RETURN TO OZ

For some random reason, I decided to watch some old Clive James interviews on YouTube last night, including a particularly edgy one from 1984 originally broadcast on LWT with Roman Polanski. To my delight, it even featured an old commercial break, complete with ads for London-based window fitters, Findus frozen food, and an early Apple computer. I believe there should be some kind of special honours awarded to members of the public who upload their old VHS-recordings of television broadcasts to YouTube, conserving moments in history like a media version of being preserved in amber.

Following the intense and probing exchange between the Polish film director and the Australian journalist, I was delighted to discover a brief interview in which Clive James interviewed Frank Sinatra during the "Ultimate Event" week-long celebrations at Sanctuary Cove in 1989. After his controversial 1974 tour of Australia, during which the singer became embroiled in a tense showdown with the trade unions, enough time seemed to have passed for him to make amends with the land down under before drawing the final curtain on his five-decade-long career.

As puffy, sweaty, and aged as Frank was in appearance, I was blown away by his dynamite performance of Mack The Knife, during which he paid tribute to Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, and Ella Fitzgerald, self-deprecatingly admitting he wouldn't be "adding anything new."

The truth is, Frank didn’t need to add anything new because, by this point in his life, he was already gold—his legacy secure—defiantly swing, swing, swinging against the dying of the light.