Clive James was the Mozart of TV criticism, and we are just Salieris

He was a poet but crucially a wordsmith. Clive James loved television but it has served him ill since his death: all clodhopping telly can do is rerun clips of a plump James laughing at the Japanese. Which gives a foul mis-impression: think Billie Holiday picking her nose in an off-moment. But she could also sing, a bit, and James could also write, a bit.

Related: Clive James: the last interview

“All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light,” he said. Again I hated him for that truth, and for my inability. All TV critics, barring the deluded, have simultaneously revered James and loathed him for his immense way with words, hewn from a determined brain and a non-judgmental way of life. Subsequent critics are, collectively, Salieri to his Mozart.

As the Observer’s main TV reviewer, it’s been a hopeless haul aspiring to – while unconsciously apeing – the sheer flair of James. He invented the idea of high and lowbrow in a Sunday packet: equally at ease with the logical positivism of AJ Ayer or the teeth of Farrah Fawcett. Above all, there was a celebration of the medium, a surprised glee that the two could exist inside the same box.

He was also capable of snark. A review for the London Review of Books of Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz begins “To be a really lousy writer takes energy.” The review is a remarkable 3,200 words long. And searing throughout. But, by and large, he forgave those appearing on the small screen in the years when British television was being invented. He could be angry, impatient, but there was always a leavening, a soft aside, a wolfish grin. The more serious the matter in hand – remember he was writing when the war was fresh in many minds – the more he felt it important that you read the sentences. Hence he made them attractive to read. It sounds so simple.

TV was a different country then, of course. But one of his truths remains. “Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

In his own words

“Jimmy Connors has unleashed his new tactic, the Early Grunt. Since the grunt travels at the speed of sound, it arrives in the opponent’s court marginally before the ball does. Opponents try to hit the grunt” July 1979

“In I, Claudius (BBC2) Caligula ate Drusilla’s baby. For those with stronger stomachs, however, Noele Gordon was on Stars on Sunday (Yorkshire), persuading us, in a heart-wrenching tremolo …” 14 November 1976

“Spock, Kirk, Scotty and Mr Sulu suddenly appeared on the surface of a planet that looks exactly like a set. Appropriately enough, the planet seems to be populated exclusively by bad actors” October 1979

“Flash [Gordon], played with incomparable awkwardness by Buster Crabbe, battled the Mighty Beast of Mongo for the chill hand of Dale Arden, while oddly continuing to resist the blandishments of Ming’s hotcha daughter, Princess Aura. Sweating it out under the mangy fur, the actor inside the Mighty Beast costume was the legendary Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan. Flash, Crash, Mongo, Ming. It worries me that I possess this information” March 1980

[In a review of a Newsday interview of Albert Speer by Ludovic Kennedy] “He probably sincerely believes he didn’t know quite what was happening to the Jews. ‘I was only astonished by how it had happened ... the way it was done.’ If this meant anything, it meant that Speer knew the Jews were being wiped out, but thought that they were being wiped out in some acceptable way. If Speer couldn’t see that he had been self-revealing, there was no point telling him” March 1976

“You will never catch Sir Oswald [Mosley] admitting to antisemitism. All he does is embody it” November 1976