Dr Johnson wrote that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money” but, as money dribbles in a bit slowly in contemporary Australian letters, I’ve decided to indulge my need for self-expression and join the blockheads clogging the blogosphere. So here I am – online, for free.
Speaking of blockheads, this week in Sydney we’ve endured the massively inconvenient presence of Presidents Bush, Putin, Jintao – those friends of democracy – at the APEC summit. In a hysterical gesture, a five kilometre steel and concrete fence was installed around a chunk of the CBD to keep out violent protesters/terrorists.
The cops have been confiscating digital cameras from tourists and erasing their photos, arresting people for jaywalking. We had snipers on the Opera House! The Chaser boys endearingly got themselves arrested for driving a fake motorcade through the no-go zone. A little bit of satire in a very humourless city. The Saturday protest – a few thousand marching peacefully against the architects of the Iraq War – was met by the biggest police operation in NSW history.
Yes, this blog is going to be about life in Sydney but it won’t be a journal of my daily meals or commuter frustrations. I’m going to write this blog as I would a weekly newspaper column on culture. You can be sure I’ll be writing about books, politics, music and movies.
Today I’m going to mention The Dick Cavett Show. I recently had an impulse to watch intelligent television, so bought a bundle of Cavett shows from the late 60s and early 70s. Thirty seven hours’ worth, in fact, on 11 DVDs. The shows are divided into themed sets – Hollywood Greats, Comic Legends, Rock Icons. Cavett has filmed new introductions to each episode. We get hour-long interviews with people like Orson Welles, Hitchcock, John Huston, Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Brando, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, George Harrison and Anthony Burgess. There is a fascinating panel discussion with directors Mel Brooks, Frank Capra, Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich. This sort of television no longer exists.
Clive James has an appreciation of Cavett at Slate.
What is Cavett’s appeal? He is unlike every other American talk show host. The standard explanation is that he is intelligent, learned and witty. His extended interviews give the guests a rare chance to be themselves on air. And the guests invariably like Cavett a great deal, as does the audience. I enjoyed the shows a lot, but with reservations.
Cavett is not really much of an interviewer – genuinely modest, slightly awkward, often flustered and usually in awe of his guests. Most of the time those characteristics are endearing. The Welles episode is a good example. Welles likes Cavett and does not want to do anything but entertain (Welles is never anything less than brilliantly entertaining). But the Brando interview, something of a scoop at the time, is a failure in Cavett’s hands. Brando is charismatic but unwilling to talk about acting or movies (he only agreed to go on the show if a panel of Native American activists could join him for the second part). Cavett’s attempts to draw him out are pretty amateurish. The Hitchcock interview is a disappointment because Cavett is satisfied with prompting the familiar anecdotes (“how did you achieve that effect?”) and macabre jokes. Groucho Marx is funny the first time, but his interviews become repetitious because Cavett insists on prompting the same stories. And for some inexplicable reason it was decided to bring Groucho, Truman Capote and a sloth (a little furry animal) on stage together. It is not very entertaining. Cavett doesn’t manage to bring much coherence to the proceedings.
However, these DVD sets are probably quite unrepresentative. Cavett ran the show nightly for many years and wasn’t always interviewing celebrities. It would be interesting to see different kinds of episodes in future DVD releases.
I’d also like to see more of his interviews with writers. Here is a YouTube clip of the notorious Mailer v. Vidal episode:
A few exciting things are to happen in the coming months – the return of Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, Philip Roth’s new novel Exit Ghost in October, and a series of 1960s Godard films on DVD in Region 4 (Australia). Stay tuned.
