Australian broadcaster and author Clive James has died at the age of 80 after a long illness, his agent has said.
The popular writer was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2010 and passed away at his home in Cambridge, England on Sunday.
A private funeral was held on Wednesday and attended by family and close friends.
“Clive died almost 10 years after his first terminal diagnosis, and one month after he laid down his pen for the last time," said his manager, United Agents.
"He endured his ever-multiplying illnesses with patience and good humour, knowing until the last moment that he had experienced more than his fair share of this ‘great, good world’.”
James had a long and ultimately unsuccessful operation in February to remove a cancer in his cheek, which left him frail and almost blind, his website said.
He had leukemia and emphysema diagnosed, and suffered kidney failure in 2010.
"I am a man who is approaching his terminus," James said in 2012.
But he continued to broadcast until this year and only gave up on writing last month.
The poet, essayist, author and entertainer had a gift for tickling the divergent sensibilities of the readers of highbrow literary magazines and the audiences of Saturday night TV in Britain, his adopted country.
James was treasured for his comic gift, learned literary criticism and deep love for the written word.
In one of his best-remembered book reviews, he said an official Soviet biography of President Leonid Brezhnev as so dull that: "If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead."
James, in his self-deprecating way, once imagined an acquaintance describing him as "the boy from the bush who could quote Wittgenstein".
He was born in 1939 in the Sydney suburb of Kogorah. He was an only child whose father survived a Japanese Second World War prison camp only to die on the flight home, when his son was 6.
James said he had no memory of his father but he looked back on the death and his mother's despair as the defining moments of his life.
"I understood nothing except that I could not help," he wrote in Unreliable Memoirs, the first of five autobiographical volumes.
"Eventually in my mid-30s I got a grip on myself. But there can be no doubt that I had a tiresomely protracted adolescence, wasting a lot of other people's time, patience and love."
Christened Vivian after the Australian tennis star Vivian McGrath, James won permission from his mother to choose an unequivocally masculine name.
He picked Clive from the character played by Tyrone Power in the 1942 film This Above All.
A scholarship for war orphans paved his way to Sydney University, for which James claimed to be unprepared.
But he read hungrily, contributed to the school's literary journal and became its editor.
After a stint at the Sydney Morning Herald, James left for Britain and Cambridge University.
He was already bridging the worlds of academia and showbiz, and served as president in 1966-67 of the Footlights.
The university club spawned stars including Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Germaine Greer, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Sacha Baron Cohen.
Despite academic success, he fell into depression in his 20s.
"The proof that I was getting ready to jump off a cliff or stick my head in an oven, that I was serious, was that I was giving my books away," he told the Financial Times in 2007.
"It was largely because I was lost, I had no outlets and I wasn't expressing myself. I wasn't doing what keeps me stable now, which is having a stage and a platform."
One of a number of famous Australians in Britain at the time, James went on to become a big name in British television and radio in the 1980s.
As an author and critic, he was influential in media circles as he won awards for journalism and broadcasting.
His often coarse, dead-pan style peaked in popularity in the 1980s with the show Clive James on Television, in which he lampooned clips of absurd international TV shows, in particular a Japanese contest called Endurance.
As comfortable writing about low-brow as he was with intellectual culture, his self-deprecating book of memoirs was a bestseller reprinted dozens of times.
James's book Cultural Amnesia, comprising short essays about more than 100 people who fascinated him, testified to the breadth of his cultural and intellectual interests.
They included writers Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, filmmaker Federico Fellini and musicians from Duke Ellington to Erik Satie.
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How Filipinos in the UAE invest
A recent survey of 10,000 Filipino expatriates in the UAE found that 82 per cent have plans to invest, primarily in property. This is significantly higher than the 2014 poll showing only two out of 10 Filipinos planned to invest.
Fifty-five percent said they plan to invest in property, according to the poll conducted by the New Perspective Media Group, organiser of the Philippine Property and Investment Exhibition. Acquiring a franchised business or starting up a small business was preferred by 25 per cent and 15 per cent said they will invest in mutual funds. The rest said they are keen to invest in insurance (3 per cent) and gold (2 per cent).
Of the 5,500 respondents who preferred property as their primary investment, 54 per cent said they plan to make the purchase within the next year. Manila was the top location, preferred by 53 per cent.
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More from Rashmee Roshan Lall
Tearful appearance
Chancellor Rachel Reeves set markets on edge as she appeared visibly distraught in parliament on Wednesday.
Legislative setbacks for the government have blown a new hole in the budgetary calculations at a time when the deficit is stubbornly large and the economy is struggling to grow.
She appeared with Keir Starmer on Thursday and the pair embraced, but he had failed to give her his backing as she cried a day earlier.
A spokesman said her upset demeanour was due to a personal matter.
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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Role Model: Sheikh Zayed, God bless his soul
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Favorite quote: To be or not to be, that is the question, from William Shakespeare's Hamlet
Favorite food: seafood
Favorite place to travel: Lebanon
Favorite movie: Braveheart
Our Time Has Come
Alyssa Ayres, Oxford University Press
The Sand Castle
Director: Matty Brown
Stars: Nadine Labaki, Ziad Bakri, Zain Al Rafeea, Riman Al Rafeea
Rating: 2.5/5
What you as a drone operator need to know
A permit and licence is required to fly a drone legally in Dubai.
Sanad Academy is the United Arab Emirate’s first RPA (Remotely Piloted Aircraft) training and certification specialists endorsed by the Dubai Civil Aviation authority.
It is responsible to train, test and certify drone operators and drones in UAE with DCAA Endorsement.
“We are teaching people how to fly in accordance with the laws of the UAE,” said Ahmad Al Hamadi, a trainer at Sanad.
“We can show how the aircraft work and how they are operated. They are relatively easy to use, but they need responsible pilots.
“Pilots have to be mature. They are given a map of where they can and can’t fly in the UAE and we make these points clear in the lectures we give.
“You cannot fly a drone without registration under any circumstances.”
Larger drones are harder to fly, and have a different response to location control. There are no brakes in the air, so the larger drones have more power.
The Sanad Academy has a designated area to fly off the Al Ain Road near Skydive Dubai to show pilots how to fly responsibly.
“As UAS technology becomes mainstream, it is important to build wider awareness on how to integrate it into commerce and our personal lives,” said Major General Abdulla Khalifa Al Marri, Commander-in-Chief, Dubai Police.
“Operators must undergo proper training and certification to ensure safety and compliance.
“Dubai’s airspace will undoubtedly experience increased traffic as UAS innovations become commonplace, the Forum allows commercial users to learn of best practice applications to implement UAS safely and legally, while benefitting a whole range of industries.”
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