Clive Anderson has no idea where he’s going. Or, for that matter, how he got to where he is. Throughout our interview, he stresses just how wildly unplanned his career has been. Indeed, before we get started, he offers a warning: ‘I may come across as a rather indecisive and drifting kind of person, actually because I am.’ Yet upon inspection of his career, ‘indecisive and drifting’ would be the last words to come to mind. Instead, over the past twenty-five years he has forged a consistently successful career that has seen him rarely absent from radio or TV. His stints on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Clive Anderson Talks Back, Have I Got News For You and many others have made him a familiar face to audiences in Britain and even across the world, yet despite such success, Anderson maintains his career has crept up on him.

At Cambridge, he seemed destined for comedy stardom, serving as president of the Footlights alongside Griff Rhys Jones and Douglas Adams, and it soon took priority. ‘It became my main preoccupation… but it had a sort of time-consuming aspect to it. You’re writing and rehearsing at exactly the time you’re supposed to be concentrating on your work, so it’s not ideal.’ Would the Footlights be to blame for any exam failures? ‘It’s a convenient thing to blame. I think I’d have been capable of wasting my time without Footlights, but [without it] I might have done a bit better.’

Despite this, Anderson emerged from Cambridge intent on becoming a lawyer, and laid comedy to bed. He sighs ‘I think it was sort of a failure of imagination, in a way… it didn’t really strike me that there was a world that needed me to be an actor or a stand-up comedian. I did want to be a barrister, so I did that.’ At least, for fourteen years. But his Footlight days weren’t dead: ‘I did keep up comedy in that I used to write sketches and jokes for radio and then TV programmes, but I didn’t really pursue it very much. It was like a little hobby that occasionally paid money.’ Yet eventually, law and comedy proved too tricky to balance: ‘I found it just too difficult, time-wise. But I didn’t really throw down my horse-hair wig and say, ‘Right, I’m stopping doing it’. I continued to do it for a while, until I realised, ‘Ooh, well I’m not really a barrister any more’. Has he considered returning to law? ‘I always thought I would… [But] now sufficient time has gone by that I’d have to start and retrain really.’

For Anderson, the gradual shift into comedy and presenting was accidental and, in many ways, he didn’t take it seriously: ‘When I was doing the telly, I’d be thinking, ‘Well, I’m not really a chat show host, I’m actually a barrister. I’m just doing this for a bit of a laugh.’ This shows onscreen, as he seems to lack egotism or vanity. He pauses. ‘I’ve experienced TV cameras, and they’re quite brutal. I certainly don’t usually watch my own programmes, because I don’t really like what I look like on television. I’d like to preserve the thought that I might look slightly different in real life, but I think that’s just a delusion really.’

Anderson seems to go to great length to paint a picture of himself as plain lucky, and rarely attributes his success to his own skill. ‘I’m not a great mover and shaker – things seem to happen to me, good or bad. I’m not very good at banging on the door and saying, “Look, this is what I should do”. I find that a difficult process.’ Yet the longevity of his career is not down to luck, but to talent. His rapid wit is renowned – though it has occasionally backfired. Infamously, the Bee Gees stormed out mid-interview after a few too many jibes, but that was anything but intentional: ‘I just stumbled accidentally into asking the wrong thing. I realised when they left that I’d trampled on a few nerves, but I didn’t do it intentionally. Well, that makes it worse doesn’t it?’

Such moments are rare, however. Instead, he has spent much of his career meeting his personal heroes, from Frankie Howerd to Peter Cook. His encounter with the latter led to an inspired special edition of his chat show, wherein Cook was the only guest and appeared as four different interviewees. It’s worth finding on YouTube. ‘I particularly liked that programme because it was great to work with Peter Cook in a proper comedy context… he didn’t really like talking about himself, he liked improvising and jollying away.’ With this impressive track record and Jonathan Ross’s impending departure, I suggest there’s a gap he might fill, but Anderson is quick to dismiss it. It’s a shame, as the dry wit for which he is famous would make a welcome change to the slightly more laddish, even juvenile, humour of Ross. But Anderson has no such doubts of the man’s skill. ‘I’m sure Jonathan Ross will crop up somewhere else as well, whether it’s on ITV or Sky or something. I doubt we’ve heard the last of Jonathan Ross.’

Currently, Anderson is mostly confined to radio, which he admits isn’t always ideal: ‘To be brutal, it’s not as well paid on the radio as it is on television, [and] it’s not as high profile. [But] it’s not really within my control.’ Still, many experienced a sense of déjà vu with the Second Prime Minster’s Debate, wherein Adam Boulton appeared as a weightier incarnation of Clive Anderson.

The man himself doesn’t see the resemblance: ‘I think it’s rather a cruel thing to say that he looks like a fat version of me! I’m sure that’s one of the worst insults I can imagine anyone giving.’ Nonetheless, he was present at the debates in spirit: ‘[The moderators] just had to say, ‘Mr Clegg! Mr Cameron!’ And so it was a little bit like Whose Line Is It Anyway? ‘And now I want that in the style of someone who does want to get elected.’ ‘Mr Brown, now do it with a smile on your face, to see if you can maintain it for more than a couple of minutes.’ He laughs at this, but adds, ‘forgive me if I ramble on too much. And please put it into sentences so I sound halfway reasonable.’

Such hesitancy is in stark contrast to his more confident onscreen persona, and while he has not been on television much recently, it seems doubtful that he’ll be away for long. For all his self-deprecation and even self-doubt, Anderson remains a witty and reliable host, and it has always been skill rather than luck that has sustained his career. He admits that he currently has ‘three or four projects which are in the ‘let’s go to lunch’ stage or ‘I’m just showing this to the controller’s stage,’ but quickly adds, ‘they sometimes come to nothing. I’m slightly nervous about talking about anything that isn’t set in stone.’ He needn’t worry. With things as they are, it doesn’t look like he’ll be retraining as a lawyer any time soon.

Cambridge is a half-hearted effort of a town. Let’s face it; it will always be the less quirky Oxford. From living in both places almost simultaneously it is easy for me to make a comparison and it’s not looking good for Cambridge.
I don’t blame you if you are fooled by Cambridge’s eccentric veneer. By law, you’re not allowed to play tennis in the street. Sounds kooky, but I’m afraid that bourgeois tradition feebly manifesting itself as idiosyncrasy is as far as it goes here. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that Cambridge is a vagarious vacuum.
With over 22,000 students frequenting the streets of Cambridge every year, you would have thought that the city would at least try and cater for this swarm of frolicsome, fun-loving twentysomethings. But alas, they are abandoned. Instead, the day’s entertainment comes in the form of punting under the mantra of you-will-bloody-well-grit-your-teeth-and-enjoy-it whilst unwillingly slurping warm, overpriced Corona and listening to the guide’s uninventive riverside commentary.
As our mediocre but ever-reliable local newspaper recently reported, ‘PUNT WARS BEGIN AGAIN AS TOUTS CLASH’. This is, of course, not referring to a low-budget Cambridge remake of Lucas’s galactic classic but to the fact that Scudamore’s Punts have a monopoly over Cambridge punting. But what does this mean for us river folk? It means that you should expect to pay in the excess of £30 every outing. What a bloody rip-off.
However, scathing remarks aside for just one moment, if you are ever in C-Town and find yourself drifting down the back alleyways, be sure to look out for a few hidden gems: the bohemian coffeehouse ‘Clowns’ is a Mecca for tiramisu-lovers the world over, the Japanese restaurant Teri-Aki serves cheap booze to the underaged and the charity shops offer cast-offs from the Cambridge elite.
And then, I suppose, there is the Strawberry Fair: an annual music festival in the heart of the city, rich with an inspiring diversity of people from louts to ladies to lawyers. Local bands come out in force and volume, exhibiting their raw talent and promising musical careers. The Fair embodies any remnants of a ‘scene’ in Cambridge.
But wait, what’s that you say? Strawberry Fair is cancelled this year? Yes, you heard correctly. Organisers say that ‘unfortunately, each year it is necessary to deal with those who would use the event as an excuse to offend’: a ‘scaredy-cat’ approach to the spoonful of adverse behaviour that inevitably emerges from such a unique event. So all that we have been clinging onto has faded and we’re left hungry for handicraft once again.
However, I am hopeful. Yesterday I received an invitation to a group on Facebook entitled ‘Even though Strawberry Fair is cancelled, I’ll still turn up’. This encourages me: perhaps the vision of the Cambridge people for a more eclectic city is not so blurred after all. It is for this reason that I remain loyal to Cambridge: I always knew that coming to Oxford would be a cruel test of where my allegiance truly lies.
Cambridge, my love, I’m coming home.

Last November saw the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall and the re-unification of Germany after forty four years of division. Heads of state from countries across Europe were present and the public celebrations were televised worldwide. A chain of one thousand giant dominoes running along the route of the wall was toppled in a symbolic re-enactment of its fall in 1989. Even an autumnal downpour could do little to dampen the scenes of jubilation across the city.
Since re-unification in 1989 a succession of governments in Germany has invested vast sums of money in the East of the country and the East of Berlin, which were formerly run by the Soviet Union. After 44 years of Communist rule, East Berlin was significantly poorer than West Berlin; its citizens had been brought up under a very different set of values and beliefs. For these reasons social and economic integration has been a slow process.

Today, Berlin is not rich. A bird’s-eye view of the city is singular in its lack of sky-scrapers and high-rise buildings. Germany’s financial sector has taken root in cities like Munich and Frankfurt and this is where big business has flourished. Thus, while politically Berlin is the capital of the country, economically it is the capital of the ‘working poor’. One quarter of the workforce (about 360,000 people) earns less than 900 euros a month. Unemployment too, however, is far higher than the national average – it reached a staggering 14.2 per cent in July last year, when the national average was far lower at 8.2 per cent.

Most of this poverty and unemployment is still concentrated in the East of the city. A short walk round any neighbourhood in this part of town is enough to show you how current the problem is. Derelict apartment blocks, disused factories, empty spaces – the vestiges of Communist rule and a poignant symbol of where recent government investment has failed to bridge the gap left behind when the wall came down.
Berlin is also a fairly ‘young’ city. The capital has several large universities and because of the flexibility of the German educational system, many young people remain students into their late twenties. Students make up no less than 25% of the city’s population. What’s more, they all tend to gravitate towards the East of the city, largely due to the simple fact that it is cheaper to rent housing here than in the West.
Because of this, in the last twenty years a novel phenomenon has sprung up in these areas of Berlin. In Eastern quarters such as Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, communal houses known as Hausprojekte have begun to spread. They started out life as squats: students taking over derelict buildings and turning them into functioning living spaces, but they are now far more official and more common. They have become a ubiquitous sight as one wanders round the Eastern boroughs.

From the street, these houses are instantly striking: brightly painted murals often stretch right across the entire facade of the building; banners screaming political slogans hang out of windows; groups of young people often congregate on the steps outside; loud punk music emanates from within the bowels of the building.
These Hausprojekte are run on a basic principle of communal living – the inhabitants share the physical space, their food and drink. Some of the more radical Projekte work on a pure communal ideology, each individual sharing everything with the other residents: all their possessions and their money.

Food is an essential part of this communal lifestyle. Often these projects will open up their doors for a Vokü (short for Volksküche, ‘People’s Kitchen’), which involves the cooking of a large pot of food which is then dished out to anyone who has one or two euros to spare. Other projects house public spaces such as cinemas, cafés or even climbing-walls.

One of the oldest Hausprojekte in Berlin is known as Köpi (it is situated at 137 Köpenickerstrasse in Friedrichshain). In February of this year, it celebrated its twentieth birthday, meaning that it was first squatted only three months after the Berlin wall came down.

The old apartment block sits a way back from the street and is obscured by a number of tall trees behind a rusty fence. As you step in through the open metal gate, however, an impressive sight meets your eyes. You stand in a shadowy courtyard and look up at the vast building as it looms enormous and dark over you. Graffiti, slogans and blazing political banners cover its face. The residents of Köpi are radical and on the far Left of the political scale. To live here, you have to be.

The residents organise regular demonstrations and marches, often in defence of other squats in Berlin which are in danger of being closed down by the authorities. Political slogans are all over the project’s website – ‘Gemeinsam sind wir unausstehlich. Raus auf die Strasse!’ (‘Together we are intolerable. Out and onto the street!’). The group has recently also taken itself off Myspace as it does not want to subscribe to the ‘capitalist brainwashing of Rupert Murdoch’.

Berlin has always had a reputation for being a focal point of political expression and protest. Virtually every year, May Day (International Workers’ Day) culminates in riots on the street and clashes between demonstrators and the police. The Hausprojekte like Köpi seem to have become vehicles for this political expression and provide a space in which people can speak out against issues as wide-ranging as neo-Fascism, climate change and animal testing.

Berlin’s recent history is unique and the influence this has had on the city is clear. The remnants of Communism in the East are still very visible. Street names commemorating the heroes of the German Democratic Republic are still preserved in East Berlin today – if you choose to, you can do some window-shopping on Karl-Marx-Allee, take the underground metro to Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz or grab a drink on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse.

But there are more subtle ways in which the Communist past has helped shape the Berlin way of life. One could argue that the Hausprojekte, so common in East Berlin now, are one example of the way in which Communism has influenced the lifestyles of at least some people in Berlin today. This is not to say that they are all Communists, but more that the values of sharing and equality at the heart of the Communist ideology seem to form the basis for their way of living together.
Communal living is something which has virtually died out in Britain. On average, we no longer even live with our extended relatives any more, preferring instead the even more insular confines of the nuclear family.

Perhaps this is no bad thing. Perhaps, however, we might look to East Berlin and the Hausprojekte and take a more open approach to the idea of living communally. For I can see no reason why it should remain such a foreign concept.

Nothing like a day of firsts: first time to Cambridge, first time at a life drawing class, first time naked in Cambridge at a life drawing class. As I boarded the coach from Oxford in the morning, I settled down to think about the various reactions from people upon hearing about my modeling experiment:

‘I’d feel quite vulnerable, that’s something I would rather share just with my partner.’
‘I’m too old fashioned and English. I want to cover-up table legs in case they cause offense.’
‘Good lad.’ (That was from my mother.)

Three hours later I arrived in The Other Place and immediately got lost, just like my first day at Oxford, and the parody was complete when a tourist took my picture. (If only he’d waited an hour…). Eventually I made it to the porter’s lodge at King’s College to meet Susy, who organizes the class, and as we walked across the quad she told me I was their first male model. (The class is all female, mostly students at King’s, and each week a different member poses for the group.) Given the proximity to the start of finals, Susy told me that today the class would be smaller than normal: only about ten girls. I tried to think of the last time I heard ten of anything being considered ‘small’.

As the class started to arrive, we were in the ‘art room’ at King’s, a small, spare studio overlooking the quad, Susy explained the schedule of poses (how many of each duration) and then I went about changing into the bright pink drop cloth – how did they know, my favourite colour. It turned out to be comically voluminous; there is more of a naked woman to cover than a naked man but not this much more. I tried not to trip over its trailing pieces as I made my way to the centre of the room, which was now encircled by ten easels, drawing kit at the ready.

The cloth made a pile at my feet and we went through the first set of four poses, five minutes each.

At first I tried to keep everything as flexed as possible: stomach, chest, arms, but then I remembered my thighs, my back, my bum, and, shoot, did I just move my eyes? Is that OK? Just breathing changes the shape of my stomach and chest; what if someone was drawing those? Less than halfway into the first pose and my attempts to assuage insecurity (vanity?) were completely overwhelmed by being at the centre of a circle of attention. There was just too much on display to worry about anything other than keeping still.

After the opening poses we took a short break. I sat on a chair and chatted to some of the girls about what it was like when they posed. Most were nervous at first but quite comfortable by the end. We spent most of our time talking about various poses, what worked or didn’t, and everyone seemed to have a story about one body part or another falling asleep.

The next sequence was two fifteen minute poses. Emboldened by my reasonable performance in the opening set, the girls were all very encouraging, I literally overreached, with my right arm outstretched, left arm following it across my chest, weight and body tilted back onto my left foot.

After about five minutes my right arm started to shake and when Susy called seven minutes my shoulder was searing. After ten minutes my right arm collapsed, my shoulder feeling like it was going to fall off. This would happen twice more before the pose was finished, and after another short break I sensibly chose, for the next fifteen minute pose, to cross my hands onto opposite shoulders.

After another short break we began the longest pose of the afternoon, thirty minutes, for which the class decided I should kneel down, arms outstretched, forehead on the floor. After almost an hour of standing this seemed like a good choice, my entire body was sore and I was strangely short of breath. It turned out that kneeling only changed the focus of the pain: after thirty minutes, my knees had melted into the floor. It took nearly a minute to stand-up, at which point I was greeted by the following observation as one artist looked over her neighbour’s shoulder:
‘You’ve been reduced to a misshapen baby; or a tortoise.’
Classic.

This comment was actually hilarious, as the girls would explain that in life drawing, artists are less focused on the body qua body, and more focused on describing, with pencil or pen or charcoal or watercolour, the shapes of which the body is comprised. This is part of the reason why I covered myself with the drop cloth in between poses; the quality of the attention changes between model and person. The ability to separate images from conceptions of images – to see ovals and circles, not a hand – is extraordinarily difficult, and sometimes the results are unexpected. (Hence, babies and tortoises.)

Nevertheless, we were all soon reminded of the salacious expectations that people have about anything involving nudity. After the class had finished Susy and a few others from the class took me to dinner in the King’s dining hall, where I noticed at least a half-dozen young men watching our table, eying the drawing pads. (After about two terms of classes, most of the people at King’s know what goes on in the art room on Sunday evenings, but only girls are allowed to participate.)

One precocious lad even came over to say ‘hello’ but little else; he stood there expectantly, as if the girls had missed their cue to show him their work. ‘Every time!’ said Susy, when he finally returned, disappointed, to his table. Somehow I figured he would have been happy to miss this week’s work anyway.

5th: Getting drunk

You want to be on top form for date number one. While you might need a drink to get the conversation going and take the edge off, your date will not be impressed if you fall off your chair, shatter your wine glass or start talking about your recent bout of chlamydia. Stay sober, and you’ll leave with your pride and reputation intact.

4th: Texting/calling

Checking your phone does not make you seem cool and popular, you’ll come across as uninterested, uninteresting and rude. Picking up a call is even worse, and making a call is just an invitaiton for your date to get up and leave. Taking two hours away from your Blackberry might not be a bad thing.

3rd: Two-for-one vouchers

We’re all for saving money, but this is not the place to do it. If you can’t afford dinner, go for coffee or perhaps a cheeky amble in the Botanical Gardens, but saying you’ll check on studentbeans and organize your date around the half an hour time frame in which Yo! Sushi has 25% off kind of kills the romance.

2nd: Ex chat

No one wants to hear about your boy/girlfriend, good or bad, or if you’re, like, totally over them. Start on a blank page and give the relationship a chance, without making your date feel like they’re being constantly compared to an Ambercrombie and Fitch model whose father owns eBay.

1st: Food choice

Girls, avoid anything phallic. You categorically CANNOT eat a banana, ice lolly or sausage without either suggesting you’re a porn star or have bad technique.
Boys, sloppy eating style augurs sloppiness in other areas. So avoid anyhing resembling spaghetti.

Other things to bear in mind: ordering a margherita pizza will make you appear dull, and there is nothing less attractive than a girl picking at a salad.
Finally, beware of anything with garlic or onions if you are gunning for that first date kiss.