Smash hit

James’s desire to be productive drove him on. After graduating, he left for England in 1961 along with many of his peers: “It was in your mental map, the way pigeons navigate. And also, in the arts and the media, Australia was generally assumed to be a bit of a backwater.” By the early 1970s, James was immersed in the dissolute, heavy-drinking milieu of London literary and journalistic life.

“It was a waste,” he says. “What I objected to about alcohol was that it wasted time and brain cells. I treated time as if I had a lot of it. Nobody has a lot of it, and I eventually woke up to that. Alcohol was obviously doing something for me – God knows what it was doing to those who loved me.

“I drink socially now, I never drink alone. But I was a serious booze artist then. The thing that saved me was that I had a light head — the guys who really got into trouble had hollow legs. But the idea of dissipation was attractive to me then. Now I can’t think of anything more alien.”

Having turned his back on drink, James — who worked in London while his wife, the scholar Prue Shaw, lived in Cambridge with their two daughters — threw himself into writing and television. By the mid-1980s he had become a star on the back of shows such as Clive James on Television.

“I’m very grateful to TV. The first reason to be grateful is that it gave me time and money and it made my family safe; journalism would never have done that. And I was pleased with the attention that it drew automatically to anything else I did. But I never really enjoyed being so recognisable.”

Hence James’s decision to retire from the medium when it no longer tallied with his interests. “My ideal of interviewing people because they were interesting or bright was getting harder to do on TV. My own colleagues didn’t want me to interview, say, a prima ballerina at Covent Garden because the public might have trouble knowing what a prima ballerina was. They would point out that if you interview Geri Halliwell you get an extra million viewers. And you do — this is the thing that’s hard to argue against. It will keep the network happy. It just didn’t keep me happy.”

James bemoans the passing of the ideals that used to drive British television — “The whole concept that you would put things on for the enlightenment of the public” — but is busy championing such principles. Aside from the new memoir, he also runs a website that hosts the kind of intellectually free-flowing interviews he misses on television.

Crucially, however, he has finished Cultural Amnesia, his mammoth overview of 20th-century artists and their responses to historical challenges. With his suspicion of Islamic extremism and his fears about left-wing blindness to its challenges, it might seem that James is serious when he describes himself as “a curmudgeon and fuddy-duddy”, though he claims otherwise: “I’m still on the left in the sense that it has never once occurred to me to ally myself with the privileged as if the underprivileged were somehow threatening their advantages.” But he is worried about the intellectual and political complacency of our times.

“The thing to be pessimistic about is that as we advance further into liberal democracy, and rights are more and more equally shared between men and women and every race, the danger is that you’ll lose a grip on just how valuable that is. You’ll think that’s automatic, that it comes like the rain, but in fact it’s part of a vast historic structure that took time. And it’s part of the writer’s job to remind the young of this.”

It remains to be seen whether his forthcoming magnum opus can live up to such a task, but James’s broad intelligence and wide appeal means he is better placed than most to succeed. “As I said, I don’t like chance. And so much happened by chance: I was usually asked to do things, I hardly ever got a job that I went for and I never planned that far ahead. It’s very easy, looking back, to make it look like I had a scheme. I didn’t, I followed my nose. But I did get better at one thing — I got better at expressing myself.”

North Face of Soho is published by Picador