The Fry Chronicles

by Stephen Fry

  An Alfresco sketch that a merciful providence has erased from my memory.

  Meanwhile Steve Morrison, our Scottish executive producer, pleaded with us to stop bellyaching. 'Go out and create, man!' he yelled at me across a table one stormy afternoon, when I was behaving more than usually pedantically or sceptically or in some other manner guaranteed to annoy. He stood and pointed at the door. 'I want Ayckbourn with edge,' he screamed. 'Go out and bring me Ayckbourn with edge!' Well, quite.

  It was made obvious to us that high up in Granada a problem with our writing had been identified. In the case of Ben it might have been over-productivity and a lack of self-censorship; in the case of Hugh and me it was exactly the opposite - crippling constipation and a kind of apologetic, high-toned embarrassment that must have been excessively irritating. For one excruciating week we all had to undergo a kind of comedy-writing masterclass with Bernie Sahlins, one of the producers of the Second City revue group and television show. Bernie, brother of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, was from a tradition of improvisation that he helped create back in the days of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, a tradition that had burst into television and more recently film with the Saturday Night Live generation of Aykroyd, Chase, Murray, Belushi and Radner. Ben wrote alone and wasn't faintly interested in the styles and techniques of Chicago improv. Hugh and I were pretty appalled too at the idea of 'building a scene' through improvisational dialogue in the approved American way. When we wrote together we sometimes did improvise, inasmuch as we made a sketch up out loud as we went along before committing it to paper. I suspect that if we had been accused of improvising we would have frozen in horror midway and would never have been able to continue. The cultural gulf between our way and Bernie Sahlins's way must have perplexed and even offended him, but it was an unbridgeable one and he left Manchester after five days without having made a dent in us. He did teach us that if we had been born American we would never ever have made it in the comedy business and we perhaps taught him that the British people are stubborn, shy and entirely dominated by their single predominant emotion, affect, vice, characteristic, disease ... whatever one might call it: embarrassment. Ben carried on pouring out script after script in his way, and we carried on not pouring out anything much in ours.

  As well as Steve Morrison, Sandy Ross, Robbie and Siobhan, we now had a fifth Scot on board in the shape of a producer called John G. Temple. Hugh revealed that Temple had approached him early one morning as we had been getting into costumes for a day's filming and asked him what drugs I was on.

  'No drugs,' Hugh had said. 'That's just how Stephen is.'

  When he relayed this exchange to me I had been profoundly shocked. What was it about me that could possibly lead a stranger to leap to the instant conclusion that I must be on drugs? Hugh explained to me with as much tact as he could manage that it was possibly my excessive energy in the mornings. I had always been loud and verbally exuberant from the earliest hours, but it had never occurred to me that this mania might be extreme enough to present the appearance of drug abuse. Everyone else was used to my often exaggerated elation and bounce, but they were evidently weird enough to a newcomer like John to excite the wildest speculation.

  Perhaps this should have sounded as a warning in my head for me to attend to my states of mind a little more carefully, but when one is young eccentricities, moods and behavioural ticks are easily overlooked, ignored or laughingly dealt with. One is so much more supple. One can bend with all the gnarls and twists and kinks that life and the caprices of one's mind confer. Past forty it is, of course, another story. What once was whippy and pliable now snaps like dried bone. So much that is charming, unusual, provocative and admirably strange in youth becomes tragic, lonely, pathological, boring, and ruinous in middle age. A hurt or troubled mind plays out a story very like that of an alcoholic's life. A twenty-year-old who drinks heavily is a bit of a rogue; sometimes he may be a little flushed in the face, sometimes too pie-eyed to turn up to this or that appointment on time, but usually he (or she of course) will be loveable enough and resilient enough to get on with life. Quite when the broken veins, spongy nose, humourless bloodshot eyes and hideous personality changes take full root it is hard to say, but one day everyone notices that their hard-drinking friend is no longer funny and no longer charming - they have become an embarrassment, a liability and a bore. I have seen and experienced the same with little personality wrinkles and dispositions that have been so acceptable and endearing and apparently harmless in youth, yet have proved destructive to the point of agony, addiction, degeneration, misery, self-harm and suicide in later years. There have been moments in writing this book when I have looked back at nearly all my friends and contemporaries (myself included of course), so many of them blessed with talent, brains, brilliance and good fortune, and I have found myself forced to believe that all of us have failed in life. Or life has failed us. In our fifties the physical deterioration which one would naturally expect has been far outstripped by disappointment, bitterness, despair, mental instability and failure.

  Then I slap myself across the chops and tell myself not to be so hysterical and self-dramatizing. And yet the episode with the car might be regarded by some doctors as a typical episode of hypomanic grandiosity...

  Car

  The sixth Scot in the Alfresco line-up was Dave McNiven, our resident musical director and composer. Naturally I saw very little of him. Once his sensitive ear had heard me miming, our professional paths were set never to cross again. You may wonder how he can have heard me miming, but this just shows the depths of unmusicality to which I was capable of sinking. It is very hard to be in a chorus and to mime without one's vocal chords just occasionally making themselves heard. A musical ear can pick up a discord instantly, no matter how many voices are singing and no matter how low and inadvertent the tiny sound that emanates. I shall never forget the shocked look on Dave's face as he spun round in my direction. I had seen it before and I was destined to see it many times again. It was the particular look of dismay that registers on the countenance of one who only moments before has said with supreme certainty and unruffled confidence, 'Oh, believe me, everyone can sing!' I exist on this planet precisely to teach such wrong-headed optimists the error of their convictions.

  The afternoons given over to music rehearsals, therefore, I filled with more driving lessons. I had taken a few while teaching at Cundall Manor. Back then, as I had bucked and jerked the motoring-school's Austin Metro down the main street of Thirsk I had been told with hard Yorkshire disdain, 'Tha gear and clutch control is shite, and tha steering is as much use as a chocolate teapot.' The Mancunian instructor four years later was much friendlier, as people so often are west of the Pennines, or perhaps it was that my car-handling skills had improved in the interval. He would hum quietly to himself and look interestedly out of the window at the street scenes that flashed by, apparently confident enough in my driving not to bother about what I was doing as I manoeuvred the dual-control Escort along his favourite route, past the university halls of residence in Rusholme and Fallowfield, down Kingsway and into the maze of residential backstreets around Cheadle Hulme. One afternoon, quite unexpectedly, he announced that I was ready to take my test and that he had booked me in for the following week.

  'If you've no objection?'

  Half an hour later I found myself in a BMW showroom, shaking hands on a deal. I have no idea what rush of blood to the head had propelled me there but by the time I left it was too late to do anything about it. I had called up my bank and arranged the financing and was now the legal owner of a second-hand 323i in metallic green. Sunroof, Blaupunkt stereo and 16,000 miles on the clock.

  That evening, not having dared tell Hugh that I had done something so magisterially arsey and recklessly tempting of providence as to buy a car before I had even passed my driving test, we all gathered in my room at the Midland Hotel. I ordered up wine, beer and crisps and we watched a repeat of May's original transmission of our Footlights show
. Two days later we assembled again with even more wine, beer and crisps to watch the launch of the all-new Channel 4, which included in its opening night line-up Comic Strip Presents ... Five Go Mad in Dorset, in which Robbie played two parts. This was the first new channel on British television since the arrival of BBC 2 in 1964.

  I passed my driving test, raced around insurance offices and returned to the car showroom properly possessed of paperwork that allowed me to drive away. I had teased and flirted with destiny and got away with it. If I had failed my test I wonder what I would have done with the car? Simply left it there I suppose.

  I host a bed party in my room at the Midland Hotel. We seem happy. I think perhaps we were.

  Challenge 2

  A week later we met for a third time in my hotel room and, surrounded by all the wine, beer and crisps the Midland staff could produce, we watched the first episode of The Young Ones, which Ben had co-written and in which he also appeared.

  Within a week then, two seismic events had rocked our little world. The gleaming primary-coloured blocks that had flown out to form the graphic figure 4 which made up the channel's logo seemed, with their smooth, computer-generated motion, to usher in a brave new world, and when Ade Edmondson as Vyvyan punched his way through the kitchen wall in the opening five minutes of The Young Ones it felt as though a whole new generation had punched its way into British cultural life and that nothing would ever be the same again.

  The Young Ones was an instant success in exactly the way Alfresco, whose first series wasn't broadcast until mid-1983, manifestly wasn't. Rik Mayall especially soared into stardom as the new King of Comedy: the brilliantly childish, Cliff-Richard-obsessed character of Rick in The Young Ones with his exaggerated derhotacizations and uncontrolled giggling snorts sealed a reputation that had grown from Rik's original 20th Century Coyote act with Ade Edmondson and his sublime appearances in A Kick Up the Eighties as Kevin Turvey, the Chic Murray of Kidderminster.

  The wild divergence I felt between this hot lava stream of new talent and the constipated conventional and constricted tradition from which I derived was extreme and has, I am sure you will feel, been dwelt on enough. From the distance of thirty years it seems self-indulgent and paranoid to harp on about it, but the distinction did at least lead to one fruitful conversation in the bar of the Midland in January 1983. Ben, Rik and Lise had already started work on a second series of The Young Ones, and the thought had struck me, having spent so much time in Granadaland and having watched lines of undergraduates queuing up, as I had three years earlier, for canteen lunches in between rounds of University Challenge, that perhaps Rick, Vyvyan, Neil and Mike, being a student foursome, might themselves be entered for the quiz, with, as the Radio Times might phrase it, hilarious consequences. I suggested this to Ben, who instantly enthused. He and the others produced 'Bambi', in which the Young Ones, representing Scumbag University, come up against Footlights College, Oxbridge, in the snooty, privileged persons of Hugh, Emma, Ben and me. My character was called Lord Snot, an insanely shiny toff based on the Beano's Lord Snooty.

  Ben may well have a different memory of the genesis of that episode. It is one of the known eternal truths of comic creation that a good idea has a dozen parents while a duff one remains an orphan. From wherever or whomever this idea derived the show was recorded a year or so later with Griff Rhys Jones as Bambi Gascoigne and Mel Smith as a Granada TV security guard. It is still considered, I think, one of the most memorable of The Young Ones episodes, in part because of an unusually strong and coherent narrative and in part also because the parricidal revenge of the new and radical upon the old and reactionary is played out so literally and satisfyingly. Footlights College are routed and humiliated as completely in fiction as we felt we were being in fact.

  The Young Ones. Comic heroes.

  I have mentioned that we were all - Hugh and I to a crippling extent - hobbled by self-consciousness and a foolish desire to avoid what we considered had been done before. But did we have any kind of a theory of comedy, any banner that we wanted to raise?

  It was clear to me that Hugh had a more complete canteen of comic cutlery in his drawer than the pitiful selection of plastic coffee-stirrers and archaic horn-handled knives that I felt capable of wielding. As I have said, I was aware without envy, but with a measure of sorrow and self-pity, that Hugh was a master of three enormously important elements of comedy in which I was an embarrassing incompetent. He had music. He could play any instrument that he picked up and he could sing. He had physical control of his body. As a natural athlete he could roll, fall, leap, dance and jig to comic effect. He had an amusing, appealing face that made him a natural clown. Big sad eyes, a funny chin and a hilarious upper lip. And I? I could be verbally adept and I could play pompous authority figures and ... er ... that was it, really. Could I cut it as an actor, or had my commitment to comedy cut that avenue off? In the comic world I had no social or political axe to grind, no new stylistic mode to advance. I liked the old-fashioned sketch comedy for which it was beginning to look as though the world had little time.

  I worried that I was going to have to be primarily a writer. Why worry, you might ask? Well, although it is true that one feels fantastic when one has finished a writing task, it is mostly horrible while one is doing it. You will see therefore that writing, ghastly at the time but great afterwards, is exactly the opposite of sex. All that keeps one going is the knowledge that one will feel good when it's all over. I knew, as all writers know, that performers have a much easier life. They swan about being admired, recognized, pampered, praised and told how wonderful they are and what energy and resource and strength they have to cope with all that pressure. Pah. They only work while they are in rehearsal, on set or on stage; for the rest of the time they can get up late and laze and lounge about like lords. Writers on the other hand are in a permanent state of school exam crisis. Deadlines croak and beat their wings above them like sinister rooks; producers, publishers and performers nag for rewrites and improvements. Any down time looks like evasion and indolence. There is no moment at which one cannot, and should not it seems, be at one's desk. It is also a desperately lonely calling.

  There are compensations. You only have to write a play once and then you can sit back and let the money roll in, while the actors have to perform eight times a week for six months to earn their pay packets.

  Hugh and I were writer-performers - we wrote the material that we performed. I could not decide whether this meant we had the best of both worlds or the worst. To this day I cannot be sure. It is obvious, however, that in terms of employment it doubles one's opportunities. Whatever I lacked in physical attributes as a natural clown I seemed to make up for in gravitas, to use Hugh's word. It seemed that people did have faith in my ability to write, although I had produced nothing up until that point except Latin! And, with Hugh, the material in The Cellar Tapes and the handful of Alfresco sketches that had made it through to transmission.

  Four things now happened in a succession rapid enough to be called simultaneity and which served to bolster the self-esteem that the Alfresco experience was doing so much to undermine.

  Cinema

  In the late summer of 1982 I was sent to meet a woman called Jilly Gutteridge and a man called Don Boyd. Boyd had produced Alan Clarke's cinema version of Scum (the original 1977 BBC television production had been Mary Whitehoused off the screen) as well as Derek Jarman's Tempest and Julien Temple's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and he now planned to direct his first major feature film, which was to be called Gossip. He imagined a British compendium of The Sweet Smell of Success and La Dolce Vita infused with the spirit and manner of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. This was to be a film that would capture a new and horrible side to Thatcher's Britain: the recently confident, arrogant, vulgar Sloaney world in which night-club narcissists, trust-fund trash and philistine druggie aristos cavorted with recently cherished icons of finance, fashion and celebrity. It was a soulless, squalid, valueless and trashy milieu t
hat believed itself to be the stylish social summit at whose dazzling peaks the lower world gazed with breathless envy and admiration.

  A script had been written by the brothers Michael and Stephen Tolkin. Although their screenplay had been set in Britain, Don felt that, as Americans, they had not quite captured the world of London 'society' such as it was in the early eighties and he was after someone who could rewrite it in an authentic English voice. Jilly Gutteridge, who was to be location manager and assistant producer, was instantly affectionate and charmingly enthusiastic about my talents, and I walked away from the meeting having been given the job of rewriting the script for the princely sum of PS1,000. I had three weeks in which to do it. The part of the lead character, a beau monde gossip columnist, was to be played by Anne Louise Lambert. Anthony Higgins, who had starred opposite her in Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract, would be the man with whom she falls in love and who would rescue her from the unworthy world she inhabits. Simon Callow and Gary Oldman were also cast. It was to be Oldman's first film appearance.

  I rewrote in a fever of excitement, and Don seemed pleased with my efforts. His preparations were well advanced for what I soon learnt was known as the 'principal photography'. In the meanwhile, he suggested, I might enjoy a meeting with Michael Tolkin, who just happened to be in town. As one of the original writers he had read my anglicizing rewrites with great interest and might even have one or two valuable suggestions ...