Clive Anderson: 'For most people, I have ceased to exist!' - Telegraph Comedy News Clive Anderson: 'For most people, I have ceased to exist!' Barrister-turned-comedian Clive Anderson was the nation's darling - and then he seemed to vanish. Now at the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time in over a decade, Britain's wittiest 'natural-born pessimist' tells Dominic Cavendish what happened Clive Anderson: 'I still feel like I’m an 18-year-old in awe of the world' Photo: Rick Pushinsky Follow “Anyone in the public eye goes quite rapidly from ‘Who’s he?’, to ‘Oh, I love him!’, to ‘Oh, not him again!’. That happens to all of us. If you’re lucky, you settle back into ‘Oh, good, it’s him again.’ ” Clive Anderson is sitting in the cultivated gloom of a posh Moroccan eatery off Regent Street being incredibly sanguine – remarkably sunny, really – about the fickle nature of fame.

In the shadows, he still looks, so far as one can tell, a lot like the golden boy of yore, or at least the one-time poster-boy for Channel 4’s early days of doing things differently. A bit craggier, to be sure, now he’s 61, but the twinkle in the eye is there, the grin comes naturally, the dimply cheeks remain endearingly cherubic and, surprisingly, there is still a lot of hair for a man who appeared to be going bald in the late-Eighties. “It has gone at a slow rate,” he says with a smile. “Some people have overtaken me.” A dash of gravitas? He now has that too. “I still feel like I’m an 18-year-old in awe of the world,” he continues, in disbelief. But, if time has been relatively kind, the television industry hasn’t been nearly so gentle to the former criminal barrister who made a decisive break for showbusiness after a long, busy, dithery period of having a foot in both camps. Once upon a time, only two decades ago, Anderson was everywhere, the people’s favourite slightly nervy presenter.

He shot to success in 1988 as the twitchy, quick-witted host of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the long-running improvisation game-show that helped usher in the era of comedy’s new cultural dominance. And not long after that became a monster hit, he broke the mould again with a quirky, irreverent C4 chat show that anticipated the teasing, familiar way with celebrities that Alan Carr , Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross have now made almost wearyingly standard. Anderson always stood at the more Wildean end of the spectrum: witness his notorious put-down to Jeffrey Archer who, needled by the insult “Is there no beginning to your talents?”, retaliated with “The old jokes are always the best”, only to be parried with, “Yes, I’ve read your books!” The self-effacing upstart won the 1991 British Comedy Award as Top Entertainment Presenter. In so doing, he struck a blow for the buttoned-up, strait-laced chap-next-door. Key to his appeal was his apparent incongruity in a world of brazen show-offs. Here was someone who looked more like a city commuter than one of those citadel-storming alternative comedians.

It was a counter-intuitive radicalism. Related Articles 'I’ve suffered panic attacks all my life’ 23 Jul 2014 When his chat show moved to the BBC around the start of the New Labour era, it looked as if things could only get better. But, after garnering reasonable ratings and some headline-grabbing moments – the Bee Gees huffed off-set, affronted by his far-from-deferential asides – suddenly, in 2001, he became yesterday’s news. It wasn’t that he lost his lustre, he lost his platform. He wasn’t guillotined – he was left dangling by indecision. “It was an odd thing,” he recalls. “They said: ‘We don’t want you to carry on doing the chat show.’ ‘Why’s that?’ The audience figures weren’t going down. ‘We’re keeping ahead of the audience,’ they said. The controller wanted ‘something a bit different’ – we made one series of this different thing, by which time the controller had moved on. So they had a new show they didn’t want anymore. That was that. But it’s not a dreadful thing. You’re not there for life.

I had my time in the sun. You can’t complain.” Well, maybe he should have complained. I missed his gauche, jerky presence, and I’m sure others did too. These days, there would probably have been a Twitter campaign to get him back on our screens. Instead, he has to contend with strangers’ consolations. “I get a lot of people who say to me, ‘What has happened to you? Haven’t seen you for years.’ Which is true – I haven’t had a TV show for a long time.” He does crop up from time to time – a stint on Have I Got News for You here, a foray onto QI there, and he even hosted Discovery Mastermind for a year – but that barely registers. There is the radio of course, where he is a regular presence: he presides over the cultural chat-show Loose Ends on Radio 4 as well as the legal series Unreliable Evidence. “ ‘Oh … radio,’ they say. I’m dead as far as they’re concerned.

For most people, I have ceased to exist!” It is around his radio commitments in Edinburgh that he has scheduled a fortnight’s appearance on the Fringe – his first since a 2001 stage chat-show – which could, were another, less reticent Clive Anderson beating the drum for it, stir up huge excitement. In essence, the public is being treated to the closest thing yet to a live incarnation of Whose Line Is It Anyway? For legal reasons, the improv show has been named, after a slight muddle, What Does the Title Matter Anyway? Although he doesn’t have the rights to trade directly on past glories, enough of the gang who made Whose Line? a hit in the first place – including Americans Greg Proops, Mike McShane and our own improv veteran Josie Lawrence – are going to be on hand to satisfy devotees. That will be fun, won’t it, Clive? Hmm. Talking things up isn’t his forte, and Anderson is unsentimental about this get-together. When the idea was first suggested, he explains, it was less a case of leaping at the opportunity than struggling to find an excuse to show it the door.

“I’m usually a great one for saying, ‘I’m not quite sure whether that works’, but with this, try as I might, I couldn’t think of a reason why we shouldn’t do it.” He is confident that it won’t make much money and ponders what might have been had Whose Line? enjoyed a live outing back in the day. “You think: why didn’t we do it? I’ve heard stand-up comedians say they only do television in order to create a market for their million-pound tours. When we were big on telly, that was probably the time to do a stage-show.” It’s not quite Terry Gilliam dissing the Python reunion shows, but the pessimism is palpable. “I’m a natural-born pessimist,” he admits, quite affably. He thinks he has inherited that from his Glaswegian father. “It’s the Scottish Presbyterian this-will-never-work thing,” he says, the flip-side being a similar sense of humour. “He was quite a funny man himself. I remember at his funeral his old mates said, ‘He was always very pleased to see you on television,’ but I don’t remember him saying that very much.

If he commented on a programme, he would say something like, ‘I didn’t like the tie you were wearing.’ I could be interviewing the Dalai Lama, the Pope and the Queen and he’d go, ‘Yeah, fine but I thought that joke you did at the beginning was a bit off-colour.’ ” He may sound Home Counties, have the perfect BBC presenter’s voice, but does he feel Scottish? He does a bit – even though he grew up with his elder sister in suburban Stanmore, Middlesex, his father having come out of the war ‘bombing the Germans’ and headed straight for a stable life, ending up as the manager of the local branch of the Midland bank. He swiftly deflects talk about a dual-identity though. ‘It’s slightly spurious, almost an affectation.’ Perhaps if I’d caught up with him in Argyll, where he has a holiday home to which he, his wife and three children have often beaten a retreat from Highbury, north London, I’d get a more expansive take on things. Throughout, Anderson inclines towards drily discussing career choices and deflecting attention on to others rather than open up about his feelings, which in itself seems interesting.

Does he ever regret abandoning the law? He was called to the bar in 1976, and his last case was in 1991 – that’s a lot of work to have put in to something that came to nothing. “I get the odd sliding-doors moment when I see names of people I know involved in big cases,” he admits. “It used to be barristers, now it’s judges. But there’s no guarantee that my legal career would have prospered in the same way. I suppose it could have done.” He grins. “It could have been me sentencing light-entertainment figures to periods of imprisonment rather than being me having worked with those figures.” Oh yes: he has interviewed Jimmy Savile , Gary Glitter and Rolf Harris in his time. To his self-deprecating credit, he decides himself a “poor judge of character”. “I looked back on my interview with Jimmy Savile. As everyone knows, there were a lot of rumours going around for a long time about him. His line was a clever one, I suppose. He said, ‘Look, people are always saying this stuff about me.

I’ve been famous for years – if there had been anything, the tabloids would have had me by now.’ ” As for the other two, “I wasn’t aware of dodgy stories – certainly not with Rolf Harris. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me that he would be investigated. He was on television my entire life.” Was Anderson a funny kid when at school, Harrow County School for Boys? A bit of a smart-aleck, he reckons, like a lot of his peers (who included Michael Portillo), but studious. He initially wanted to be a doctor – “I had a few quite pleasant experiences of going into hospital” being the principal rationale – so he did science subjects. “I got about a week into doing A-levels and realised it wasn’t really for me, but I stuck with them. I then imaginatively switched to wanting to be a barrister, a very north-London-suburban outlook on life.” It was at Cambridge, studying law at Selwyn College, that he fell in with a comedy crowd that included Griff Rhys Jones, Douglas Adams , Jimmy Mulville (who now runs Hat Trick Productions) and Peter Fincham, currently ITV’s Director of Television.

He was president of Footlights in 1974. He remembers a night early on doing a monologue as part of the Footlights revue: “I knew that every joke that I had written was getting its full amount of laughs, and I was getting more from reacting to the laughs – that’s when you get the bug.” He was there on the first night of the Comedy Store in 1979, reputedly the first act (he can’t recall). There were sundry visits to the Edinburgh Fringe, and he wrote for Frankie Howerd and Not The Nine O’Clock News, did TV studio warm-ups too – all this, and being a barrister too. When pushed, he says the most fulfilled time of his life was when he was nipping between two worlds. “That was my favourite period – doing both. I was better at both as a result. It gave me more confidence.

In court, I’d be thinking, “In six weeks’ time I’ve got my own chat show.” In my TV studio, I’d be thinking, ‘This isn’t really my world.’ ” A psychologist might make much of the fact that his mother died in 1982 when he was just starting out and wonder aloud whether that is what lends him that curious ill-at-ease, little-boy-lost air that brings out the maternal in viewers. He doesn’t divulge too much about her, but says he thinks she might have disapproved of his career choice – “I think she would probably have thought it was being too trivial to stop being a lawyer.” Was she artistic? “The only quirky thing,” he says, suddenly tender, “and I’m afraid it hasn’t come on to me, is that if we were on holiday somewhere, or just away somewhere and there was a piano, she could sit down and play show-tunes. You’d go: how do you know how to do that? She couldn’t explain it – she’d never had a music lesson, couldn’t read music.

The only thing is that they’d had a piano in their house when they were growing up, and somehow she knew what to do.” There’s an old-fashioned leather briefcase on the table, rather schoolboyish, groaning with things that Anderson needs to be getting on with. He grimaces – I sense he’d like to be pressing a buzzer, Whose Line-style, and bringing this to a halt. Summing up, how would he characterise how things have gone, where he’s headed? He pauses. “When I first started in broadcasting, Michael Grade described me as a gifted amateur. I think that was a compliment. By now, I should have been able to display the gifts more obviously and become professional. But I think I’m always going to be something of an amateur who drifts in to doing things – gifted or otherwise!” ‘What Does the Title Matter Anyway?’ is at the Underbelly’s McEwan Hall, Edinburgh, Aug 6-19. Tickets: 0844 545 8252; underbelly.co.uk So, Clive, why did it all go wrong?

| From the Observer | The Guardian The Observer So, Clive, why did it all go wrong? Although he's a past master at quizzing others, Clive Anderson hates talking about himself. Until you ask him about being frozen out from his role as one of TV's most celebrated inquisitors Share on Messenger Close Halfway through our meeting, Clive Anderson explodes. 'Oh God, tell me about yourself,' he groans, in the face of yet another question about whether his stiff-looking suits help him stay in character, or whether all barristers are frustrated entertainers. 'I can't stand this! It's like being at a not untypical dinner party: you sit down and ask the person a question and they keep talking about themselves, and they never say, "And what do you do, my dear?" 'That's a common experience, especially for women sitting next to men, isn't it?' he adds, with the hopeful expression of someone encouraging a dog to retrieve a stick. Well, yes, how right you are, Clive, but this is our job, not a dinner party.

'Yes, this is our job,' says Clive, still squirming, 'but none the less...' Poor Clive, forced into this corner to publicise his stage show, now under way at the Edinburgh Festival. Interviews - this way around, at least - are plainly purgatory for a man who has such a horror of opening up, not just to strangers, but even to quite close friends. Today, though he is much more engaging than anticipated, and turns out to be very generous with his time, he does not pretend that this meeting is anything other than something to endure: no, he won't have anything to drink, not even a glass of tap water, even though it's the hottest day of the year. The master of chat is, to be frank, not all that good at it in real life. Today, he's good at waffle, he's expert at stalling and he's unparalleled at changing the subject, but when it comes to chat, he stinks. I should have known what to expect, having already heard, for instance, that he will do almost anything to avoid sharing the enforced intimacy of a car interior with someone he does not know well.

Someone who has bumped into him occasionally over the last two decades has said that he always refuses her lifts, even in the pouring rain, rather than subject himself to the nightmare of small talk with a casual acquaintance. A much better friend, who is enormously fond of him, tells me that even on long motorway journeys, he grills passengers rather than actually making conversation with them. 'I grill them? Who said that? Well, I'm happier talking about other people than me. But then, you probably are as well. You've probably got into the habit of grilling people, as a journalist,' he says, speculatively waving another stick. Never at weekends, I say. At weekends, I talk about myself all the time. But he has caught me on a Thursday and so it's back to the dentist's chair for both of us. Certainly, from my end, this interview is turning into an experience akin to pulling teeth. Half cherub, half boiled egg, Clive was famously a barrister long before he was a television presenter and you can imagine him appreciating the horsehair wigs and wing collars that are the apparatus of lawyerly detachment.

Even on his late TV chatshow (Clive Anderson Talks Back when it was on Channel 4; later, when the BBC poached him, Clive Anderson All Talk), he took pains never to truly connect with any of his guests. Yes, he was celebrated for asking the unaskable (to Charles Kennedy: 'Now, the Liberal Democrats - what's the point?'; to Cher: 'You look like a million dollars - is that how much it cost?'; and to Jeffrey Archer: 'Is there no beginning to your talents?') and those gags will live forever, but they ensured his guests were always kept at arms' length. His apparent directness signalled a certain fastidiousness; by being so provocative, he staved off messy emotional reality. It was always Clive's quips, rather than any insight offered into his guests, that made his show work. As someone who hates talking about his private life, he admits he didn't really like delving into anyone else's, unless there was a precedent and they'd already opened up to Oprah or been outed by the News of the World.

The sort of celebrity Clive wanted on his show was either a sparring partner, someone who could keep up with him (Robin Williams rose to the occasion), or someone who would grin and bear it and let him shine. Commanding attention without showing one's hand - it's all about control. Though the show always flattered his sly, jumpy wit, Clive doesn't think he was ever unfair to a guest. 'In a TV studio, someone who chuckles along can look good, someone who banters well can look good, someone who is good looking can look good. Certainly, there are things that can go wrong in my sort of interview - people can look a bit off - but I'd say plenty of people came out of it looking well.' But sometimes, he will admit, he surprised himself. 'I don't think I'm really a rude person, but now I see myself on television, I think, "Oh, God, that is a bit strong." And I wonder if I've always been like that and I haven't been aware of it. The thing is, when you're in court, you're putting all sorts of outrageous things to people.

I applied roughly the same sort of rules as a barrister or a current-affairs interviewer to interviewing celebrities - "You're a very beautiful actress, but isn't that because you've got access to plastic surgery?" - not necessarily to be unpleasant, but because it's entertaining and it's challenging. 'What do you watch Newsnight for? Do you watch it for the well-put-together reports on slum clearances in the north of England? They do those very well. But you know you watch it for Jeremy Paxman, who suddenly, for some reason, will ask Norman Lamont, "Enjoy your job? Are you going to miss it?" A brilliant question! Maybe it was unfair, maybe it wasn't, but that's what I watch it for.' Well, you can watch Paxman doing it, but Clive, 48, is currently off our screens and seems to have nothing set up for the future. His management company talks about something big happening in the autumn but admits that nothing has been finalised. Clive is less mealymouthed. He volunteers the opinion that he is currently in a 'netherworld'. All Talk, the BBC chat-show, hit the buffers 18 months ago.

He stops fiddling with the curtain cord (we're sitting in the Groucho Club, of which he is a member) and, before launching into an explanation, makes the spluttery, diffident, throat-clearing noises that always bought him time and audience indulgence on TV. Peter Salmon, then controller of BBC1, decided that All Talk's time was up and persuaded its host to do a different show - Clive Anderson Now - which was meant to be a Have I Got News for You for BBC1, but in fact turned out to be 'quite a halfway house between things'. 'I'm not sure why Peter Salmon thought I should do a different sort of show. I certainly asked him, but I'm still not sure. I got a BBC answer. The expression he used was "keep ahead of the audience", which I took to mean that the audience was happy with All Talk as it was, but it wouldn't be at some future date. 'The bad luck for me was that by the time we got on air, HIGNFY was on BBC1, so that didn't help with Now 's long-term future. And, by then, Peter Salmon was no longer controller of BBC1.

There wasn't anyone feeling responsible for the new programme. So, Now is then. 'It is a bit frustrating. Things come and go in television. At the moment they've gone.' That old chestnut again. To lose one Des Lynham... but Clive won't play ball. 'I've always felt it looks a bit, I don't know, feeble when people moan about the BBC. It's a large organisation, they don't owe anybody a living, I've chosen always to have contracts for individual programmes. I've never had an exclusive deal because I thought, rightly or wrongly, that would give me more flexibility. Well, the downside of more flexibility is that if they don't renew the contract, then you're scrapped and you have to look around for something to do.' He has several projects in the pipeline and is talking to different channels but, at the moment, the only definite is his Radio 4 law series, Unreliable Evidence, and the gig at the Assembly Rooms, where he is currently interviewing key performers at this summer's Edinburgh Festival.

(According to the Glasgow Herald: 'Freed from the constraints of good taste that an ex-lawyer undoubtedly knows that television is constrained by, Anderson is adept at giving the Fringe crowd what it wants. Yup, smut.') 'I would say that my defining thing for many years was interviewing people on the television in the way that I do - or did - and I'm not sure anyone's actually said that's no good... but Michael Parkinson's around, there are younger people coming along, so there's not room for everybody. Personally, obviously, I feel they could make room for me, but there it is.' He says all this quite bouncily, as irrepressible as ever; he certainly doesn't look particularly downcast. Is he? 'Ah... I don't want to be drawn on that,' he says firmly, chuckling and tugging again on the curtain cord, as if it might trigger an ejector seat. 'I wouldn't say I was up cast, though. What do you think? You notice income changes, you notice when it goes up and when it goes down.' With three children (Isabella, Flora and Edmund) under 12, one imagines he must do.

But then he has always had a taste for winging it, surely a reaction to his background. His father, a Presbyterian from Glasgow, was a bank manager in Stanmore, north London. Clive's upbringing - church, grammar school, elocution lessons - seems hugely sensible, at least until the point at which he arrived at Cambridge, joined the Footlights and fell in with Mel and Griff and Douglas Adams. Even the law itself, which, on the face of it, looks like an extremely conventional career choice, actually provided a very long leash. He enjoyed the freelance nature of the work, the last-minute rush to prepare a criminal case, the element of chance on the day. Similarly, he has never wanted a TV contract to last for longer than two series. It's telling that his big break on Whose Line Is It Anyway? came along in the late Eighties, just as his wife, Jane, now a consultant specialising in Aids, was going on maternity leave for the first time. For Clive, who had dabbled in radio, stand-up and script-writing for his college chums, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, the opportunity to try TV could not have come at a worse moment.

'I don't think my wife was twitchy about it; now you raise it, perhaps she was. But she never said to me, "How dare you frivolously waste away your career." She was OK about that. 'I don't think I was confident that it would work. I must have felt sufficiently confident to say I'll do it, but I remember thinking, when I started doing Whose Line on the television, that it might make me look as though I wasn't really serious about being a barrister. The television might go nowhere, and I might in one fell swoop ruin one career and fail in another.' Luck was on his side in 1988. However, for reasons that he insists are lazy and practical rather than sentimental (he violently objects to the idea that he might be sentimental), he has continued to rent space in his old chambers, Four King's Bench Walk, and his name is still on the plaque by the door. 'It's based on the notion that, well, I might want to resume my legal career. I don't think that's imminent, but I might as well have somewhere to start from,' he says.

Like Michael Portillo, his old classmate from primary and grammar school, Clive is well aware that you can't take much for granted. 'Funny business, politics, isn't it?' he muses. Yes, and funny business, funny business, too. Clive Anderson's Fringe - Where Is It? is at the Assembly tomorrow, 10.15pm; 0131 226 2428 Books | By Tom Hawking | October 15, 2015 Here at Flavorwire, we’ve established a proud tradition of surveying great insults — but it’s nothing compared to the millennia-old tradition of commentators and satirists lobbing invective at the politicians of their time. With election season upon us, it seemed a good time to round up a selection of the best examples of this particular variety of insults — click through for 30 of the best/funniest/nastiest. 30. Graydon Carter and Spy magazine on Donald Trump “[A] short-fingered vulgarian.” [ via ] 29.

David Broder on Ronald Reagan “The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.” [ via ] 28. Thomas Paine on Napoleon “The completest charlatan that ever existed.” [ via ] 27. George Orwell on Stanley Baldwin “One could not even dignify him with the name of a stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole on the air.” [ via ] 26. Margot Asquith on Winston Churchill “He would kill his own mother just so that he could use her skin to make a drum to beat his own praises.” [ via ] 25. Edward Pearce on James Callaghan “If you were hanging from a ledge by your fingers, he’d stamp on them.” [ via ] 24. James Reston on Richard Nixon “He inherited some good instincts from his… forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them.” [ via ] 23. Emmet Hughes on Dwight Eisenhower “He bestowed upon the games of golf and bridge all the enthusiasm and perseverance that he withheld from books and ideas.” [ via ] 22. Christopher Hitchens on George W. Bush “[George W.

Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.” [ via ] 21. William F. Buckley on Lyndon B. Johnson “A man of his last word.” [ via ] 20. Molly Ivins on Rick Perry “Bush was replaced by his exceedingly Lite Guv Rick Perry, who has really good hair. Governor Goodhair, or the Ken Doll (see, all Texans use nicknames — it’s not that odd), is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But the chair of a major House committee says, ‘Goodhair is much more engaged as governor than Bush was.’ As the refrain of the country song goes, ‘O Please, Dear God, Not Another One.’” — [ via ] 19. H.L. Mencken on William Jennings Bryan “The most sedulous flycatcher in American history . . . a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity.” [ via ] 18.

Gore Vidal on Ronald Reagan “A triumph of the embalmer’s art.” [ via ] 17. Clive Anderson on Jeffrey Archer “Lord Archer, is there no beginning to your talents?” [ via ] 16. Gore Vidal on George W. Bush “Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It’s like having a war on dandruff. It’s endless and pointless.” [ via ] 15. P.J. O’Rourke on Republicans, generally “Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then get elected and prove it.” [ via ] 14. H.L. Mencken on Franklin Roosevelt “If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.” [ via ] 13.

The editors of Harper’s on Abraham Lincoln “Filthy story teller, despot, liar, thief, braggart, buffoon, usurper, monster, ignoramus Abe, old scoundrel, perjurer, swindler, tyrant, field-butcher, land-pirate.” [ via ] 12. Noam Chomksy on George W. Bush “The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that’s happening.” [ via ] 11. Hunter S. Thompson on Richard Nixon “I couldn’t imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn’t quite reach the lever on the voting machine.” [ via ] 10. Thomas Paine on George Washington “Treacherous in private friendship… and a hypocrite in public life. The world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.” [ via ] 9.

Ian Hislop on Boris Johnson “People always ask me the same question. They say, ‘Is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot?’ And I always say, ‘No.'” [ via ] 8. Dorothy Parker on Calvin Coolidge (On hearing of Coolidge’s death) “How can they tell?” [ via ] 7. Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin “In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity… In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.” [ via ] 6. ee cummings on politicians, generally “A politician is an arse upon/ which everyone has sat except a man” [ via ] 5. Ezra Klein on Dick Armey “A stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.” [ via ] 4.

Jo Brand on Margaret Thatcher “It was great when she became Lady Thatcher, because then she sounded like a device for removing pubic hair.” [ via ] 3. James Callender on John Adams “A hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” 2. Hunter S. Thompson on Richard Nixon, again “If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.” [ via ] 1.

John Wilkes on the Earl of Sandwich “That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles, or your mistress.” (In response to Sandwich’s claim that Wilkes would die either on the scaffold or of syphilis.) 'Smugness is not my specialist subject' - Telegraph Culture 'Smugness is not my specialist subject' His acerbic wit held firmly in check, a softer, chastened Clive Anderson is making his return to television. Cassandra Jardine meets him By Cassandra Jardine 12:00AM GMT 09 Nov 2001 THE television quiz show - once a gentle arena in which viewers could pretend to pit their wits against stolid librarians and solicitors - has turned into a theatre of cruelty. The more supercilious the questionmaster, the better the ratings. So Clive Anderson would seem to be well qualified for his new job as interrogator on Mastermind, the Gestapo-style black chair/white spotlight programme . As a chat show host for a decade, he acquired the reputation of a baby-faced assassin who asked questions to which the bravest of circuit-hardened celebrities would wish to say "Pass".

'Am I really twitchy and awkward?' asks Anderson: 'That's not a problem on Mastermind, because I have the questions to hold' Remember the time he inquired of Jeffrey Archer: "Is there no beginning to your talents?" Or when he suggested to athlete Kriss Akabusi that if that was his lunchbox down there, he must be very hungry. They were great moments in the history of ego puncturing. Now that his target is eggheads, however, Anderson appears to have gone soft-boiled. Chortling away on a hotel sofa in Mayfair, he oozes admiration for the hard-working opsimaths (late learners) who opt to answer questions on breathtakingly obscure specialist subjects. He leans forward to emphasise sincere enjoyment of his new incarnation as a quizmaster. Actually, he has done it before, at his children's schools and near his home in Islington, "where they get terrifically worked up about it". But perish the thought that he's laughing at the know-alls who take part in Mastermind.

Related Articles 5 October 1996: Mr Funny Peculiar [interview with Clive Anderson] 09 Nov 2001 "I imagined I would be trying to catch them out," he admits, "but the whole psychology is to want them to get the right answers. They work so hard at it. Seeing everyone getting high scores and one clever clogs going through is much more fun than seeing people humiliated." He would be a useless contestant himself, he says. "I'm the sort who would say, 'Yes, that book was by, oh you know, so-and-so' - and that's when I know the stuff." Since he's asking the questions, he doesn't have to be knowledgeable - only to appear so as he reads off a card - so I laugh when he suggests the collective noun for quizmasters like Anne Robinson , Chris Tarrant and Jeremy Paxman should be "a smugness" . Then he backpedals, furiously. "Maybe a blazer of quizmasters would be better," he tries, lamely. Smugness, you see, is not his favourite subject.

The word comes up whenever his name is mentioned, perhaps because of the tight-lipped grin that splits his face whenever he says something funny. That's so unfair, he explains. "People like me, who try to be funny, are accused of being smug smart arses. Actually, my expression is one of relief at having thought of something to say." We won't be seeing much of his smirk on Mastermind, though, because he has been playing up his "dour schoolmasterly" side to appear more like his stern and revered predecessor, Magnus Magnusson . "I aspire to be like him," he says. Still, he cannot help giggling when reminding viewers of this new, inter-active Mastermind that they can play along at home by pressing buttons on their remote controls. "It just seems such a bizarre notion. But, of course," he corrects himself, "it's a good idea." He's on irony alert, anxious not in any way to offend his new employers. Being a quizmaster does appear to be money for old rope. Almost everything he does is prescribed; the Magnusson catchline "I've started, so I'll finish" is even in his contract.

Ad libbing is limited to the occasional "reasonably intelligent decision" when an answer isn't precisely as on the card, and a few seconds of chit-chat before the contestants' specialist rounds. Is there any opportunity for a display of rapier wit? "There's the odd little quip. Really, it's mild wit substitute. All quite pleasant." Essentially, all he has to do is speak fast - that should not be a problem - and control his fidgeting. That could be. "Am I really twitchy and awkward?" he asks, distressed to learn that while he imagines he is coming across as calm, I am watching a puppet show of waving hands, crossing legs and eyebrows that seem to be tweaked by invisible strings. "Anyway," he says, crestfallen, "that's not a problem on Mastermind, because I have the questions to hold. And it's not as if the camera is on me much." For a specialist in devastating repartee, this is humble fare, but the bleak 18 months since Clive Anderson Now was axed by the BBC may have made him grateful for a steady job.

Having always refused to tie himself down for more than one series, he seems truly "delighted" to be stepping into Magnusson's shoes. His sense of humour is not so much squashed as redirected into the realm of self-deprecation. He puts himself down constantly on everything, especially his appearance (too fat for the Mastermind T-shirt). Having become, some thought, slightly puffed up by his own effortless success, he now takes the modest line that, "Whatever one's merits, if things happen to fall into place, that's luck". At 48, he seems little changed from the sparky, but not particularly confident Clive whom I met twenty-something years ago at Cambridge. He was president of Footlights, the comedy revue society, and I was hoofing it as the back end of the cow in the annual pantomime. Every generation of Footlights looks backwards to the late greats (ours was no exception), but some notable talents emerged from Cambridge in the Seventies.

Griff Rhys Jones went straight to Not the Nine O'Clock News, Douglas Adams soon afterwards wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Nicholas Hytner began an ascent that has landed him the top job at the National Theatre . Compared to them, Clive Anderson (fresh from Harrow County School) never knew how he would make a living out of his wit, of which the only example I remember from those days was, coincidentally, a sketch about Magnus Magnusson's son. The joke lay in every word occurring twice. "It wasn't particularly good, but it was short, so it went on my show reel," he says. "I was never an actor, I was always me. I wasn't the world's best scriptwriter. I didn't see myself doing stand-up and - a failure of imagination - I hadn't thought about broadcasting. So I became a barrister. Parental approval had something to do with it." (His father was a bank manager in Stanmore.) He swears he didn't pine when his contemporaries became famous, and it was just his natural pessimism that led him to advise Douglas Adams to forget writing and take a steady job.

But he did keep a toe-hold in comedy, writing scripts and warming up audiences, as part of what Rhys Jones has called the "snake pit mafia" of old Cambridge cronies like Jimmy Mulville, Rory McGrath, John Lloyd and Andy Hamilton, who moved en masse into television and radio comedy. "Hand on my heart, I don't think I wanted to be spotted. I remember Mel Smith saying I ought to have a show of my own and it seemed such an unlikely notion." However unlikely, the blond, follically challenged barrister with a lack of neck, which has been described as "a shrug that went wrong", found television contracts landing in his dark-suited lap. All he had to do was be himself. It must have been a heady experience. Cautiously, he carried on with the law, dreading the day when a jury returned to say: "We've been deliberating for three hours and seven of us think it is that bloke from the telly." Eventually, as news quizzes, chat shows, travelogues and legal programmes nagged him for his services, he left his desk in chambers.

For 10 years, he was "bowling along tolerably happily" - baiting the likes of Richard Branson so adeptly that, when Branson threw a glass of water over him, Anderson quickly said he was used to it, having flown Virgin Atlantic. Seventies cheek: Clive in the Footlights "I put up my hand to embarrassing people," he says, "but there was never a problem getting guests for Clive Anderson All Talk." So it remains a mystery to him why the show was first reworked into an awkward newsy hybrid, then dropped. "If there were criticisms, I wasn't given any. That's the BBC way of doing things. Polite, but it doesn't leave you with a very good understanding. Perhaps there were just younger, fresher people around. Somebody had to go - and it was me." It's been a sobering experience. The nagged has become a nagger who puts together proposals, lunches producers at The Ivy and jockeys for pilots. This summer's stand-up at the Edinburgh festival wasn't a success. So Discovery Mastermind must seem like a lifeline. He's certainly anxious not to grumble. Many things help him keep a sense of proportion.

Three young children and his wife Jane, who is an Aids specialist, certainly help. "When we discuss our day, and she has had to give someone a terrible diagnosis, it makes my complaints about having to go to Manchester to make Mastermind seem trivial." Douglas Adams's sudden death in May in a San Diego gym was another reminder that chasing an elusive contract is not good for body or soul. "For a long time, I couldn't believe he wasn't still in California trying to get producers to make a film of Hitchhiker. Even at his epic memorial service, I thought he would pop up and say it had all been a mistake." For a while, Anderson did become philosophical about life, the universe and everything - including the wisdom of playing football at his age. But he soon reverted to type. "To some extent, you should bear in mind the bigger picture. But unless you are a religious leader, the world goes round by people concentrating on whether they can sell their nuts and bolts 10 per cent cheaper or if their novel will win the Booker." Or whether their quiz programme will be given a second series.

"Magnus Magnusson did Mastermind for 25 years," says Clive, with a smirk that suggests relief, rather than smugness. Discovery Mastermind is on the Discovery Channel from November 12 at 8pm The last great comedy goldmine has closed down | The Independent The last great comedy goldmine has closed down Monday 22 November 1999 00:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture SHARES IN comedy writers will plummet today. (But fortunately him, Jeffrey Archer sold all his on Friday). First the Tories closed the steelworks. Then they closed the pits. Yesterday, British satirists were mourning their closure of the last great comedy goldmine in Britain. Jeffrey Archer is quitting politics. Angry scenes were witnessed in Soho as gag writers declared an all-out strike in protest. Now pensioners may face the festive season without jokes in their Christmas crackers. The army will have to be called in to write the gags for Rory Bremner. It is, quite literally, a very serious situation. Jeffrey Archer's candidacy for the Mayor of London had promised to keep us entertained all the way to May.

At the offices of Have I Got News For You, researchers had built up a huge collection of wonderful snippets, which were going to be detonated at intervals. They say that every politician has a skeleton in his closet. Archer has a walk-in wardrobe full of them. The campaign was a period that the Conservatives were dreading. I imagine that the weekend's conversation between William Hague and Lord Archer went something like this: "Anyway William, I don't think it's a resigning issue." "Okay Jeffrey - I accept your resignation." "No, I was saying, I think we can ride this one out." "So will you announce your resignation or shall I?" What is incredible is that the Tories ever thought that Archer was fit to run the capital. This man was their number one choice. Would you trust Jeffrey Archer? There are lies, damned lies and Jeffrey Archer's life story. Archer is now in the impossible position that no one will ever believe anything he says again.

"So Jeffrey, were you the mystery second gunman in the Kennedy assassination?" "No!" `"Oh well - he obviously was then." Over the years, the Archer cocktail of naff showmanship and casual disregard for the truth have provided meat and drink for hungry satirists in an age when our politicians have becoming disappointingly bland and sanitised. When I worked on Spitting Image, Jeffrey Archer's little puppet could be brought into any sagging sketch to tell a few outrageous lies. Ian Hislop and Nick Newman once wrote a splendid Mastermind sketch in which Jeffrey Archer answered questions on the life of Jeffrey Archer. He got every answer wrong, so Magnus Magnusson got to put him straight on all the porkie pies that Archer had told about himself down through the years. Soon afterwards, Archer was foolhardy enough to come on Clive Anderson Talks Back. "There's no beginning to your talents," said Clive as he probed the great storyteller about his duplicitous past. After the show we were treated to the real Archer, ranting and raving in the studio car park, threatening to sue if the programme was broadcast. With this memory, I am comforted that this spectacular downfall could not have happened to a more horrible man.

Don't take my word for it; go into any branch of Waterstones and ask the booksellers there if Jeffrey Archer has ever been in to sign. Ask whether he behaved with politeness and humility. This is the sort of politician that British satirists want. The Americans have a philanderer as a president; the Russians have a drunkard. What do we get? A church-goer with a new baby on the way. So we must turn to the Conservatives to step in and rescue the British comedy industry. Immediate steps should be taken to make Jonathan Aitken the Tory candidate for Mayor of London with Neil Hamilton as his deputy. Otherwise British entertainment may never recover. First they take away our favourite target. And now Jeffrey Archer has time to write another novel. Haven't we suffered enough?

More about: Why the one-liner is comedy heaven | Express Comment | Comment | Daily Express Why the one-liner is comedy heaven I NEEDED a password, eight characters long – so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” PUBLISHED: 00:00, Fri, Aug 26, 2011 The giants of comedy had the confidence to turn the laugh against themselves, like Bob Monkhouse [] Are your sides splitting? They should be. This joke by stand-up Nick Helm was voted the funniest one-liner at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. If you’re stone-faced it could be that you’re not as immersed in the world of technology as young Nick and don’t know that cyberspace is obsessed with passwords. Or maybe you just don’t think it’s funny. As a comedy writer I know humour is subjective and whether you laugh depends as much on the skill and likeability of the comedian as on the content of the gag itself. One of the greatest exponents of the one-liner Tim Vine came second in this competition. Vine holds the record for telling 499 jokes in an hour.

He’s avoided the rambling, storyteller style made fashionable by Billy Connolly and Eddie Izzard and brought back one-liners which he whacks out with the rat-a-tat-tat heat of a popcorn maker. His runner-up gag? “Crime in a multi-storey car park – that’s wrong on so many levels” but they could have chosen from hundreds. I saw Vine doing his pre-Edinburgh warm-up in a pub last month. He came on wearing kids’ swimming goggles with a carrot dangling from the strap. The audience were already laughing when he announced: “I think the guy that sold me these night vision glasses saw me coming.” Drive-thru McDonald’s was more expensive than I thought – once you’ve hired the car. And what about the other finalists? Hannibal Buress was third with: “People say ‘I’m taking it one day at a time.’ You know what? So is everybody.

That’s how time works.” Fourth came Tim Key with: “Drive-thru McDonald’s was more expensive than I thought – once you’ve hired the car.” There was a wooden spoon for veteran Paul Daniels: “I said to a fella, ‘Is there a B&Q in Henley?’ He said: ‘No. There’s an H, an E, an N, an L and a Y.’” Chances are many of you thought that was funnier than the winner. It’s the way they tell ’em. I believe one-liner specialists are the craftsmen of comedy, not only because of their ability to memorise so many jokes but also tailor the gags to the audience. I once heard a stand-up addressing a room full of vicars. He began with: “I’ve heard the meek shall inherit the earth – if that’s all right with everyone else.” Then he discussed a busybody parishioner: “She’s so nosey, when she found Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians she steamed it open.” But my favourite was his exit line: “Jesus is coming – look busy.” Do this week’s finalists measure up to the great one-liners of the past?

Are there guaranteed laughs such as: “I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming and yelling like the passengers on his bus”? Or: “My psychiatrist told me I was crazy and I said I want a second opinion. He said OK, you’re ugly too.” The giants of comedy had the confidence to turn the laugh against themselves. Like Bob Monkhouse’s “They all laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian – well, they’re not laughing now.” Or how about Rodney Dangerfield’s poignant: “If it wasn’t for pickpockets I’d have no sex life at all.” Some make you wince as much as laugh. Demetri Martin’s: “The worst time to have a heart attack is during a game of charades”. And Tommy Cooper’s: “Two blondes walk into a building. You’d think one of them would have seen it.” I can still picture Ernie Wise flicking through Eric Morecambe’s record collection and asking: “Have you got the Gondoliers?” “No, it’s just the way I walk,” dead-panned Eric. My favourite at the moment is Canadian comic Stewart Francis’s: “I quit my job at the helium factory.

I refuse to be spoken to in that tone.” But the guys don’t have all the gags. Remember Mae West’s: “Personally I like two types of men – domestic and foreign.” Or Dorothy Parker: “One more drink and I’ll be under the host.” Groucho Marx’s: “I never forget a face but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception” and Henry Youngman’s terse, “Take my wife – please!” were acid-drop sharp. Television chat shows have provided us with some of the best barbed one-liners such as Caroline Aherne’s (as Mrs Merton) opening question to Debbie McGee: “So Debbie, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” and Clive Anderson’s enquiry to author Jeffrey Archer: “Is there no beginning to your talents?” But often the funniest one-liners come not from professionals but from people we know. I once suggested to my mum that we go out on the spur of the moment. She said: “I’m all in favour of spontaneity, I just need a couple of days warning.” Barry Cryer’s favourite one-liner has two cannibals stirring a giant cooking pot which contains a rednosed clown.

One cannibal turns to the other and asks: “Does this taste funny to you?” And in the end comedy is always a matter of taste. * Find Jan Etherington’s comedy course details at: Most read in Express Comment Political From Scorn with extra bile by English journalist, Matthew Parris "Richard Nixon is a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in" - Harry S Truman "If the president's penis is straight, it is the only thing about his administration that is" - Sunday Telegraph columnist Mark Steyn on reports of a physical abnormality in Bill Clinton "Jerry Ford is so dumb that he can't fart and chew gum at the same time" Lyndon B Johnson on Gerald Ford "Jerry Ford is a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off" Lyndon B Johnson on Gerald Ford "He looks like the guy in a science fiction movie who is the first to see the Creature" - David Frye on Gerald Ford "A triumph of the embalmer's art" - Gore Vidal on Ronald Reagan.

"Trust him as much as you would trust a rattlesnake with a silencer on its rattle" - Dean Acheson on J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI "When his library burned down, it destroyed both books. Dole hadn't finished colouring in the second" - Jack Kemp on Bob Dole before he became Dole's running mate in the 1996 presidential election race "I am not like the leader of the opposition. I did not crawl out of the cabinet room like a mangy maggot" - Australian prime minister Paul Keating about his opposition leader John Howard "As an intellectual, he bestowed upon the games of golf and bridge all the enthusiasm and perseverance that he withheld from books and ideas" - Emmett John Hughes on Dwight David Eisenhower "How can they tell?" - Dorothy Parker, on being told that Calvin Coolidge was dead. "McKinley has a chocolate eclair backbone" - Theodore Roosevelt on William McKinley "Thomas E Dewey is just about the nastiest little man I've ever known. He struts sitting down" - Mrs Clarence Dykstra .

"He has a bungalow mind" - Woodrow Wilson on Warren G Harding, his successor as President of the USA "His argument is as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death" - Abraham Lincoln on Stephen A Douglas "The trouble with Senator Long is that he is suffering from halitosis of the intellect" - Harold L Ickes on Huey Long "A real Centaur: part man, part horse's ass" - Dean Acheson on president Lyndon Johnson. "He was a man of splendid abilities but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks" John Randolph on Edward Livingstone "A political leader worthy of assassination" - Irving Layton on Pierre Trudeau "A man who looks as if he has two flies f**cking in his mouth" - Boris Yeltsin on his adviser Sergei Filatov "An improbable creature, like a human giraffe, sniffing down his nostril at mortals beneath his gaze" - Richard Wilson on Charles de Gaulle "The weak are a long time in politics" - Neil Shand on John Gummer .

"A semi-house-trained polecat" - Michael Foot on Norman Tebbit "Far better to keep your mouth shut and let everyone think you're stupid than to open it and leave no doubt" - Norman Tebbit on Dennis Skinner "I suppose the honourable gentleman's hair, like his intellect, will recede into the darkness" - Paul Keating again, this time on shadow treasurer Andrew Peacock "If you were hanging from a ledge by your fingers, he'd stamp on them" - Edward Pearce on James Callaghan "I wouldn't say she is open-minded on the Middle East, so much as empty-headed.

She probably things Sinai is the plural of sinus" - Jonathan Aitken on Margaret Thatcher "He is going around the country stirring up apathy" - William Whitelaw on Harold Wilson "Winston has devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches" - FE Smith on Winston Churchill "The Right Honourable and Learned Gentleman has twice crossed the floor of this house, each time leaving behind a trail of slime" - David Lloyd George on Sir John Simon "When they circumcised Herbert Samuel they threw away the wrong bit" - David Lloyd George "The Right Honourable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts" - Richard Brindley Sheridan, replying to a speech by Henry Dundas "Is there no beginning to your talents?" - Clive Anderson to Jeffrey Archer "Whenever I want a good read I get one of Jeffrey's novels, and stand on it, so I can reach the good books" - Steven Norris.

"Mr Blair is a man of hidden shallows" - Hugo Gurdon "A mind not so much open as permanently vulnerable to a succession of opposing certainties" - Hugo Young on David Howell "He was swaggering in a predatory way towards the susceptible of this conference like a gigolo eying the passenger deck" - Edward Pearce on Michael Portillo "A systematic liar and a beggarly cheat; a swindler and a poltroon... He has committed every crime that does not require courage" - Benjamin Disraeli on Daniel O'Connell

Question: To whom did Clive Anderson say ‘Is there no beginning to your talents’?
Answer: Jeffrey Archer