by Stephen Fry
Attempting a carol. Christmas Day, Norfolk, 1987.
Chelsea – damn, I wish I still had that pullover …
All the details are on the clapperboard.
Quiet, dignified downtime: Eilean Aigas, Inverness-shire, 1993.
Hugh, perfectionist as he is, always stays within his character: a drivelling poltroon from dawn to dusk while Jeeves and Wooster was being filmed …
Everyone always anxious to sit next to me on the Jeeves and Wooster set.
Official publicity still for Jeeves and Wooster. I remember it as if it were twenty-five years ago.
Filming Jeeves and Wooster at Farnham, 1989. Sister Jo visiting the set.
Giving Charlie Laurie his daily vodka and yogurt smoothie. Christmas, 1988.
It’s that butch look. Christmas, 1988.
Newborn Charlie Laurie, adoring godparent, 1988.
My butch look, 1987.
Hysteria publicity shot, 1991.
Backstage at a Hysteria benefit show. Sadler’s Wells, 1989.
Reading at, I think, a Hysteria show.
(See over) I know what you’re thinking, and you’re to stop it, January 1991.
Self, Ben Elton, Robbie Coltrane, Griff Rhys Jones, Mel Smith, Rowan Atkinson.
An idiot and an imbecile.
Ready to lay down their lives for my country.
A blithering idiot and a gibbering imbecile.
Radio Times 1988 Christmas Edition: Saturday-Night Fry feature.
Hugh, Jo and I.
With sister, Jo.
A signing at a Dillons bookshop. London, 1991.
Hugh’s warmest, most approving look, 1991.
A profile of a liar for the publication of The Liar, 1991, with sister Jo.
Tourrettes-sur-Loup – my best audience.
Tourrettes-sur-Loup – picking on someone my own size.
Hugh and I revealing our weekend recreational identities.
Mandela Birthday Concert, Wembley Stadium, 1988. About to perform in front of 80,000 people. Not in the least nervous. Oh no.
I felt comfortable and ALIVE.
Incredibly, I still have that shirt. Haven’t burnt it or anything …
Self and Hugh wining, dining and pointing at Sunetra Atkinson.
A bit more Fry and Laurie.
Cap Ferrat with Mrs Laurie.
Cap Ferrat, 1991 – Charlie Laurie, by this time, rightly, bored of my attempts to amuse.
Stripey me.
Self and self at the National Portrait Gallery. Maggi Hambling’s completed work.
Next to Maggi Hambling charcoal portrait of me commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery. Do NOT mention the hair.
Maggi Hambling’s National Portrait Gallery picture of me.
Taking pleasure in red wellies: life gets no better, 1990.
The American Peter’s Friends poster.
Peter’s Friends publicity shot. From left: Emma, self, Hugh, Rita, Alphonsia – it’s clear I’m thinking about the Time Out critic.
Full cast of Peter’s Friends, 1992. From left: Rita Rudner, Ken Branagh, Alex Lowe, Emma Thompson, self, Alphonsia Emmanuel, Imelda Staunton, Tony Slattery, Hugh, Phyllida Law.
Publicity still for Hysteria, 1992. I have no words.
Self.
Labour Party fundraising gala. Next to Dickie Attenborough and Melvyn Bragg.
Sir Paul Fox, the Prince of Wales, self, Alyce Faye Cleese: premiere of The Man Without a Face.
With Alyce Faye Cleese at The Man Without a Face premiere.
Publicity for Comic Relief, April 1991 – m’colleague, Hugh Laurie and Emma Freud, self, Jennifer Saunders, Tony Slattery.
Note where I’m playing from. Total duffer. Inverness, 1994.
Jo and my third nephew, the most excellent George.
Carla Powell checking to see if my beard is real. It is.
I can’t quite explain why I’m sitting like that: I’m going to say in order to keep the jacket smooth …
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2014
Copyright © Stephen Fry, 2014
Cover photography © Suki Dhanda
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The extract from O Tell Me the Truth About Love by W. H. Auden, 1938, is reprinted by kind permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.
ISBN: 978-0-718-17755-3
VERY NAUGHTY, BUT … IN THE RIGHT SPIRIT
* Since I wrote this passage some poor sod of a local radio DJ was forced into resignation for playing an old recording of the song. Oh lawks.
MORAL OR MEDICAL?
* In the real sense of willy-nilly. Not in the sense of harum-scarum or all over the place.
THE EARLY DAYS
* A once common phrase that no one seems to know any more, but is worth looking up.
* After three series a BBC executive eventually cottoned on to the terrible truth that the name of Everett’s female vulgarian, Cupid Stunt (‘all in the best possible taste’), could be crudely spoonerized. She was forbidden from reappearing. A new, seemingly identical, character called Mary Hinge popped up in the next series. ‘Now you see that’s better,’ said the executive. ‘You don’t need to be smutty to be funny.’
* As with smartphones, coke lore had it that storing the damp wrap in rice would eventually dry it out, but it never worked for me.
* I haven’t … except to correct hasty typos.
† We didn’t.
* Technically Anteros, of course, but what the hey?
† The second best in central London. The best is, of course, that of the young man memorializing the Machine Gun Corps in Wellington Place. His matchlessly perfect buttocks present themselves to anyone travelling south along Park Lane towards Hyde Park Corner. One never minds a red light there.
* Pronounced like the mint you were a long time ago urged not to hurry and Andy the tennis champion.
† Moray played the definitive Colonel Bantry all those years ago with Joan Hickson’s equally definitive Miss Marple.
* In other words by grape variety – Sauvignon Blanc, Shiraz, Merlot, etc. – as opposed to the confusing traditional British manner of listing by estate without any mention of the grape. This once pioneering approach is now standard practice, of course.
* As in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, only more lively and convivial.
* See Moab is My Washpot.
* Not to each other. Two separate ceremonies.
* Feeble ref. to the Mujahadeen, who we
re one of the Afghan insurgency forces in the old Soviet–Afghan war.
* After all, the royal family have a house not far from me, and Princes William and Harry have been known to pop into one of my favourite pubs in the county: that being the case, some git off the TV is hardly going to cause excitement.
* Famous in the wider world for his naked balloon dance. He drowned, aged fifty-five, much mourned by what was then the oxymoronic alternative establishment. His stand-up act was, I need hardly add, staggeringly unfunny in a way that must have taken enormous effort. He himself was astonishingly funny, however. Go figure.
* Slimline it may have been called, but it imparted no such thing to my increasing bulk.
NOTES FROM A SHOWBUSINESS CAREER
* I once heard someone say they’d really enjoyed the new Hare piece at the National …
* I was wise enough to run the manuscript of this book by Hugh to check for accuracy. I am sometimes accused of a good memory, but it is only good for useless things. Hugh’s is both compendious and useful. I quote his response to the paragraph above: ‘… not that it matters, but it was definitely Rowan who did the hoovering. I also distinctly remember him driving to the petrol station – the only place open on New Year’s Day – and coming back with fig rolls, for God’s sake. They might have been there since the previous New Year.’
* Not tired enough to sleep, obviously …
LIVING THE LIFE
* Ex-President of the Cambridge Footlights. Before my time, but he co-produced our 1981 tour of Australia, magnificently described in The Fry Chronicles.
† Terrifically funny American stand-up comedian. ‘I can’t understand why cosmetics manufacturers make perfumes that smell of flowers. Men don’t like flowers. If they want to attract men they should bring out a scent called New Car Interior …’
* For all I know this is deeply unfair, and Time Out welcomed us with lavish praise. We were too scared to look. I remember years earlier Rik Mayall opening a Time Out to see a review of the second series of The Young Ones. ‘“Nothing like as good as the pioneering first series,”’ he read, then spluttered, Riklike, ‘but they hated the first series. Bastards!’
* Her husband, Richard, was an RAF pilot.
* I bore in mind the fact (told to me years ago by my mother, who knows these things, when watching a Mills film) that Sir John had been for fifty years on the Hay Diet. When he was a young man he had developed a stomach ulcer, then the most common cause of death of men under forty in Britain. Today, of course, suicide is the most common. Someone recommended to him the Hay Diet, in which protein and carbohydrates are never combined. Vegetables are ‘neutral’. You can have steak and salad or pasta and salad. You can have cucumber sandwiches, but not cheese rolls. Ham and eggs for breakfast or just pancakes. You get the idea. His ulcer was allayed, and for the rest of his life he remained trim.
* He had been unable to see properly for at least five years by this time and spent much charitable energy helping the Royal London Society for the Blind.
DEAR DIARY
* Almost certainly Valery Gerghiev, who has since become a kind of friend.
* Some might think the anagram rather appropriate given the astounding settlement awarded her when JC and she divorced. I couldn’t possibly comment.
† A BBC Radio 4 arts programme, forerunner of Front Row.
* Comedy POW drama written by David ‘Reggie Perrin’ Nobbs. I had filmed it with Hugh Bonneville, Nicholas Lyndhurst and others earlier in the year.
* Usually notorious for bowing out of parties with a gentle yawn at about 9 p.m.
* Wasn’t so easy to ‘source’ a book in the days before the World Wide Web and Amazon and so on …
* TV chat-show host: a simply adorable man who died from Hepatitis B in 1988.
* Jamie struggled after Russell’s untimely death in 1988 but then wrote the wonderful At Swim, Two Boys, one of the best Irish novels of the past however many years.
† The wicked cad in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, whose casual allusion to how good a parson he would have made had he minded to become one so shocks Fanny, the heroine, who is shocked by everything, to be honest.
‡ And rightly. It went on to win the Hawthornden Prize (which had been recently resurrected by the munificent Dru Heinz, widow of the 57 Varieties chap), and the author, Tim Pears, went on to write the hugely successful In a Land of Plenty.
* Ben played Verges.
* A lot fewer than there are now, Stephen young sausage.
* Alphonsia Emmanuel and Tony Slattery, who were also in Peter’s Friends. Richard Curtis of Four Weddings fame unkindly remarked that surely Alphonsia Emmanuel is a drag name … you might think that, but I c. p. c.
* Tony S.
† Still together *sentimental gulp*.
* Now between £300 and £700 p.d.
† Sean Connery’s 1983 remake of Thunderball. Rowan Atkinson made a brief appearance in it.
* Producer of Not the Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image, Blackadder and – in 2003 – QI.
† I meant that I usually hook.
* Now known the world over for his portrayal of the Downton butler.
* Not even vaguely like Boyle’s Law, Stephen, which is to do with gases.
* Last three named all BBC high-ups of the time. Checkland (known as ‘Chequebook’ as he came up through the ranks of admin and business rather than programme-making) was Director-General.
* In The Picture of Dorian Gray it’s a schoolroom in which the eponym hides his portrait, not – as everyone says – an attic. But only I would be so pedantic in a diary.
† Subsequently re-revived by Rowan Atkinson.
* The splendidly mad old producer of The Goon Show, Till Death Us Do Part and, in 1982, Cambridge Footlights for the BBC with me, Hugh, Emma and Tony S.
* Hemmings.
* My beloved nephew George. All three of my nephews are equally beloved of course. No nieces sadly; sister and sister-in-law just weren’t concentrating. Actually, it’s the sperm that determines gender come to think, no pun intended. Help, I’ve become infected. Writing footnotes in diary style now. It’ll be exclamation marks next!! Oh merciful heavens!! No!!!
† The painter and sculptor. She had been commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint a picture of me, which she had long wanted to do anyway.
* The sainted Edwina Curry was bringing a Private Members Bill before the House of Commons to make the age of homosexual consent equal to the heterosexual age. At the time the gay age of consent was twenty-one, the original Wolfenden Report recommendation, passed into law thirty-odd years earlier. Final equality had to wait until 2000, three years into the Blair administration.
* 0-86719-371-9.
† Kim was seven thousand times more likely to know. He was a chess master and had been at school with Nigel Short. Taught him the French Defence and its many variations, Kim’s favourite for black.
* The last Governor of Hong Kong, who oversaw the rain-sodden handing over of the Crown Colony to China in 1997. At time of writing Chairman of BBC trustees and may well be the last of those too, given the corporation’s plight.
* Norman Lamont had been sacked a few months earlier as Chancellor of the Exchequer by Prime Minister John Major. He made a snidely neat resignation speech in the House: ‘This government gives the impression of being in office but not in power.’