When Karl Miller asked him to contribute a column to The Listener, which kickstarted his career as a professional TV critic, he simply wrote about the programmes he was watching anyway. As a neophyte freelance writer in the late 1960s, he channel-hopped through the evening at his Swiss Cottage flat before settling down to write through the night. While studying at Cambridge, he would watch the set in the Footlights’ clubroom, until the channels shut down. Since first properly encountering TV on arriving in Britain in 1961, he has been gripped by its scale, variety and ubiquity. In fact, James has always been a binge-watcher (as well as a binge-reader and, especially in the last few bountiful years, a binge-writer). After he was diagnosed with leukaemia in a “polite but insidious form” in 2010, he began binge-watching on Saturday afternoons, often in the company of his daughter Lucinda, four or five episodes of NYPD Blue or The Sopranos on the bounce. For Hill Street Blues was the shape of things to come – one of the first in a long line of US serial dramas that dealt in subtle, many-layered narrative, and demanded intellectual and emotional commitment from viewers.įor James, as for many of us, the long-form TV serial is now consumed via the box set. Back then, he thought that Hill Street Blues was about as clever as American TV would ever get, and that “seriousness, sophistication, and the thrill of creativity could be supplied only by the older, wiser, more mature nations”. When James gave up writing about TV to appear on it more often, Dallas and Dynasty were in their pomp. His style, smart as paint and full of esoteric references, but entranced by the stupid and the stupidly enjoyable, has been widely copied but never surpassed. Indeed, his reviews were often more inventive than the programmes he wrote about, given his focus on the cheap US imports, light entertainment shows and soap operas that most viewers watched and most reviewers ignored. From 1972 to 1982, on the back page of the Observer Review, he turned the witty television column into an art form. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.W ith this book – after a few decades spent making TV shows, writing poetry, cultural criticism and memoir, and translating Dante – Clive James returns to the field he made his own. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls. Season of the Deep launches later today, and I will begin coverage of that in full tomorrow.įollow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Fun armor skins! I will be buying them all. In any case, something lighter to start with. PlayStation is attempting to lean really hard into those in the future, having I guess “mastered” high quality single player games but having perilously few live games which print money in ongoing revenue. Past that, Bungie has been attempting to teach largely single player Sony studios on how to build a sustainable live service game in an industry when so many of those fail. There’s also rumblings that one of Sony’s new media projects could be a Destiny animated series. We should be a year or so away from at least the announcement of Bungie’s next, non-Destiny game, that is no doubt some sort of multiplayer live service offering. On a more serious note, the real work of Bungie at PlayStation still feels like its only just begun.
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