Clive Anderson- My Seven Wonders
Assembly- Studio Three
Edinburgh Fringe 2023
Reviewer: Mark Ritchie
A Four- Star Review ****
It was nice to chat to a chat-show King and I was afforded that opportunity when an acquaintance of mine introduced me to Clive after the show.
Not a show as such, The Seven Wonders is a series of Amazon pod-cast recordings which feature Anderson and various guests in a live audience talk show setting.
The guests are invited to talk about seven ideas or simple things which they find wonderful and this provides the glue which makes the interviewer and interviewee coalesce around a topic.
The guest in the studio that day was writer and comedian Lynn Ferguson, a long-time favourite of mine, which proved to be a happy happenstance.
Regarding live telly, Anderson’s heydays on shows such as Clive Anderson Talks Back and the like seem gone forever. After a nasty slip live on air back in 1997, when The Bee Gees just got up and left the BBC stage mid-interview, this old Harrovian public schoolboy now aged 70 has been on the BBC television missing list ever since. Possibly as part of some Auntie Beeb consolation prize, Mr Anderson has been banished in recent years to a cosy corner on Saturday early evening radio, far out on planet Radio 4.
Clive Anderson is probably a thoroughly decent sort of chap. Fame on the telly and a soubriquet such as ‘The Cuddly Assassin’ may have benefitted him at the time. Nowadays the interview and comedy pitch are much gentler. His joke of the day was reminding his audience about Donald Trump being impeached arrested and thrown out of his job for allegedly stealing top-secret US papers, which itself is again allegedly a threat to national security. Whereas our former PM Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson was thrown out of his job for attending an office party. Food for thought?