Behold: a video channel that pre-dates YouTube

An old-fashioned recommendation, delivered in writing

Video clips are staples of online life. Besides those irritating viral-meme-gif things that people mistakenly assume can be deployed as examples of incisive wit and a sparkling sense of humour, there is also a vast universe of real talks, interviews, and documentary explainers. Many of these are exceptional, but hard to parse, given the rate at which they flow through our social media feeds.

Online videos are so ubiquitous that it is hard to imagine that there was a time when it was a rare thing to make a video available on the internet, and a truly audacious and groundbreaking idea to consider recording a video purely for the purpose of putting it online.

When did it begin? YouTube was launched in 2005, so you would assume that it could not be any earlier than that.

I am no internet scholar, so I cannot say who did it first, but the first effort I came across was the set of interviews conducted by the critic Clive James, which date from 2000. They are absolute gems.

Clive James had previously hosted a number of successful UK television shows and was also a prolific and wide-ranging critic and author. After he retired from television he set up a website, which in itself was not groundbreaking, since by 2000 setting up a website was already passé, but he clearly had dreams of great things. First as an archive of his own writing, and then as a gateway and guide to the universe of the arts. The most daring feature, and presumably the most time-consuming and expensive, was a series of video interviews.

The “expensive” part may be hard to understand now. It is hard even for me to believe, and I remember how it was at the time. Hints remain in the archived early pages of the site. Back when it was in its infancy, there were regular updates hand-wringing about the lack of funds and sponsors, and the likelihood that very soon the entire thing would disappear through lack of support. As James explained it, the more people who watched, the more it cost! These days it is trivial, and free, to not just create a website, but to host audio and video on it. You're reading this on just such a site! But, even for a famous and successful and presumably well-off veteran of television journalism, with all of the connections and experiences and resources that entailed, the notion of an “internet channel” felt like a fantasy.

Nonetheless, he recorded three “series” of interviews in 2000 and 2001, and they featured on his website, clivejames.com, and that is where I watched them. Clive James died in 2019, but the website is still maintained, and all of those early interviews can be found in the Video section. Needless to say, the videos themselves are now hosted on YouTube.

My purpose here is not just to provide a snippet of obscure internet history, but to advertise the actual interviews.

They are packed with wonders — insights, anecdotes, and oodles of recommendations for reading, listening and viewing. I first heard about Philip Roth in the Martin Amis interview, which is a gift that's hard to surpass. I read “Wild Swans” after watching the Jung Chang interview, and watched “Alive” after Piers Paul Read.

My two favourites are undoubtedly Martin Amis and Terry Gilliam, and Gilliam in particular. The interview is not just full of amazing stories and fascinating discussions, but more than that it is wonderful to watch an interview that contains so much energy and exuberance. This is more common now. To appreciate my reaction you may have to go back and find standard celebrity television interviews from the same time. A typical interview was stilted and awkward, and set up to allow the interviewee to tell a few canned stories and plug their latest project. Sometimes there were attempts at “interesting” questions, but they never went anywhere. In these Clive James interviews it is two people talking as equals, and thoroughly enjoying themselves.

I was reminded of them in a recent Substack piece by Erik Hoel, where he argued that just as the ease of CGI sucks the creative energy from a film, so AI may come to suck the spark and genius out of, well, everything, I suppose. Let's see. But I was immediately reminded of Gilliam's rant about CGI in the Clive James interview — back then they were talking about Jurassic Park, and his own absolutely-no-CGI masterpiece, Brazil.

Gilliam is probably now dismissed in many circles as a grumpy old man, and back in 2000 he was on the verge of that — his best films were behind him, which I’ll get to — but he was fascinating to listen to, and his energy was inspirational. At the time he was struggling to make a film of Don Quixote. A few years later his failures were documented in “Lost in La Mancha”. Amazingly, the film finally got made in 2018 — twenty years after the first full production, and Gilliam now 78 years old. The final film, with Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, was a bit of a mess, but it was a triumph that it was made at all.

There were later interviews, sponsored from a variety of different sources (SkyArts in the UK, and then Slate magazine). Sadly not all of them are indexed on the website. I just found one with Nick Hornby¹. In this interview the two characters don't seem to really connect. Clive James wants to lay into the Da Vinci Code, and all who are stupid enough to think they enjoyed it, and Nick Hornby evades and remains generous. It often seems that James’s greatest ambition is to find plausible excuses to tell you how many books he’s read, and among his life’s exhaustive collection of laughably implausible excuses, the very worst may be taking a discussion of pop sensibility as an invitation to say, “I’m currently grappling with the later novels of Henry James”. It's still a great interview, but it also suggests that there really was something special about some of those earlier ones. There was a level of comfort and openness between the two interlocutors that allowed much more to come out from both of them².

One interesting juxtaposition in watching these interviews is that Terry Gilliam was close to the point in his career where someone might say in retrospect, “You would have been wise to stop there.” None other than Nick Hornby has just written a Substack piece on just this question — can the artist decide on the right moment to stop? He might think of his fellow Jamesian interviewee as an interesting case study. Should Gilliam have stopped after “The Brothers Grimm”, and avoided the tragedy of Heath Ledger dying during the filming of “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”, not to mention almost dying of a heart attack himself while making Quixote? Or is it better that he got to finally finish his dream project? I tend to go for the latter, and I think Hornby does, too: in a coincidental appearance of another recurring character, he reminds us of the late Philip Roth novels, which were in production when James and Amis were semi-dismissing him for his “humour hoarding”, and thankfully concludes, “I’m not done yet”.

The best of these interviews achieves what was impossible before the eruption of podcasts, and even now it is a rare podcast that rises to their level. Some of the participants are no longer here (Martin Amis, Victoria Wood, P.J. O'Rourke), and of course neither is their host, so the interviews are becoming an ever growing collection of voices we will not hear again. Enjoy!

Interviews:

Series One
Series Two
Series Three
(The 4th and 5th series lists are incomplete, but some, like the Hornby interview, can still be found.)

1. The audio and video quality aren’t great, which may explain why it’s not on the website’s main list.

2. Having got it into my head that the entire interview was slightly uncomfortable, I watched it a second time and was struck by how many times they laughed together. So let’s put it this way: just how often do you watch a TV interview and, instead of viewing it as a mix between a business transaction and a performance piece, instead think about how the two protagonists actually feel about each other?