Statements
A perfectionist with a steady hand: Jonathan Green remembers John Clarke
It was Di Gribble who introduced me to John Clarke. They’re both dead now, leaving that same sense of unfillable loss, of something just gone from life.
John was a man of many conversations and we shared more than a few. In corridors, on phones, in studios.
It always amazed me, early in the piece, that he made time, someone so accomplished, so well-known and adept. But it dawned on me eventually that having a chat was one of the things John liked most, perhaps second only to working.
There would have been other private priorities above these I know — to his family and closer friends — but ours was a particular conversation, full of ideas, wit and a constant fascination with literary and performance form. It had the intimacy of mutual fascination, but not a true closeness …