“Do I like being interviewed?” squirms Clive Anderson. “No. Not really. No. Nooo. I’m much more comfortable asking the questions.” Now aged 71 and preparing to tour live recordings of his Seven Wonders podcast (during which he invites celebrity guests to discuss the things that bring them joy), he claims to be a “less aggressive, more laid back” interviewer these days. But “back in the day, I did perhaps push people too far…”
In the late 90s – when interviewing styles were much more deferential – his late 90s TV chat show, Clive Anderson All Talk, was notorious for the shocked laughs generated by cheeky cross examinations designed to knock A-listers down a peg or two.
Anderson famously addressed Cher’s alleged cosmetic surgery with the line: “You look like a million dollars – is that how much it cost?” He teased Richard Branson until the businessman poured a glass of water over his head (“I’m used to that; I’ve flown Virgin,” he quipped) and most famously caused the Bee Gees to storm out of the studio after he reminded them they once performed under the band name “Les Tosseurs” and assured them: “You’ll always be les tossers to me.”
As a former barrister, appearing in criminal cases for 15 years, Anderson tells me that by the time he started grilling celebrities for the cameras, he’d become inured to “putting difficult points to reluctant witnesses”.
“It’s no good being squeamish in court,” he tells me, via video call from the soundproofed cupboard under the stairs of his North London home, “if you want to get to the truth.”
I grew up enjoying Anderson’s quick, flippant wit on TV improv show Whose Line Is it Anyway (which aired on Channel 4 from 1988-1999), and still listen to him presenting Radio 4’s daily arts interview show Loose Ends. His delight in spontaneous gags feels childishly unfiltered and I wonder if he managed to keep a lid on the impulse in court.
“I think so,” he shrugs. “The comedy in courtrooms is slow moving. As a barrister you always have to laugh at the judge’s jokes. And witnesses always get the biggest laughs. Like Mandy Rice Davis’ classic: “Well he would, wouldn’t he?” (that was the model’s response when asked if she was aware Lord Astor had denied having an affair with her, during the government toppling trial of Stephen Ward in 1963).
Born in 1952, Anderson was a new student at Harrow County School for Boys (then a grammar school) when Rice-Davis was on the stand. Fellow pupils at the time included the future Tory politician-turned-broadcaster Michael Portillo and future head of BBC Comedy, Geoffrey Perkins.
Anderson’s parents met while serving in the RAF, and his Glaswegian father went on to manage a branch of the Bradford & Bingley building society while his clever son headed off to Cambridge, where he became president of the Footlights (1974-5) and befriended Griff Rhys Jones (with whom he took a show up to Edinburgh in 1981). Although many of his peers went straight into entertainment, Anderson initially “didn’t know what I had to offer comedy, really. Geoff and Griff went into radio as producers and they seemed happy but it wasn’t for me.” He enjoyed his “proper, serious job” and still believes his happiest years were spent juggling law and comedy.
Last year, Anderson toured with his one-man show “Macbeth and Me”, about his obsession with Shakespeare’s tragedy of a Scotsman’s “vaulting ambition”. I’m assuming the high-achieving Anderson would also describe himself as ambitious, but he brushes off the idea.
“I don’t think I’m particularly ambitious” – he glances down and winces – “oh no! I’m folding my arms in a defensive gesture!… but really I think I’m the sort of person who’s always needed other people to make things happen. I’m not good at knocking on doors.”
Anderson was practising law at the same time as Tony Blair and totally failed to clock the extent of his colleague’s ambition. He recalls “being at a lunch with him in a garden somewhere and he asked: ‘Have you ever thought about going into politics?’ I said ‘No, not really.’ He said ‘Oh! Hmmm, mmmm. Well, I miiiight…’” Anderson shakes his head. “With my lack of imagination, I thought he was thinking of standing for the parish council of something. Next thing you know he was prime minister! It was a meteoric rise – quite extraordinary.”
Blair, he continues, “is now a more controversial figure than he was back then, but his political skills turned out to be more formidable than you’d have thought. He’s clearly much more steely than the amiable guy he appeared back then. Even now he’s reviled in parts of the Labour Party. I notice he generally performs quite well when he chips in from afar although, I’m not sure it’s that’s wise for former PMs to get involved…”
Unlike Blair, Anderson prefers to be beside, not directly beneath the spotlight, while he chips in questions and jokes from the sidelines. Quite often on Whose Line is it Anyway? he was chuckling along with the audience – still in his lawyer’s suit. The performers often poked fun at the host’s snobbier views and balding head. “If I ever had any vanity, then I definitely lost it by being on television,” he once observed. He still tours with the improv show: “I’m part of the brand and I think improv keeps us young, although some of the performers are getting a bit creaky now. They don’t want to play games that involve lying down, because they can’t get up again.”
Many comics of his generation grumble about cancel culture and argue they “can’t say anything any more”. But, despite the spontaneous nature of improv, Anderson doesn’t worry about saying the wrong thing. “I think I’m so used to live broadcasting that I’m probably self-censoring the whole time anyway.”
He notes that Radio 4 listeners can take offence whatever he says. “I write a monologue for the beginning of Loose Ends and I’m careful to keep things balanced. If I do a joke about the prime minister then I’ll follow it with one about the leader of the opposition. But even then you’ll get letters from somebody saying, ‘How DARE you start a programme telling a joke about this politician I like?!’ They don’t even HEAR the jokes you made about the other side. To them, you’re just stating the obvious if you say: ‘He or she’s a crook.’”
Anderson enjoys the way the eclectic guest list on Loose Ends can take conversations in unexpected directions. He laughs at how he’s attempted to “suck up” to unpredictable interviewees such as The Libertines’ Peter Doherty (“He’s a QPR fan so he was impressed I saw them win a league game in 1967, although I don’t think anything else I said impressed him”) and reflects with sorrow on an awkward interview with soul singer Bobby Womack. “Bobby wrote the first single I ever bought – the Rolling Stones’ ‘It’s All Over Now’ – and he’d had an, uh, ‘interesting’ life. He’d been married to Sam Cooke’s widow. There was infidelity, violence. It was all described in the opening pages of his autobiography. But when I asked him about that he said it ‘didn’t happen’.” Anderson sighs. “It’s a bit sad because I don’t think he was just being difficult – I think it was Alzheimer’s or whatever. He was just no longer in touch with that part of his life.”
The idea for the Seven Wonders podcast – now approaching its 80th episode – came to Anderson as a TV idea years ago. “I come from a comic tradition that was about knocking people, but I do like to be positive. Then one day I found myself in Grand Central Station, while doing some work in New York. I was in a very happy mood, looking around thinking: what a fantastic building! A cathedral of transport. I thought: this is a Wonder of the Modern World. Then I started to ask myself what the other six would be…”
Anderson tells me some of his own wonders would include his wife, Professor Jane Anderson (Consultant Physician in HIV Medicine at Homerton University Hospital in Hackney), a leather football his grandfather gave him as a boy, and the “Red Lady of Paveland”. “I got to touch the red lady’s bones when I was making a documentary about them,” he explains. “The small red skeleton was initially assumed to have been the body of a woman. But it turned out the original archaeologists had it all wrong. The bones belonged to a boy who had lived 30,000 years earlier – he’d been walking around Pembrokeshire before the Ice Age and buried with due ceremony, covered in ochre, in a cave.” Anderson likes the way the story shows the advances in our knowledge. And he gets a buzz from artefacts.
“After my own death, as President of the Woodland Trust,” he winds up, “I think I’d like to be buried under a tree. Either in a wicker casket or after I’m cremated. I don’t really mind. People get interested in trees as kids and then again when they’re very old and they start thinking about their legacy.”
What kind of tree would Anderson choose? “Well, in this country the most satisfactory legacy is an oak tree, or if I want to push it maybe a yew. They’re a bit gloomy but they belong in churchyards and they hang around for a long time…”
He can’t resist one final quip: “Yew or non-yew? That’s the question!”
Clive Anderson’s ‘My Seven Wonders’ tour begins on 4 April (socomedy.co.uk/artist/clive-anderson)
