaign: what it sells is a sense of superiority’, he is saying the same thing that the other critics already said, only better than they said it. That's enough reason to read him, but more insights might have been nice too. There is also an edge of amiable but over-persistent leeriness to some of his expositions, which means you come away from this book knowing that he fancies Cersei more than Daenerys, finds Kate Mara delectable, and considers that the only reason to watch Ghosts of Mars is ‘Natasha Henstridge in a teddy’. I can roll my eyes over this stuff, but I'd rather not have to, even when I agree with him. It's not the content but the tone that feels misjudged, and being tone-deaf is not a criticism you would ever associate with Clive James on form.

It suggests that, in at least a few ways, he is not quite keeping up with the contemporary mood (despite some completely unexpected references in here to The Witcher 3 and Amy Schumer's ‘Last Fuckable Day’ sketch). And this goes for more than just mood. He spends a paragraph of his introduction considering the grammatical justification of talking about ‘box sets’ rather than ‘boxed sets’, but doesn't grasp that no one has used either of those terms since streaming services made them both obsolete. Someone get this man a Netflix subscription, pronto.

Anyway, the pleasures of this book vastly outnumber its niggles. Some of the lines in here are fantastic: on Mad Men (again) he talks about the women having to deal with ‘a glass ceiling that's been set at floor level’, while Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones ‘had such an impact that he suddenly made all the other male actors in the world look too tall’. Whatever its subject, a sentence written by Clive James is always worth reading, indeed studying. I hear him in everything I write, and after he's gone I'm going to spend the whole time wondering what he would have thought about whatever new cultural phenomenon is in circulation. This book, which answers the question, can only feel like a gift. ( )

I don't think I'd like Clive James in person (for one, he comes across as sexist in this book), but I have to admit, I gobbled up this book quickly. ( )

https://shawjonathan.com/2017/01/03/clive-jamess-play-all/ ( )