The Fry Chronicles

by Stephen Fry

  Oh well, we thought. That was that. Fun while it lasted. But the film's producer, David Puttnam, either out of loyalty or for more practical reasons of financial economy, did not fire us. He quickly acquired Eton College as an alternative location, and we were all bussed out to Berkshire, using the nearby Bray Studios as a base. At Eton they shot one of the most memorable scenes in the film, the Great Court Run in which Harold Abrahams and Lord Lindsay, played by Ben Cross and Nigel Havers, run a complete circuit of the outer perimeter of Trinity Great Court in the forty-three seconds or so (depending on the clock's last winding) that it takes for the chimes to strike twelve, a feat that Sebastian Coe just failed to emulate in 1988. School Yard at Eton is probably a quarter the size of Trinity Great Court, but camera angles managed to disguise the fact that even I could probably have run round it in forty-three seconds. My role in this scene, along with just about everyone else's, was to cheer and throw my boater wildly in the air.

  Filming the scene seemed to take an extraordinarily long time. I could not believe how long: it occurred to me that everyone must be extremely incompetent and that it could surely all have been done so much more quickly and efficiently. I now know that the days were all managed with exemplary order and speed. To an outsider, filming always appears both intolerably boring and horribly disorganized. When you do not understand how something works it is perhaps natural to question and to doubt. In later years, when - as so often might happen - a passer-by on a street shoot I was involved with expostulated at 'all those people' and how 'most of them are just hanging around doing nothing' and then offered the suggestion that 'I suppose it's all under the control of the unions', I would, to tamp down my indignation at such rudeness, force myself to remember my own scepticism when an extra on Chariots of Fire. That scepticism was shared by many, and so bored did the majority become and so ill-used did they feel themselves to be that they staged a mini-strike. They all sat down in School Yard and chanted for more pay. It staggers me how greedy and rude we could have been, and I am pleased to say that Kim and I were not among the bolshie faction. Puttnam appeared before us and sportingly and without the least sign of annoyance or disappointment agreed to pay us all an extra two pounds each. We cheered him louder than we had been asked to cheer the race.

  If you happen one day to be watching Chariots of Fire and want to spot me for reasons into which I will not inquire, then the Gilbert and Sullivan entertainment that takes place after the matriculation dinner is the scene to find. I'm lurking and smirking in the background. It is one of nature's cruellest curses on me. No matter how soulful, sweet and unselfconscious I try to appear, my features always arrange themselves into an expression of utmost self-satisfaction, self-awareness and self-love. So unfair.

  Back in Cambridge, life continued its jolly round. Simon Cherry, who had directed Latin!, was chosen by BATS to direct the 1980 May Week production. He cast me as the warty old king in All's Well That Ends Well. Emma Thompson played Helena, Kim had a variety of parts, and Barry Taylor played Parolles.

  Playing the King in All's Well That Ends Well, BATS May Week production 1980, in Queens' Cloister Court.

  Barry, whose Macbeth had so impressed me, was an extraordinary man and one who made me, without meaning to, feel very guilty and ashamed. He was as genuinely intelligent, perceptive, wise, learned, skilled at writing and academically gifted as anyone I had ever met, but as far as Cambridge and life in the world outside was concerned he had one huge defect, one appalling flaw. He was honest. He had integrity. Honesty and integrity are fine virtues in so far as they go, but they are fatal when it comes to sitting exams. He was in the year above me, so this was his last term at Cambridge, and finals beckoned. If anyone should have got a First and stayed on to research and become a valued teacher and academic it should have been Barry. But his fatal flaw meant that when he sat in the examination hall and turned over the paper he would try to answer the question. He would sit and think about it. He would ponder avenues of approach. He would start, cross out what he had written, have another think and only commit to paper his most considered judgements, appraisals and conclusions. By the time the whistle blew for the end of the three hours, during which time three questions should have been addressed and three essays completed, Barry would hand in one perfect essay and half of a very good one, leaving the third question entirely unanswered. He had done this in Part Ones the year before and he himself knew that he would probably do it in the Finals of the English tripos that were rapidly approaching. He wrote with delicacy and style, and his literary insights and moral, social and aesthetic perceptions were of far more value and depth than mine, but he simply could not master the art of time-keeping or manage the compromise of giving examiners what they wanted. He came from a working-class family who lived south-east of London. He told me that on the rare occasions that public-school boys had got on to the bus in Southend or the Isle of Dogs and asked for a ticket in their posh accents, he and his friends at the back would do cawing, honking, drawling impersonations of them. Not threateningly or violently, but because the sounds were so peculiar to their ears. It was hard for them to believe that anyone, especially anyone their age, really spoke like that. Then Barry arrived in Cambridge and found that he was the one with the unusual accent, and suddenly ra-ra public-school speech was the norm. It took him some time to believe that anyone with such an accent could be anything other than a dim chinless wonder.

  How Barry must have regarded a man like me, slick and deceitful enough to answer exam questions in just the way that achieved the best results with the least effort yet gifted with enough of a memory and knowledge to disguise it as authentic academic achievement, I don't know. Add to that my public-school manner and apparent confidence and I cannot but think that I made up just the kind of package that anyone with spirit would be most likely to despise.

  Cambridge might have argued, should they have been moved to do so, that their examination system is perfectly suited to the real world. Success in politics, journalism, the Civil Service, advertising, the Foreign Office, the City and so many of the grander fields of professional endeavour rely on the ability quickly to master the essentials of a brief, to subdue material to one's will, to present, promote and pimp, to massage facts and figures and to do all with speed, polish, ease and confidence. The tripos weeds out the slow, the honest, the careful, the considered and the excessively truthful - all of whom would be grossly unsuited to public life or high-profile careers.

  My cynicism and self-criticism may seem distorted and overstated, but I do not think I exaggerate so very much. Certainly the distinction between Barry Taylor's diligent integrity and my own indolent technique remains symbolic of something that is wrong in education and testing. Having said which, Cambridge was not so foolish as entirely to fail to recognize Barry's qualities, and he did subsequently have a career in academia despite not getting the First-Class degree that a better system of examination would undoubtedly have awarded him. On the other hand, if continuous assessment existed in my day, and had there been a greater emphasis on written work and research and less on scrambling to produce essays against the clock in the examination hall, I would have been booted out within months. Perhaps two streams of testing are required: one for plausible bounders like me and another for authentic minds like Barry.

  Caledonia 2

  A second Edinburgh Fringe season approached. This time I was exclusively bound up with the Cambridge Mummers, the drama club for whom I had appeared in Artaud at Rodez the previous year. Despite their reputation for progressive programming and emphasis on the modern, radical and avant-garde, they asked if I might consider allowing Latin! to join their repertoire. Caroline Oulton had written a play about the Swiss kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely; a friend called Oscar Moore had written a piece whose title I forget but which had darkly funny things to say about Dunstable; Simon McBurney and Simon Cherry were preparing a one-man show in which McBurney would play Charles Bukowski. A children's play was also being devise
d, and the main evening show would be a production of the rarely performed Middleton and Dekker comedy The Roaring Girl with Annabelle Arden in the title role, under the direction of Brigid Larmour. It was Annabelle and Brigid who had co-directed the production of Travesties in which I had first seen Emma Thompson. All these shows would be presented for two weeks in that same cramped but historic Riddle's Court venue off the Royal Mile.

  After the May Term finished and I had completed my usual summer stint at Cundall Manor we rehearsed for two weeks in Cambridge. I stayed in digs (Queens' was earning money from renting itself out for a business conference) near Magdalene with Ben Blackshaw and Mark McCrum, who had, with what grown-ups call 'commendable enterprise', started a business called 'Picnic Punts'. Every morning they would get up, dress themselves in striped blazers, white flannel trousers and boaters and go down to a mooring just opposite Queens', where they kept a single punt. A wooden plank with a white cloth would be placed athwart the vessel as a table, a wind-up gramophone, ice bucket and all the accoutrements required to serve a cream tea with strawberries and champagne would be stowed somewhere, and Mark would erect a handwritten sign on the Silver Street Bridge with illustrations (he was handy at drawing and calligraphy) advertising a punt-ride up or down the Cam in the company of genuine undergraduates.

  Ben was pretty and fey and blond and Mark impish and darkly handsome. The dreamy sight of them in their Edwardian whites was guaranteed to appeal to American tourists, day-tripping matrons and visiting schoolmasters of a Uranian disposition. Sometimes, as I hurried across a bridge between rehearsals, I might hear a Gershwin tune echoing off the stonework of the Bridge of Sighs or the slowing down and rapid rewinding of a Benny Goodman foxtrot drifting across the meadow opposite King's and I would smile as I saw Ben and Mark poling their way along the Backs, cheerfully making up outrageous and incredible stories about Byron or Darwin for the edification of their credulous and awestruck customers. At day's end, I would come back from my rehearsals, and they would return from the river, muscles aching, tired from talking nonsense, their day's takings wrapped in the tablecloth, which would be emptied on the kitchen table. Every last currency note and coin was scooped up and taken to the grocer's in Jesus Lane to be spent on meat and pasta for that evening and bottles of wine and tea things and champagne for the following day's punting. I don't think Mark and Ben turned a penny's profit, but they got themselves fit, ate and drank well and inadvertently started a trend in 'authentic student punts' that is going to this day in the hands of much savvier and harder-nosed entrepreneurs. Not once did either of them suggest that I contribute to the nightly supper fund, despite the fact that I always ate and drank the food and wine that it bought. There was a carefree charm to the pair that made me feel heavy, bourgeois and over-earnest.

  I had agreed to be in The Roaring Girl, as well as reprising my role as Dominic Clarke in Latin!, with John Davies still in the part of Herbert Brookshaw. Simon Cherry would be directing once again and he had asked David Lewis, a History of Art student with whom he shared rooms in Queens', to design a poster. The result was sensational. In the style of an Edwardian children's storybook jacket Dave's design depicted a school-uniformed boy and a young man in a teacher's gown kissing, with a cricket game going on in the background. It was stunningly well done; the lettering, the colour palette, the whole look of it was exquisite. It shocked, but it was also funny, elegant and charming, which is what I hoped the play might be.

  The Mummers' producers, Jo and David, sent an army of volunteers (in other words the cast) around Edinburgh as soon as we arrived, to staple and paste up the posters for all our shows wherever we could. It soon became apparent that the Latin! poster was in great demand. The moment it went up it would be pinched, even if we took the common precautionary step of ripping it first to decrease its collectability. I started to get messages left for me at Mummers' headquarters in Riddle's Court offering money for spares. It had become a collector's item. In a rare burst of entrepreneurial PR zeal, I called up the Scotsman, pretending to be upset that our poster was being stolen as soon as it was put up. Sure enough, they obligingly ran a small paragraph with a picture of the poster, under the mini-headline: 'Is this the most stolen poster in Edinburgh?' The box-office went through the roof, and Latin! was sold out for the whole of the two weeks of its run.

  Latin! The most stolen poster of the 1980 Edinburgh Fringe.

  Latin! played in the mid-afternoon, but the main evening attraction was the The Roaring Girl. One of its cast members was a handsome and amusing Trinity Hall undergraduate called Tony Slattery, who had the look of a young Charles Boyer and the habits of an ill-trained but affectionate puppy. He read Modern and Medieval Languages, specializing in French and Spanish. He had represented Britain at judo, becoming national champion at his weight in his teens. He sang and played the guitar and was capable of being most dreadfully funny. Every night, in his role as some kind of foppish lord, he would put a larger and larger feather in his hat. By the time we came to the end of the first week it was brushing the ceiling. The entire cast, including Annabelle Arden, who had the lead role of Moll Cutpurse, fell into unrestrained giggles each time he executed a low bow which caused this enormous plume to bounce and waggle over our heads or into our faces. Sometimes when actors corpse it amuses the audience, but when it goes too far they often start to stir and mutter and hiss, which was what happened that evening. It was deeply unprofessional - but being deeply unprofessional was one of the marvellous things about being students and being, well, not professional.

  We all squeezed into digs somewhere in the New Town, hunkering down in sleeping bags on the floor, and even managed to make room for my sister Jo who came to visit and got on very well with certain members of the company. It was a wonderful time; the plays were all successful in their own way and we attracted good audiences. The pleasure was compounded by excellent reviews; the notoriously difficult Nicholas de Jongh was blush-makingly nice: 'Stephen Fry is a name I shall look out for in the future, which is more than can be said for most of the writers and performers on the Fringe,' he wrote. I have since been a sore disappointment to de Jong, I think, but at least we got off on the right foot. Even better news came when the Scotsman awarded us a Fringe First, the award that everyone aspired to win in those days.

  Solemn but triumphant in the Mummers group photo celebrating our Fringe First Award.

  A moment later, responding to Tony Slattery and revealing an unsurprising cigarette.

  There was little time to see any other shows. Electric Voodoo, this year's Footlights Revue, was composed of completely different performers from the year before. Hugh Laurie, that tall fellow with a flag of crimson on each cheek, wasn't in it, nor were Emma or Simon McBurney. Emma did come to Riddle's Court to see Latin! and she brought the Laurie chap with her.

  'Hullo,' he said when she pushed him forward to meet me after the show.

  'Hullo,' I said.

  'That was very good,' he said. 'I really enjoyed it.'

  'Thank you,' I said. 'That is very kind.'

  The triangles on his cheeks flamed redder than ever, and he popped off. I didn't give him much more thought. That night we had a party to celebrate the Fringe First. How tall and serious I look in the photograph.

  Conveniences

  In the late September of 1980 I arrived back in Cambridge for my final year. Although we could each have had a single set again, Kim and I decided that we wanted to carry on sharing and we were allocated A2 in the medieval tower of Old Court, the finest undergraduate rooms in college. Many graduates and dons had accommodation far less grand. The rooms boasted magnificent built-in bookshelves, a noble fireplace, an excellent gyp-room and bedrooms. The windows looked out on one side over Old Court and on the other on to the Master's Lodge of St Catharine's, the abode of the august Professor of Mathematics Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who was currently enjoying a period as Vice-Chancellor. The most prized item of furniture we added came in the form of a mahogany table that
cleverly opened up into a wooden lectern. I had borrowed this from Trinity College as a prop for a lunchtime reading of the poems of Ernst Jandl and had somehow failed to return it. Kim added his Jaques chess set, Bang and Olufsen stereo, Sony Trinitron television and Cafetiere coffee jug. We were far from the great age of designer labels, but brand names were beginning to acquire a new significance and desirability. I owned a pistachio-coloured Calvin Klein shirt whose loss I still mourn and a pair of olive-green Kickers of such surpassing splendour that I sob just to think of them.

  On the ground floor at the foot of our staircase a smaller set of rooms had been taken over by the college and transformed into something quite marvellous and strange and new: a ladies' lavatory. The outer room was fitted with a large dressing-table with bulbs around the side of its mirror. On this table were boxes of coloured tissues, a glass jar of Q-tips and a pretty painted porcelain bowl filled with powder-blue, baby-pink and Easter-yellow balls of cotton wool. A basket-weave chair freshly painted in white gloss was tucked into the valance or pelmet of flower-printed chintz that underhung the table. On the pink-painted walls were three different coin-operated sanitary towel and tampon machines. In the lavatory itself a complex incinerator for used examples of same stood next to the toilet, and hanging off the back of the door could be seen a thick swatch of brown Lil-lets disposal bags. The whole place screamed, 'You are a woman. Don't even think of forgetting it.'

  Queens' College, after 532 years of single-sex status, had decided to go co-ed. Women undergraduates had arrived this term as full members of the college.

  I can picture the scenes at the meeting of the college's governing Fellows. The President coughs for attention.