Stephen Fry

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0:12Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading creative figures reveal the formative influences and experiences that inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the actor, writer, comedian and broadcaster Stephen Fry. He made his name as a comic performer with the Footlights Company as a Cambridge University undergraduate, and went on to forge a screen partnership with his friend Hugh Laurie, first with the sketch show A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and then the comic drama series Jeeves and Worcester, adapted from the P.G. Woodhouse stories. Among many other stage and screen roles, Stephen Fry starred as Oscar Wilde in the 1997 film Wilde, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe.

0:53He received a Tony Award nomination for playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night on Broadway and was Lord Melchit over several generations of Blackadder. He's written five novels and three volumes of autobiography, has presented numerous documentaries, including an Emmy-winning film about being diagnosed as bipolar. A familiar face on British television screens, Stephen Fry has hosted numerous award ceremonies and panel shows, including the long-running quiz series, QI. Stephen! Hello! What a pleasure. I don't think we've met. No, I don't think we have, but your voice solaces me at all times. And it's lovely to put a face to it.

1:32And you're not the conductor. I get his post. I'm sure you do. Stephen Fry, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you so much. It's a great honour to be included amongst your previous guests, I have to say. I feel deeply unworthy, but I'm not going to overplay the imposter card. Yeah, far too modest from the start, Stephen, but it's great to have you here. You were born in 1957 in London and grew up, I think, largely in Norfolk. And your father was a physicist. Tell me something about home life growing up. What was the household like? Well, if I describe it, it sounds impossibly grand. It was a country house and we had gardeners with an S.

2:06And it was almost Victorian. The fish man came once a week in a horse and cart. And coal men would come to dump coal in a coal hatch. And we weren't on the water supply. so my brother and I took it in turns to be on pumping up duty. There was an old pump house. And so it was very old-fashioned. And privileged. And privileged, I guess you would. Yes, children take everything for granted. The way you grow up is how the world is. And I was sent away at the age of seven to a prep school right the other side of the country in Gloucestershire. My brother had been sent to the same school. I knew my father had been a chorister in St Paul's Cathedral.

2:46My mother was Jewish. Her father and mother came over, at least. The rest didn't, unfortunately, in the 30s. Did you feel culturally Jewish? Yes, culturally, in terms of excitement about food, talking about food, foreign accents, occasional words that I couldn't tell were Hebrew, Yiddish, Hungarian, Czech, German. And so there was this feeling of exoticism. But none of my family, at least some slightly more distant ones who went to Israel, were slightly, as we say, from, you know, orthodox or even vaguely religious. But no Friday night dinners, no Pesach, no Seder nights, you know, Passover things.

3:26Just an acknowledgement and a pride in Jewish heritage and food, as I say, this obsession with food. And just back to your father, because I mentioned he was a physicist. Were you interested in science growing up? Quite the reverse. My relationship with my father was very tricky indeed. I thought of him, as soon as I'd, I can't be honest and say read the book, I'd probably seen an adaptation of David Copperfield. And Mr. Murdston is how I thought of my father. Cruel man. You remember David Copperfield, he makes him go around with a little sticker on his back saying this boy bites. So I thought of my father as this dark, saturnine figure, but in prouder moments, because he really was very brilliant, I thought of him as Sherlock Holmes.

4:10He was gaunt, he smoked a pipe, he was cold and distant and worked all the time, all the time. Our house had a stable block, a big Victorian stable block, that he converted into a laboratory, and we called that Over the Way, and when father was over the way, we could relax and breathe, my brother and I, and then later my sister. What was he doing over there? Over the way? Inventing? Inventing things. I mean, on good occasions, I remember once I woke up at three in the morning screaming because the world was rushing towards me in the most inexplicable way. I'd gone to bed and suddenly I was awake and this terrifying action sequence was playing out in front of my bewildered eyes.

4:52And then my father's arm crossed in front of me. And I realized he had been tasked by the Ford Motor Company to develop some controls for their automatic gears for their range of motor cars. And he had some Ford Capris in the forecourt of the stables. And he'd hit a period where he thought he'd really got this incredibly smooth automatic transmission. So he picked me out of bed while I was asleep, strapped me into the seat next to him and tore through the Norfolk countryside, hoping that I wouldn't wake up because the gear changes weren't bumpy. And, of course, I did wake up. And when I saw this strange sight rushing towards me, I was grieved.

5:30You were the test dummy. Yeah, and he was very affectionate. He said, are you all right, darling? And he hadn't called me darling all my life, I don't think. Well, I was going to say, because you describe him as distant and quite cold, was there affection there as well? Oh, yes. I mean, I suppose, if I'm honest, he had such high expectations for me. For all my problems, I guess it's a rather dreary thing to have to say because everything's medicalised these days, but maybe there's a good reason for it. But I would probably have been diagnosed with ADHD when I was younger because my inability to concentrate and my hypermanic behaviour was very noticeable from the earliest age at this prep school.

6:10and my problem really which turned out to be as so many curses are a kind of blessing was that I was hopeless at almost everything that children are supposed to be good at you know if I tried to catch a ball I did that sort of uncoordinated thing of clapping my hands at it you know and I couldn't really run in a straight line I was dyspraxied probably uncoordinated unco were the kindest things that were shouted at me you can imagine the other completely unacceptable phrases and words that were banded. And I couldn't sing. I love music, but I couldn't play it. But, and it was in a music lesson, I remember, orchestra was written up on the board, and I yelled out, cart horse, because I saw the anagram straight away.

6:55And the teacher looked at me as if I was strange and said, did you really just see that? And I said, yes, can't you see it? She said, well, yeah, once you point it out. It was obvious to you. It was obvious. It's almost a savant thing. And I realised that words and language were absolutely my thing. On This Cultural Life, Steve and I asked my guests to choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. And your first choice is receiving the gift of Very Good Jeeves by P.G. Woodhouse for your 10th birthday. Were you already a big reader at this age? I was.

7:30The house was filled with books. A lot of them are my father's childhood books. and almost all my tastes were two generations before mine. And so what did Woodhouse mean to you when you first read Jeeves? How different was that? It was the language. It was the sudden, extraordinary beauty, grace, timing, rhythm, everything about the language. It spoke in my head and I felt, as you do when you fall in love, that I'd been here before, you know. It just had that extraordinary familiarity. This is how language ought to be. I was down here tutoring your cousin Thomas, and that it was essential that when we met you should treat me as a perfect stranger.

8:11But why? Because if your aunt supposed that I was a pal of yours, she would naturally sack me on the spot. Why? Bingo raised his eyebrows. Why? Be reasonable, Bertie. If you were your aunt, and you knew the sort of chap you were, would you let a fellow you knew to be your best pal tutor your son? This made the old head swim a bit. But I got his meaning after a while, and I had to admit that there was much rugged good sense in what he said. Still, he hadn't explained what... Just suddenly, nouns could become verbs, and you could have fun with making the reader do some of the work, you know, so you'd get a transferred epithet inside the sort of comic, I stabbed a listless forkful of E and bacon.

9:00You know, how can a forkful be listless? Because you are listless. That's the pathetic fallacy, I think, isn't it? You can appreciate that now as an adult, but at 10 years old then... Well, again, I think it was partly to do with the fact that language was all I had. It was the thing that made people laugh. It's that cliche about those who go into something comical later. Yes, it was a defence mechanism. A little later on at public school, if there was any threat of being bullied, I would bring out my best way of defending myself, which was to say, no, no, no, no, don't touch me, I'll get an erection.

9:33And to see public schools, oh, bloody hell, oh, God, you are so... And, of course, they couldn't touch you, they just couldn't. It was discovering that one thing I had, that they had strength and they had the camaraderie and there's a wonderful couple of lines of Kipling, you know, the flanneled fool at the wicket and the muddied oafs at goals. These are the men who have lost their souls. And that's how I felt. I thought life was an absolute battle between the athlete and the aesthetic. But you saw complexity and you saw something in the language of Woodhouse that you recognise. Also the world he was describing, Jeeves and Woodhouse.

10:10Was that something that you want to be part of? Yes, in a fantasy way. I mean, now you have teenagers looking at the strange world of luxury, Louis Vuitton and so on, and seeing that as a sort of escape from presumably a humdrum reality where they aren't affordable but they are just aspirational. And for me it was a world of stiff collars and tailcoats and silk shirts and valets, gentlemen, personal gentlemen like Jeeves or the dreamy, amiable Lord Emsworth in his castle and imagining oneself as a guest amongst those people. Yes, it is an escape. But if Woodhouse was an escape, the world that Woodhouse was creating was you could live vicariously through it, you could see yourself as part of that.

10:54I mean, you ended up playing Jeeves, of course, with your friend Hugh Laurie. I say, Jeeves, as a matter of interest, what are you doing? I merely ask. I'm sorting through these clothes. These are for repair and these for discarding. Wait a second. This white mess jacket is brand new. I assume it had got into your wardrobe by mistake, sir, or else that it had been placed there by your enemies. I will have you know, Jeeves, that I bought this in Cannes. And wore it too? Every night at the casino. Beautiful women used to try and catch my eye. Presumably they thought you were a waiter. Now look here, Jeeves.

11:33So I'm guessing there was always a kind of empathy with Jeeves. But now when we look back, it was a different world then. The books are depicting a different world now. It was recently reported that they're going to be republished with trigger warnings about outdated themes and language used by Woodhouse. What do you think about that? Well, they won't have to do much with Woodhouse, to be honest. I mean, quite famously, he was in his absolute height and gaining in readership during the teens of the last century when there was a war, and what a war. And in all his works, I think it's mentioned once, there's Monty Bodkin, who's a character that talks about a bit of unpleasantness in France.

12:15That's the only mention of it. And in the same way, beds are for hiding things under. It's a farce device. They're not for sleeping in. They're not for anything adult. It's often been observed by George Orwell, by Evelyn Moore and others who wrote on Woodhouse and admired him, that he was a prelapsarian writer. There is genuine innocence in it, which is quite extraordinary. So, yes, you may have servants and masters, but it's not a political power game in any kind, or at least if there is power, the power is reversed. In the Commedia dell 'Arte tradition, like Goldoni and others, the servant is smarter than the master.

12:49And what's his enduring influence on you and your comic instincts, do you think? I think it was linguistic more than anything else. And people started to notice that I just couldn't help using Woodhouseian tropes and epithets and the rhythm, the music of it. Having no music myself, I suppose all that went into the verbal quarter of my brain. Your next choice is Anthony Asquith's 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. How old were you when you first saw the film, do you think? I reckon about 12. And I was at home in Norfolk and my father was over the way and it was raining, so I wasn't going to go out and do any larking about or bicycling.

13:34And we did have a television. It was really a tiny little thing, you know, a black and white machine, kept in a cupboard a lot of the time and brought out for things like Churchill's funeral or a royal wedding or something. But I dragged it out and arranged the bunny aerial flick through the three available channels and there was a film going on. Mr. Ernest Worthing. Jack, don't seem to remember inviting you. No, you're absurdly careless about sending out invitations. Cucumber sandwiches? Why such reckless extravagance in one so young? Don't you touch them? They're ordered specially for Aunt Augusta.

14:09Well, you were eating them? That's quite a different matter. She is my aunt. Have some bread and butter. And people were talking in the most extraordinary way. And I became deeply fascinated. I started to laugh and laugh. Now, Algernon... That must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives or creditors have a ring in that Wagnerian manner. Then there was a scene where I now know it was Michael Dennison playing Algernon and Dorothy Tewchin playing Cicely. I hope, Cicely, I shall not offend you if I state quite openly and frankly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.

14:42And I heard those words and it was like a bomb going off in my head. Whatever Woodhouse had done to me, this was the megaton version. It was suddenly language as the most extraordinary device for seduction and delight and beguiling and thrilling and it was a weapon and a gift. And I could sort of automatically parse in my head why the line was so brilliant because, of course, without, I don't think, expressing it in quite the way that I would now, we use Anglo-Saxon for love. I love you madly. That's what we say. We don't say you are the visible personification of absolute perfection. To do that, you have to stand back from your heart and engage your head because we think of those Latin phrases as technical and somehow intellectual.

15:26But love is a passion that is expressed directly with the hearts of oak English way and there's something almost sick about saying I hope you are not offending my state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be the visible personification of absolute perfection. It's hilariously funny as it trips off the tongue, but it's also ironic. It's simultaneously drawing back from just saying, I love you. But it's even more of a gift of love because it is framing it in this outrageous way. It's impossible quite to explain how that landed on me and the rest of it. There were many, many other, of course, brilliant, And it had Michael Redgrave as Jack Worthing and Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism and, of course, Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell.

16:12A handbag! I rushed out, not knowing what I'd seen, to my mother and said, Mother, I hope I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be the visible personification of absolute perfection. What are you talking about? Well, I saw this and I explained it and she said, Oh, she said, that's the importance of being earnest by Oscar Wilde. Every other Thursday, a little sort of pan-technican would drive to within half a mile of the house at a junction of lanes, which was a mobile library. So I stood that next Thursday and waited for the library to trundle to a halt.

16:45And there's a lady in a sort of fluffy cardigan and half-moon reading glasses on a chain. And what can I do for you, young man, he says. And I say, have you got the importance of being earnest by Oscar Wilde? Well, now, let's have a look. and there were the four comedies. Woman of No Importance, Lady Fandermeer's Wind, as we like to call it, The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband. And I rushed home with it and read and read and read and The Importance of Being Earnest in particular. I kind of memorised. In the next Thursday that it came, I went into the library again and managed to find the complete works.

17:24Some of those were beyond me. But other things, the children's stories, and it was just amazing. And then so the next available Thursday, I went and asked if there was anything else. And the lady said, well, you've got the complete work, so there won't be anything else. So I looked round the library desperately and I found a book by L. Montgomery Hyde called The Trials of Oscar Wilde. I was very puzzled by that. And I thought, did he have trials as in tribulations? Did he have a sorrowful life? So I took that home and as I read, I started to gasp and pant and feel simultaneously triumphant and terribly, terribly worried because I could see what was going on.

17:59I suddenly understood that this man, this extraordinary man, I saw what the word he used in his famous letter to Bosie from prison, his nature. I saw that his nature was the same as my nature. Did you know you were gay then? I wouldn't have framed it like that, but as soon as I saw this example of it, I knew that I was, absolutely knew. What, reading that letter? Yeah, because I saw that affection for another male and that deep sense of love, and not even the physical, the sexual sense, but just that was something I had, and I'd had for other boys in the school, and I'd felt for them in a strange way that I hadn't understood, and then suddenly I did understand.

18:39And reading that was terrible, because what happened to him was so baffling, and so terrifying, so cruel, barbaric. So it wasn't liberating, it wasn't, oh, this is who I am. It was a mixture, because, yes, I was proud to be associated with it. But also fearful. But also fearful. And then, of course, I started to cycle to the library in Norwich. And the more I read and then connected out to others, William Somerset Maugham and Robin Maugham, his nephew, and all these confessional books about gay lives lived in the 20th century, usually ending up in Capri or the south of France or in Tangier, you know, with the Paul Bowles and that set.

19:15And I realized that my life was absolutely cursed if I wanted to stay in Britain, in that I would have to live a life of secrecy, shame, exile, stigma, disgrace, always hanging over me, these horrors. It was in the days when there wasn't a page three of the telegraph worthy of its name that didn't have a story about somebody being found fumbling with somebody else in a cinema and being fined and told they were disgusting by a magistrate or being sent to prison or losing their name and their livelihood. So what did you think you were, how were you going to have to adapt your life to cope with this new circumstance?

19:52My first thought was I'd become a librarian. I thought that was the sort of job where I could be in a world of books and they would be my companions. And the friendly, sophisticated, aesthetic group of people whose lives I loved reading about would be my companions. and maybe I would write secretly in the evenings and make enough money to be able to go and live in Greece or in Tangier or south of France or somewhere like that away from the sad reality of life in Britain. I mean, it was hysterical and adolescent and at the same time I was falling in love with a boy at school and messing my life up in all kinds of different ways.

20:32But the great advantage it gave me, and I almost feel sorry for gay people growing up now, is that it gave me an absolute inside track into how literature transforms everything and how artists are supreme in their understanding of the way the world is and how confessional art and creative arts can be the secret that lift you up above the muddied fools at goals and the flannel fool at the wicket and, as it were, get a revenge, the revenge of the artistic type who could put away the years of misery and exclusion. And if Importance of Being Honest was sort of the entry drug to wild for you, at that age, so you're into sort of 13, 14, 15, were you already eloquent, loquacious?

21:18Was it something that you were doing, performing for other people? I think it was, yes. I mean, I occasionally bump into an old school friend and they will confirm this, that I would go into little rants or little poetic episodes of description and so on. That was my shtick. as it were, because I also, you know, at a lower cultural level was, if you want to put it that way, was, you know, I would have records of musical artists because my friends, my brother, they had the Pink Floyd, the sort of public school prog rock thing, you know. And I was listening to old comics on discs. Performing for your friends in the common room or the corridors or wherever is one thing.

21:59What about the stage? When did you start acting? I guess I was about 14 when I played a witch in a production of Macbeth. We were told by the director of it to invent our own witchiness and our own costumes and things. So I went to the butchers in High Street and I got a bucket of guts. And on the first night, it was quite impressive. These guts. On the second night, the smell was unbelievable.

22:35Your next choice, Stephen, is The Final Problem, the Arthur Conan Doyle short story in which Sherlock Holmes dies. Spoiler alert. We set off together with the intention of crossing the hills and spending the night at the hamlet of Rosenlau. We had strict injunctions, however, on no account to pass the falls of Reichenbach, which are about halfway up the hill, without making a small detour to see them. It is indeed a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss from which the spray rolls up. Why have you chosen this? Well, it's an example of the canon, which is what we Sherlockians call the books as told to us by Watson under the benevolent eye of Arthur Conan Doyle.

23:24It's something I fell in love with at a very early age. By the time I was 10 or so, I was a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. They play what's called the game, which is a bit strange to outsiders, but the game assumes that Sherlock Holmes really lived and that these adventures were told by the real Dr. Watson. Therefore, you can examine them. And so, for example, I remember one of the first meetings of the society I went to, someone gave a lecture on train accidents in Crewe because there's a story, one of the most famous of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, The Speckled Band, in which the girl who comes to see Holmes to explain her problem says that her mother was killed in a train accident at Crewe in the year 1872, whatever it was.

24:11And so this fellow has taken upon himself to examine all the train accidents in 1872 at Crewe, and there was one in which a woman was killed, and so this therefore clearly was the woman. And so it's this taking as a reality. It allows you an extraordinary insight into the social, cultural history of Victorian England. So that was the fun of it. I thought I had made a discovery, but they were just being kind, which is that T.S. Eliot's Macavity is a metrical version of Holmes's description of Moriarty, culminating in the famous line, why he is the Napoleon of crime. He does his binomial theorems on a blackboard, and his head is domed and bald and moves side to side in a rather slithering, unpleasant manner.

24:52and the description of Macavity the mystery cat in the Old Possum's book of practical cats is an exact version of that and I thought I'd discovered this, you see, so they let me give it as a lecture when I was about 12 or so. And then... 12? Yeah, yeah, I was the youngest member for some time. I mean, it wasn't a lecture, it was just a... I have discovered and I would read both of them. But this is intertextuality. I mean, if you are mixing up Conan Doyle and T.S. Eliot at 12... Well, I suppose so. They're not the highest forms of either. They're both the populist fiction. But it wasn't, yeah.

25:28Remember, I had no real television or internet or anything else to fill my life but books. And it was the deepest pleasure. You said in a note to us, though, that this book was the cause of you being expelled from school. I'm wondering whether you're expelled for precociousness now. Do you mean precociousness, John? You see, this is why I would get slapped. It fell out like this, Mr Holmes. I got permission from my housemaster to go to London one weekend for the meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society in London. It was held at the Commonwealth Club, I think it was. It was very grand because the head of the club was called Lord Gore Booth and the editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal was the Marquess of Donna Gauls.