More Fool Me

by Stephen Fry

  National Geographic, before it became best known for an imbecilic and embarrassing suite of digital TV channels, was – thanks to its anthropological coverage in a pre-internet, pre-Channel 4, pre-top shelf age – the only place where a curious boy could look at full colour pictures of naked people. For that alone it deserves the thanks of generations. One did get the false impression that many peoples of the world had protuberances shaped exactly like a gourd, but never mind.

  National Geographic made films too, and at my school these would be run through an old Bell & Howell projector by the geography masters to keep us quiet and to give them time to beetle off and pursue their amorous liaisons with matron or the whisky bottle, depending on which teacher it was. ‘Fry, you’re in charge,’ they would never say on their way out. But what strange films they left us to watch. I seem to recall that the subjects were usually logging in Oregon, the life cycle of the beaver or the excitements to be found in the National Parks of Montana and Wyoming. Very blue skies, lots of spruce, larch and pine, and plenty of plaid shirtings. The unreliable speed of that hot and dusty old Bell & Howell rendered the soundtrack and its music flat then sharp then flat again in rolling waves of discord, but it was the commentators that gave me raptures with their magisterially rich and rolling American rhetoric. What a peculiar way with language they had, employing poetical tricks that had been out of date a hundred years earlier. My favourite was the ‘be-’ game. If a word usually began with the prefix ‘be-’ it was taken off. Thus ‘beneath’ became ‘neath’ and so on. But the ‘be’ of ‘beneath’ wasn’t simply thrown away. No, no. It was recycled by adding it to words it had no business being anywhere near. Which would result in preposterous declamatory orotundities of this nature: ‘Neath the bedappled verdure of the mighty sequoia sinks the bewestering sun,’ and so forth. And what is the proper name for this rhetorical trope, also much deployed? It would start with the usual ‘be-’ nonsense: ‘Neath becoppered skies bewends …’ but then this: ‘the silver ribbon of time that is the Colorado River’. The weird and senseless maze of metonym and metaphor that was National Geographic Speak in all its besplendour was a great influence on me, for where others had rock and roll music, I had language …

  And so I bewended and bewittered like the large slab of humanity that was Stephen Fry. Despite my passion for all things American and my obsession with its language, literature, history and culture, I didn’t visit the country until I was well into my twenties. I had adapted and rewritten the book of the British musical Me and My Girl as alluded to passim, and it was decided that a Broadway production might be worth attempting. With Mike Ockrent, the director, and Robert Lindsay, the star, I took a PanAm flight from London to JFK. I had never been so excited in my life. My first view of the Manhattan skyline was like Dante’s first view of Beatrice, Cortez’s of the Pacific and, I dare say, Simon Cowell’s of Susan Boyle. I fell for New York quite as much as Wodehouse, W. H. Auden, Oscar Wilde and my other literary heroes had before me. But we were only there for rehearsals. The musical was to try out and open in Los Angeles, California. My first visit, and I was to live for a while in both Manhattan and Beverly Hills. My cup ran over like a blocked gutter.

  In Broadway’s theatre district there is a famous eatery called the Carnegie Deli. It features in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, you may remember. It was on my first full day in America that I went in there and ordered a pastrami sandwich. Big deal, you may say. Oh yes. Big deal. Huge deal. For those who have not had the pleasure, a proper New York deli pastrami sandwich is about the size and thickness of a rugby ball. Two thin layers of rye bread and in between slice after slice after slice of warm, fatty, delicious pastrami. On the side is served a pickle or so. Hold that image. Me facing off with a vast pastrami sandwich. Right. We now scuttle to LA. I blew all my per diems on a single weekend in the Bel Air Hotel, luxury on a scale I had never even imagined, let alone contemplated. Robert Redford winked at me from across the breakfast room. I nearly trod on a dog belonging to Shirley MacLaine. My over-running cup ran over even more till it was more like the Trevi Fountain than any sort of cup I know.

  Then back to New York. I am happy to say the opening night of Me and My Girl was everything one could have hoped for. The New York Times raved; we were a hit. I won a Drama Desk award and a Tony nomination; Robert Lindsay went on to win a Tony and a hatful of other trophies for his brilliant performance. There and then I promised myself that one day I would live in New York, this city from whose sidewalks you drew electricity like a tube train from its tracks. At the time I had been staying in an apartment belonging to my friend Douglas Adams. On the flight back I garrulously chattered away to an American lady sitting next to me about how I loved America and was planning to live in New York.

  ‘But honey,’ she said – she was rather in the Rosalind Russell Auntie Mame mould – ‘honey, you told me you’d only ever been to New York City and Los Angeles.’

  I confessed that this was true.

  ‘Then you have never even seen America,’ she said.

  I suppose regarding a part of something as being congruent to its whole might be viewed as a kind of pars pro toto fallacy or lazy synecdoche, but I didn’t truly understand what this woman meant until, as the National Geographic might say, I bethought me of the colossal continent of succulence that was a Carnegie Deli sandwich. How could anyone say they had eaten a Carnegie Deli pastrami sandwich if in fact they had only gnawed at the thin slices of rye at either end while the whole continent of meat lay untouched? How could anyone say they had experienced America who had only nibbled at New York and Los Angeles?

  One of the tasks I was – er – tasked to do when in Los Angeles some time in 1990 or 1991 was to pick up a script in Las Vegas and transport it to London. To fax an entire 120-page script from Las Vegas to London might have been within the budget of a major studio, but not within the budget of Renaissance Films, Ken Branagh’s production company, founded with a City gentleman turned producer called Stephen Evans. Email attachments were but a glint in the eye of the future. If you had a document to send you used a courier. Couriers came in the shape of DHL and FedEx or possibly in the shape of Stephen Fry.

  I cannot remember what had taken me to Los Angeles in 1991, or even if I have the year right, but I do know that the previous winter I had invited Emma Thompson and her new husband, Ken Branagh, for a week at my Norfolk house. They had seen me chopping wood. We had talked of this and that and somehow, as is the way with Ken, a story idea had been born or confirmed in his head.

  I think perhaps on reflection that I may have got this wrong. Maybe it was Martin Bergman* and his wife, the American comedian Rita Rudner,† who had been up to Norfolk, for it was certainly they who wrote the screenplay in question. Oh memory, what a ditzy queen you are.

  Well, well. The facts of the matter are that Ken knew I was in Los Angeles and asked me to stop off in Las Vegas and pick up the latest version of the script. I had not read any version of it, but had agreed to be in it, such was my instinctive trust of Ken and such were his extraordinary powers of persuasion.

  The film was to be called Peter’s Friends, and I read it on the plane back from Los Angeles with a mounting sense of horror. It was funny, I thought, but it was about us. About Hugh and me and Emma and Tony Slattery and our Footlights generation seven or eight years on. Ken had enjoyed great success with the film version of his triumphant Stratford Henry V and now he wanted to make a kind of British Big Chill.

  Hugh and I, perhaps because of the permanent guilt derived from our perceived privileged upbringings, instinctively recited in our minds the likely response of critics whenever a new project arose. We had in mind some kind of antagonistic Time Out reviewer. The wrinkle in his nose, the snort of his derision, the slow downward curl of his lips – we were there before him, writing his copy as if inside his head and the heads of everyone else. This we will return to in a moment.

  In the spring of ’88 I played the part of the philosopher Humphry in
Simon Gray’s The Common Pursuit in Watford and at the Phoenix Theatre in the West End. During that time I had been making the television version of Delve Special, which had been retitled This Is David Lander. Filming all day and then just making it in time to the theatre and after that being naughty in the Limelight nightclub with rock stars, snooker players and other disparate lowlife legends seemed to be something I could manage, although my doctor popped into the dressing room at the Phoenix twice a week to inject me with B12 to keep my energy levels up. I don’t remember asking for this, so I assume it was the show’s producer who probably worried, as producers do, that I might be running out of fuel. The run of the play was followed by a period Hugh and I had set aside to write all the material for a comedy sketch show that we decided after much agonized debate to call A Bit of Fry and Laurie.

  In the early spring of 1989 we began taping the first full series of this (‘a lacklustre throwback trapped in an irrelevant Oxbridge past’, we imagined Time Out snarling furiously). In the summer of that year we recorded Blackadder Goes Forth (‘a sad dip in form after the delights of Blackadder the Third’, Time Out would be sure to mutter) and immediately after that Hugh and I filmed the first series of Jeeves and Wooster, again sharing throughout the shoot what we imagined would be Time Out’s verdict: ‘while the rest of the world leaps ahead in innovation and edge, Fry and Laurie welter feebly in a snobbish and puerile past’.* This had come about when a fellow called Brian Eastman had asked for a meeting. Eastman had previously worked in music for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the British Council and now had a company that produced most notably the series Poirot on ITV. It was his plan to bring Wodehouse’s Bertie and Jeeves to the screen, and he felt that Hugh and I were good casting. Strangely, to us at least, he was quite open as to which roles we felt each should play. It seemed obvious to us that Hugh was a natural Bertie and I more suited to Jeeves. Hugh put it this way: Bertie’s voice is a trumpet, Jeeves’s a cello.

  Actually, such was our insecurity and fear of failure we didn’t really believe it could be done and might easily have turned Brian down, had it not been for a fear of any other two actors playing the parts. The pessimism in this case wasn’t entirely our usual flabby lack of confidence, so much as an immense respect of, and devotion to, Wodehouse’s work. His novels and stories, like any writer’s, are composed of plot, character and language. What makes Wodehouse stand head and shoulders above any comic writer of the twentieth century (indeed almost any writer, regardless of genre) is his language. In the end we decided if we could get across character and plot and only a small amount of that peerless prose then we might turn enough people to reading the books, consigning them to a lifetime of endless pleasure. Clive Exton, who wrote the adaptation, was best known for his chilling screenplay 10 Rillington Place, the grim, murky retelling of the Christie murders. But he had since moved to another world of Christie murders altogether as one of the lead writers on the Poirot series.

  Fry and Laurie seemed sometimes to be a desperate affair, writing and staring at the wall and not believing we were at all funny, performing dozens of sketches before a live audience on each recording evening and then worrying straight away about the next week. But I was working with Hugh, my best friend in the whole world, and while sketch delivery, like any kind of birth, involves pain and squealing, it was a period of fecundity, laughter, freedom and friendship that I would have been lucky to have experienced had I lived a hundred lives. Sometimes I will be sent a YouTube link on Twitter and out of curiosity follow it up only to discover that it is an old Fry and Laurie sketch that I have almost entirely forgotten. Forgive me if occasionally I find myself laughing and actually feeling proud. Naturally, as we all do, I wince and writhe in embarrassment at this mannerism or that, but I do really believe that some of our writing and performing was … well … top hole …

  Straight after Fry and Laurie we made Blackadder Goes Forth. The audience that came into the BBC studios, as I have mentioned, had almost certainly seen Blackadder II and Blackadder the Third on their televisions at home and were somewhat alienated by new characters and settings. In rehearsal there was a lot of pacing, smoking, coffee-drinking and throwing out ideas, not to mention having ideas thrown out. We were young, we were buzzy and we were also, although we had no idea of it at all, making a comedy series that for whatever reason appears to have stood the test of time. The character drawing and imagination of writers Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, our own additions, I would modestly suggest, the extraordinary talent of Rowan, Hugh, (Sir) Tony Robinson, Tim McInnerny and the late and hugely lamented Rik Mayall all seemed to combine in a way that simply clicked. John Lloyd, the producer, kept us all on point, as Americans like to say, but on a couple of occasions we made such drastic changes to the storyline that whole new sets had to be ordered from the production designer just two days before recording, and it was John who manfully took the blame each time. My own proudest achievement is perhaps not the playing of the insane General Melchett, but the suggestion after the first read-through that Tim McInnerny’s character’s name be changed from the proffered ‘Perkins’ or ‘Cartwright’ to something that might explain his animosity, suspicion and hostility to all around him. I wondered if ‘Darling’ might not work, and Rowan and Tim ran with the ball as only actors of their quality could.

  Jeeves and Wooster, which started more or less straight after Blackadder finished, was unalloyed pleasure. Hugh and I both took to single-camera filming (as opposed to the multi-camera TV studio set-up then customary in which sitcoms were recorded on tape) like ducks to bread crusts. We had wonderful fellow actors to work with and lively, funny crews full of banter and inventiveness. Between them they had been involved in many of the best films ever to have come out of Britain, from Dr No to Dr Strangelove.

  Somehow during this period as well as my involvement in those three television series I had also written four or five twenty-minute films for John Cleese’s company Video Arts. Video Arts specialized in training films for business and industry. These films had been constructed around psychological ideas all vetted by John Cleese’s pet psychologist, Robin Skynner, with whom he’d written the book Families and How to Survive Them. They had thrilling titles like How to Schedule a Meeting, How to Run an Interview, How to Succeed in a Job Application. I secretly called the whole project ‘How to Make Money by Stating the So Fucking Obvious It Makes Your Nose Bleed’. If businesses needed to be told in firm language:

  make a list

  stick to it

  then no wonder the British economy was swirling round the lavatory pan. They were fun films to make, however, and to be around John Cleese, a towering hero from my early teens, still made me rub my eyes with disbelief. I had written roles for myself, John, Hugh and Dawn French. Other parts were played by Ronnie Corbett and Julian Holloway.

  It was during this period, post Fry and Laurie, Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster, that I made simply the best decision in my entire life. It saved my health, my career and (for a time at least) my sanity.

  While I had been deep in this absolutely brutal schedule (although it seemed natural to me), my sister Jo had completed a TV and film make-up course in London, and one evening we had dinner in Orso, the popular Covent Garden restaurant.

  I had been turning something over in my mind and finally, over the panna cotta alla fragole, I ventilated it.

  ‘Jo, I know there’s always the possibility of your going off to do make-up work on a film or something. And I know Richard might get stationed abroad,* but do you think you might like …?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, if this is out of order just spray wine at me, but how would you feel about …?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, over the last few years I’ve started to get more and more fan mail, more and more requests for appearances and after-dinner speaking and the lord knows what else. It’s kind of out of control …’

  ‘Right …’

  ‘My diary is so packed that
I can hardly keep up with what I’m doing, and I need, well I need a …’

  ‘A secretary?’

  ‘Well, the term for it is Personal Assistant. PA. But in your case, being a personal sister, you’d be a Personal Assister.’

  ‘Oh God, that is so exactly what I hoped you’d ask me. I was going to suggest the same thing. I’d love it. I’d love it more than anything.’

  For the past twenty-six years, then, Jo has been my PA. She is the best PA anyone ever had. Naturally I would say that out of family loyalty, but a story illustrates the point.

  During filming with John Cleese somewhere in West London for a Video Arts project, Jo visited the set with her Filofax to go over the next week’s diary business. This was before you could electronically sync diaries over the air, well before PDAs and smartphones. She stayed for lunch, joined John in watching me film a scene with Ronnie Corbett and then biffed off.

  About ten minutes later John stalked over.

  ‘Well, don’t I feel a total dick.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘All my working life I’ve looked for the perfect assistant, and you, you bastard, have found her. So naturally I said to her while you were on camera, “Whatever he’s paying you, I’ll double it.”’