Jeremy clarke spectator biography of barack
•
Jeremy Clarke, Dr Moira Woods, Iain Johnstone, Rita Lee
Matthew Bannister on
Jeremy Clarke, who chronicled his experiences of living a “low life” in the Spectator magazine for more than 20 years. We have a tribute from Eric Idle.
The women’s rights campaigner Dr. Moira Woods, who set up the Irish Republic’s first dedicated sexual assault treatment unit.
Iain Johnstone, the film critic and documentary maker who told the stories of stars like Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand and John Wayne.
Rita Lee, the singer known as Brazil’s “Queen of Rock”
Interviewee: Eric Idle
Interviewee: David Goodhart
Interviewee: Rosita Sweetman
Interviewee: Oliver Johnstone
Interviewee: Camilo Rocha
Producer: Gareth Nelson-Davies
Archive used:
Jeremy Clarke's Low Life: Dead cool, Jeremy has bitten the bullet and taken up yoga, The Spectator, uploaded Facebook 03/09/; Jeremy Clarke’s Low Life - Sharon has ditched Jeremy and is getting a dog, her mum has set him up on a blind date, The Spec
•
'The Viagra tablet slipped through my fingers it bounced erratically across the room. My new yoga teacher and I watched it go': Read the best extracts from Jeremy Clarke's much-loved Low Life column following The Spectator writer's death at 66
Jeremy Clarke 'wrote like a dream'. Among old hacks, there is no greater praise than that phrase, reserved for the pro columnists who deliver perfect copy every week – full of wit and unexpected modes of expression, yet always precisely to length and free from garble.
Clarke, who died from cancer last week aged 66 at his home in France, was the Spectator's Low Life columnist from , detailing his drunken escapades and erotic catastrophes with a charming frankness. He inherited the column from Jeffrey Bernard, a reprobate so infamous around Soho that his adventures were turned into a hit West End play starring Peter O'Toole – called Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell.
Clarke never courted that sort of notoriety. Yet his excesses were even more reckles
•
Jeremy Clarke remembered
Boris Johnson
When Jeffrey Bernard died in , it seemed possible that we would never igen have a regular Low Life columnist in The Spectator — or no one half as good. We needed someone who could match Taki for appalling frankness, for saying the unsayable; but not about the denizens of Gstaad or New York nightclubs.
Low Life meant the opposite milieu. We needed our man with the half-eaten packet of prawn cocktail flavor crisps and the monster hangover, our man in the värdshus lock-in, the ferret show, the debtors’ court, the A&E at 3 a.m. with the drunk guy going crackers. It had to be someone who knew how to argue with social workers.
We needed a new literary efternamn. After a few years of struggle and several false starts we funnen him; or someone even better, someone with that rare ability to be both totally readable and transparently honest.
When we first approached Jeremy (we being Stuart Reid and I), he was almost overwhelmed with