TV REVIEW : ‘Postcards’ Series Views Great Cities of the Globe

Clive James is the kind of chap you’d enjoy as a train companion, filling in the long stretches between stops with his stories of places you haven’t been.

On the other hand, peripatetics like James, an Australian-born British TV host and critic, can be a pain after a while--precisely because they’ve been to places you haven’t been.

“Clive James’ Postcards,” an eight-part BBC-produced series in which our host wanders through eight great cities, isn’t a pain at all, at least judging from the first two episodes which take James to New York (tonight) and Cairo (July 17). The series then scurries on to London, Bombay, Paris, Sydney, Rome and Berlin.

Notably, this isn’t titled “Clive James’ Slide Show,” because James avoids being a tourist and continually makes himself the butt of cultural jokes. We never, ever see him waving from the top of the Empire State Building or the Pyramid of Giza.

In both Gotham and Cairo, we are always made aware of his fairly comic outsider’s appearance: Even in Central Park, he stays dressed in his conservative coat and tie, and his plump and pasty appearance is jarring amid small, dust-covered camel traders. James suggests that he’s always on the outside looking in on a different world, but trying to get to know it well despite it all.

Sometimes, he’s smart on his sociocultural tour. He sniffs out terrific corners and voices of New York as if he has lived there his whole life: He gets author Richard Price to give as good a New Yorker’s take on the city as you’ll ever hear, and he finds the nuttiest deli, Sammy’s, anywhere.

Sometimes, James is goofy. His fear of New York crime gets him into bulletproof underwear, his love of clubbing (which he seems to do in every city he visits except Cairo) gets him lots of stares, and he rides his camel through the dunes to the strains of the “Lawrence of Arabia” theme.

James’ “Postcards” are both sly jabs at the notion that travel brings wisdom and subtle auto-portraits of a man conquering his fears of the unknown. In these senses, they form a commentary on armchair adventures, while being not a bad substitute if you can’t get there this summer.

* “Clive James’ Postcards” airs at 8 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.