Tea and tears with an unfunny man

Clive James is a jolly, laid-back, witty Australian, right? Meeting him would be a pleasant, fun experience, leaving me with a warm glow and a skip in my step, right?

Well, er, it didn't quite work out like that. I left my interview with James respecting him far more than I expected - and yet feeling profoundly more miserable than I thought an hour with anyone could possibly induce.

I met him just over a year ago, and I have been haunted by the experience ever since. These days, when I see him joshing with Michael Parkinson on TV, or read his commentaries on the Olympics, I remember meeting a man who was bleeding - both mentally and physically. Allow me to explain.

It had been a miserable week for me, and it seemed as though the rain would never cease to fall on London, or on me personally. This interview was my treat to myself, something I had looked forward to for months. Good old Clive, I thought, he'll be a veritable dose of Prozac to remedy my blues.

But it quickly became apparent that James has paid a high price for his success. As I settled into my chair, he began to explain why he so rarely speaks to journalists. "Celebrity gossip is so out of hand that, if I could possibly do it all again, I'd do it under an assumed name or wearing a mask. The costs are too high."

Really? But why would anyone be nasty to Clive James? Surely he gets nothing but friendly slaps on the back from members of the public? "I did an interview a while back on some new programme I'm doing. A journalist agreed to the terms that we'd only talk about the programme and the editor says, 'Oh no, we must have a full profile', so he goes and puts two other reporters on it. They show my house in Cambridge. One of the papers published a two-page spread which included everyone he thought that I was supposed to know, and they showed a picture of the house. The next night a rock came through the window and scattered glass all over, near my child. And the house has been regularly robbed ever since. I have the editor to thank for that. And I'm only a minor celebrity. Suppose it's someone like David and Victoria Beckham. One of the papers just published a plan of the layout of the house. You may as well have a whole lot of arrows on it telling thieves where to park their car and where the kidnappers should arrive."

OK. This is so unexpectedly horrible that I switch into Hello!-magazine mode. Your family must have been a comfort when things got tough, I prattle, trying to think of some witty anecdotes I could prompt him into reciting for me.

He doesn't like this. James is very protective about his family, refusing even to name them. He recalls one journalist who accused him of "neglecting" them because he didn't list them in Who's Who; James simply didn't want to disclose their identities to the prying media. "If I had time, I'd write a little guidebook about what not to do, when handling the press. The press can't be managed. The only way you can manage the press is to not turn up. You don't have to answer their questions. This is my first interview in years, and I know you'll treat me well. But with most people, you should just not answer the question. 'Are you married, do you have children?' No, no comment. 'What do you think of Diana?' No comment. It's all you can do. But, even then, your silences will be taken as answers. There's no way out of it."

I see. Why, if he feels so strong-ly, did he then choose a life in the media glare? "I've been a show-off all my life. I think it started at the age of four, when I was barred from the birthday party of the kid next door. If you're that way, you may as well get as celebrated as you can, because people around you will suffer and so will you. I don't think it's the way to be if you can choose."

I must admit that, as a journalist, I felt pretty crap by this point. James had spent ten minutes eloquently explaining why the profession was full of bastards.

If it is still not clear why he feels this way, the source of his antipathy to the media can be summarised in one word: Diana. I can't draw him into speaking about his close friend the late Princess of Wales, not even the tiniest comment, because "whatever I say gets picked up by the press and they act like I go on about her all the time". It is evidently a painful topic - his body tenses up and, for the first time in the interview, he evades my gaze. He wrote a remarkable article in the New Yorker in the weeks following her death. Along with Julie Burchill's work, it was the most powerful and elegant writing to emerge from the cascade of prose that burst forth in those surreal weeks. In the agony following her crash, he wrote: "For the first time, I wish I had never met her. Then I might not have loved her, and would not feel like this. But I did meet and I did love her."

This is not the naive infatuation of an older man for a young beauty; he admitted that, "when the squeeze was on, she was a fruitcake on the rampage". He knows that "at least once, she lied to me outright". But he remains firmly on her side, understanding of her pain because, the article implies, he is similarly damaged. His father was killed when he was six, which, he explains in the article, was an early source of his bonding with Diana. But he resists the temptation to vilify the people she perceived in life as her enemies: he argues that "Diana's declaration, in her Panorama interview, that Charles might never reign was the single biggest mistake of her lifetime". The article is run through with such a visceral grief that I find it hard to read. Even as we sat in his office, several years after that disaster in Paris, I felt he had not recovered, and the memory of the princess still torments him.

This was not the only source of misery that became apparent in the course of our conversation. Surely, I thought, by shifting the conversation on to those lovely, humorous "Postcard" documentaries he makes, I could liven up the mood? "Africa scares me, anywhere that's out of Cairo. Ireland: there's a lot of places that scare the shit out of me. And I wouldn't go into a war zone if I could help it. You wouldn't find me fighting to get a story. But that's part of a character flaw." But, Clive, you've done lots of good things. I want to hug him and tell him it'll be OK. But we begin to talk about how the ghosts of the oppressed countries he has visited haunt him.

"1989. Tiananmen Square. I was there with my camera crew along the river. 300,000 people. And I had the only camera crew in the entire city. And because the people saw the cameras, they thought they could talk to the World Service and CNN. They began shouting for help to my camera, and I imagine if that had been a real TV camera, not a film camera, that would have been very, very important footage. But by the time it was developed, it wasn't news any more."

So what do you do to help yourself sleep at night when you get back to your cosy western bed?

"I got one guy out of China. He had a scholarship to come here anyway. And I arranged his flight. And he came here and studied. One person. And so what happened to the other 300,000 people who went by? I don't know." He then names another person whom he met in China - but insists that I don't print her name, for her own sake. "She ran a theatre. And she wrote me a letter afterwards. She couldn't get away. I couldn't even answer it be-cause she would have got a bullet in the head."

At this point, he started to bleed. Yes, to bleed. A scab on his head had become dislodged, and a trickle of thick red blood ran down his forehead. I began to fear that not only would this interview be miserable, but that Clive James might actually die. He declined a tissue.

I tried to find something cheerful to ask him about. He and Germaine Greer joined the Cambridge Footlights on the same day. She was the first woman member.

"It's quite a male environment - practically military." But Greer must have been fun? Cheerful, even? Well, he says, some brilliant female comedians are excluded from the Footlights. "Victoria Wood is a genius. But how she would have dealt with Cambridge had she been there? I can't imagine Footlights being able to be an incubator for her, although Mel and Sue - one of them was president of Footlights and obviously flourished." Greer was a great hit there, too - he says of her today that she "is a good example of someone who would have had to become famous or she would've gone nuclear. She certainly deserves her fame, but she finds it very uncomfortable and unsettling." I foolishly mention a biography of her that was written in 1999, and he says: "I pray nobody ever writes an unauthorised biography of me, because who are they going to speak to but your enemies?"

With that, we are back to the nature of fame. In an attempt to stave this off, I ask if he thinks things are better for today's generation of Cambridge students, the next Footlights, than they were for his. "I think it's harder and harder to live the kind of life that we did in the Sixties, where you could more or less be an intellectual hobo. It was a sort of hang-out. There was always a job somewhere, doing something clerical, casual or manual labour, and that's going to disappear for real. People think about jobs much more. I never really thought about jobs. And I honestly think I couldn't hold one down. I only turned up early when I actually owned the joint."

James is excessively self-critical. Again and again he makes comments that are not jokingly self-deprecating, but genuinely self-lacerating. He is a difficult person to spend an hour with: somebody so fiercely intelligent and yet so profoundly melancholy has a remarkable capacity to drag your serotonin levels to the floor. I didn't enjoy my interview. And now, whenever I catch a glimpse of him on television, so effortlessly jocular and sunny, I feel slightly jealous and wonder: why couldn't he do that for me? But I feel I saw something that isn't paraded for the licence-fee payers.

In the year since we met, James has significantly scaled back his television work. He covered the Sydney Olympics for the Independent in pieces so eloquent, so pungent, so bursting with life, that all those years he spent away from print journalism seemed like a tragic waste. I have followed his highbrow sparring with another towering intellectual force, Gore Vidal, in the letters pages of the Times Literary Supplement.

I have rediscovered his television criticism and novels, and I feel as though I've journeyed some way into that enigmatic, endlessly fascinating mind. I will never understand his secretive relationship with Diana. I will never, I suspect, understand how a person I saw so needy, so low, can bring so much light into the world. Troubling though the experience was, I am glad I met Clive James. I feel like I brushed up against a man of remarkable integrity. I just wish that I had been able to provide optimistic answers to the questions he so clearly tortures himself with.

This article first appeared in Varsity