In 1960, four young men met in a London cafe and so began Beyond the Fringe and a revolution that would change the face of British culture. One of this satirical gang of four was Jonathan Miller, who looked like a kinaesthetic Anglepoise lamp, as it was said, in continual motion and spoke as if ideas gushed from him like water from a bottomless reservoir. Astonishingly profuse, giddyingly versatile and connective, endlessly restless and firing on all synapses, Miller was a neurologist who became all at the same time, like a magic trick performed in plain sight a comedian, a theatre and opera director, a presenter of a landmark TV series about the body, a public intellectual, a famous feuder and a man who had a bewilderingly eloquent and informed opinion on just about anything.
For decades, the two men were at the heart of British cultural life, both as theoreticians and practitioners
In 1962, a young man arrived in the UK from Australia, and irreverently, joyously, hilariously set about demolishing the walls between high and low art. The Observer TV columns that made him famous were essays of comic genius that treated all genres with equal seriousness and equal mockery. People who didnt even own a TV bought the paper to read the high-wire weekly performance. Clive James was a TV critic who was also a TV star, a literary reviewer who was at the same time a poet and novelist, practising what he mocked, thin-skinned about being mocked right back.
For decades, the two men were at the heart of British cultural life, both as theoreticians and practitioners. And now, within days of each other, they are both gone.
It may be hard for a young person today to understand how astonishingly new, fresh, radical, destabilising and glorious their achievements were then. They burst onto a dreary postwar society of austerity and grim respectability, of strict hierarchies, of Norman Wisdom and wet Sunday afternoons, of knowing ones place and keeping to it.
For both, not keeping to ones place was the point, overturning the rules was the point, puncturing pomposity, skewering pretension, mocking revered establishments, demolishing old certainties, exuberantly and loudly speaking about things that had previously been whispered or not mentioned at all. The old ways were dying. The world was for the young.
Miller once called himself an informaliser; he brought jukeboxes into opera productions and Wittgenstein into standup comedy. He turned his fierce, pliant, democratic intelligence on all manner of subjects: imitating a sat-upon sofa, directing Alice in Wonderland, talking about Shakespeare to schoolchildren, arguing with Jehovahs Witnesses who came to his door.
And James described himself as a premature post-modernist, insisting like the US film critic Pauline Kael that the creative impulse could flourish in every arena, in gameshows as well as classical music, soap operas as well as classical ones. In his (nearly 900-page long) collection of essays, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, he gives us his maverick A-Z of 20th-century culture that leaps nimbly between figures such as Louis Armstrong, Sigmund Freud, Terry Gilliam, Coco Chanel
TS Eliot wrote about the music hall, but he didnt get up on stage. George Orwell praised the art of seaside postcards, but he didnt paint any himself. Miller and James collapsed boundaries not just between high and low culture, but between theory and practice. They were fearless in this, sometimes unwise, and of course they made mistakes and made themselves vulnerable and ridiculous. James the TV critic would probably have slated James the TV star. Miller was constantly lampooned in Private Eye as a garrulous pseud: Dr Jonathan pouring out his convoluted verbosity. He himself was always regretful about giving up his career in medicine and ambivalent about some of his work. (Looking back, he said: You think, what on earth was all that about?)
James had a late flowering during his time of slow dying, though Millers last years of frailty were silent ones
One unintended consequence of this demolition of borders and reconfiguration of the cultural landscape was that professions that had traditionally been working class were now invaded by the middle classes: boys from public schools could become standup comedians. (This mobility does not seem seemed to work the other way round, although in the 16th century Thomas Wolsey, the son of a butcher, could became an archbishop and cardinal.) Actors come from Eton now.
Miller and James were in the public eye as young men, middle-aged men, old men. James had a late flowering during his time of slow dying, although Millers last years of frailty were silent ones. They remained men of their time, whichever time that was and of course, they were men. It is hard to imagine a woman being allowed such longevity, or being accepted as both hilarious and serious.
James had strange views about women (Cultural Amnesia performs its own act of selective forgetting, including only a handful of women in its 100 entries) and cranky ones about climate change. But the public largely forgave him, while Germaine Greer who arrived in the UK at about the same time as James and who changed the world and how we live in it more profoundly than he or Miller has not been treated so tolerantly. Women are not so easily excused when they behave foolishly or make mistakes; usually, they are not excused at all.
It is easy to say that there will never be their like again how could there be? Like Brigitte Bardot, they were products of the society that they set about revolutionising. Now we are living in the age they helped to make, where a monolithic culture has been kicked over and a postmodern one has taken its place: one where Sam Mendes can direct Shakespeare one month and James Bond the next; where Stephen Fry is a comedian and a public intellectual; where young people watch Love Island and read WG Sebald; where irony runs through our discourse, sincerity is suspect and truth up for grabs.
For decades, Miller and James seemed unquenchable and unstoppable. It is strange to think that they both were stopped at the same time, two worlds ending. As James once wrote: I could go on, except I cant.
Nicci Gerrard is an author
See original here:
The playful pair who pricked the grim respectability of postwar British culture - The Guardian
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