The Fry Chronicles

by Stephen Fry

  Oh my God, Stephen is going to talk about the quality of work done by the team who came to decorate his house. WTF?

  As they say on helplines, bear with me caller ...

  One of the plasterers, Martin, was really very, very expert indeed. Marvellous at ceiling roses and all kinds of moulded ornamental plasterwork. The other two, Paul and Charlie, were more than competent at the rendering, skimming, bonding, sanding, painting and other ancillary skills that might be expected from a general builder, but they had another quality. They were quite extraordinarily funny. I brought them coffee, as you do when you have the builders in, and I chatted with them in what I hoped was a friendly and unpatronizing manner but just couldn't get over how much they made me laugh. They had been at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, which seat of higher education they had quickly vacated, dropping out and moving to London, working in the building trade and wondering if comedy might ever be an attainable goal. Charlie was the lead singer in a punk outfit which apparently had a cult following. Paul entertained our household with impressions of London types, the especial favourite being a Greek cockney who had an eccentric way with very cockneyfied English. This character was based on a real-life Hackney kebab-shop owner called Adam. Hugh and I believed that, excellent as Paul and Charlie were with the bonding, skimming, rendering and so forth, they really should have a stab at making their way in comedy. Paul wasn't sure he would like performing but thought that perhaps, one day, he might see if he could make it as a writer.

  The most successful comedy writer I knew lived just up the road in Islington. He was Douglas Adams. The success of the radio series, books and television adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had earned him international regard, reputation and riches. He was a gigantic man, at least three inches taller than me, although it seemed much more. When he ran up and down the stairs the whole house shook. He was curious about and amused by all kinds of inanimate articles and objects, by living plants and creatures, by himself, by other people, by the world and by the whole universe. The most fundamental laws, principles and accepted systems that underlie everything and are taken for granted by almost all of us were to him fascinating, funny and appealingly odd. More than anyone I have ever known he combined childlike simplicity with a great sophistication of understanding and intelligence.

  Almost every day when I was not working I would go round to his house off Upper Street and, like a shy schoolboy, ask his wife, Jane, if he might be free to play. He was never free to play, of course, being eternally under the shadow of a writing deadline and so, naturally, we would play. Douglas's remark about deadlines has become the final word on the subject. 'I love deadlines, I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.'

  In what manner did we play? What was the substance of our play? Scalextric? Trains? Jam sessions? Dressing up? No - I fear that you might already have guessed. Douglas was the only person I knew who, like me, owned a Macintosh computer. Like me, he upgraded to a new machine every time Apple brought one out. Like me, he more than just liked it, he loved it, believed in it, wanted to shout out its pioneering, world-changing importance from the rooftops. Like me, he could not believe how so many people could be chained to IBM-compatibles running CP/M or the new operating system, MS-DOS, both of which did nothing but put text up on the screen. We believed that the mouse, icons, drop-down menus and whole graphical-desktop idea had to be the way forward and were easily upset and enraged by those who failed to see it. Like all fanatics we must have been quite dreadfully boring, boorish and bothersome. Together we moved from the 512 'Big Mac' to the Mac Plus with its magical SCSI connectors and thence to the all-colour Mac II and beyond. Douglas could well afford it, and I was beginning, as Me and My Girl money continued to roll in, to be able to match his spending pound for pound. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be monied was very heaven.

  Any meaningful kind of internet was, of course, years off. Not only was there no World Wide Web, even servers, services and protocols like WAIS, Gopher, Veronica, Jughead, SuperJANET and Archie, today long moribund, were then a futurist's dream. There had been Prestel, an early online service run by the Post Office which ran very happily on my old BBC Micro and allowed simple mail and messaging, and there was also Compuserve, a commercial online service that the ordinary enthusiast could log on to using a simple acoustic coupler modem. The exciting parts of the burgeoning internet, like electronic mail, Telnet and FTP, were tantalizingly out of reach, available only to those in academia and government. Most of Douglas's and my time was spent downloading small programs (especially kinds called 'inits') and trying them out on our machines until they crashed. There was no real purpose behind it all. If Jane asked us why we needed to do what we did and what the point was, which as a keen-brained, hard-nosed realist of a barrister she did from time to time, we would look at each other in wonderment.

  'Point?' Douglas would roll the word round in his mouth as if it was new to him.

  I would quote King Lear's 'Reason not the need'.

  For some people, computers, digital devices and machines of that nature will be functional objects whose purpose is to serve by performing specifically needed tasks. If there is a little tweaking required to ensure that such functions can better be fulfilled, then so be it: let there be a little tweaking. For other people, people like Douglas and me, the tweaking is the function. Using a computer to write a book, fill in tax returns or print out an invoice is something you could do, but how much less fun than messing around. People like Douglas and me bond with digital devices as owners bond with dogs. Unless you are blind, or a shepherd, policeman or security guard, dogs do not have a function, they are there to be loved, tickled and patted - to bring joy. I suppose the more common affliction of this kind is the one people have with cars. Rowan Atkinson, Steve Coogan and Robbie Coltrane, for example. They use their cars to go to the shops, drive home and so forth, of course they do, but that is not what dominates their attitude and relationship to them. If you have not been blessed or cursed with deeply emotional feelings for machines you will set me down as a dork and a geek, much as you might set them down as petrol-heads and boy racers. Enthusiasts are used to being mocked, maligned and misunderstood. We don't really mind. In truth, there is every probability that Douglas and I relished being esoteric hobbyists who spoke a recondite language and devoted hours to fruitless projects. I am ashamed to confess that a little bit of regret entered the soul when Microsoft finally got the point and started to offer their own graphical interface. They called it Windows, and by 1992 version 3.1 had reached the stage where it was almost usable. Another three years were to pass before Windows 95 could finally be called an operating system, rather than an add-on to MS-DOS. That was eleven years after the introduction of the Mac, a lifetime in computer terms, and Douglas and I felt on the one hand vindicated and on the other a little deflated, as though the crowd had found their way into the secret garden. One of the most unattractive human traits, and so easy to fall into, is resentment at the sudden shared popularity of a previously private pleasure. Which of us hasn't been annoyed when a band, writer, artist or television series that had been a minority interest of ours has suddenly achieved mainstream popularity? When it was at a cult level we moaned at the philistinism of a world that didn't appreciate it, and now that they do appreciate it we're all resentful and dog-in-the-manger about it. I am old enough to remember the cool long-haired boys at school who were seriously annoyed by the success of Dark Side of the Moon. They went around muttering 'sell-out' when a month before they had bored anyone they could find on the subject of the misunderstood brilliance of Pink Floyd and how the world was too stupid to recognize their genius.

  Douglas and I had years of lonely pleasure ahead of us, however, and the two- or three-year period of our intense visiting, disk swapping and techie chatter counts as among the happiest of my life.

  Douglas's writing routine was painful in the extreme. Sue Freestone, his publisher at Heinemann, would co
me round and beg, often almost with tears welling in her eyes, for pages from his printer. Douglas would hurl himself downstairs to the coffee machine, hurl himself back up again, thump to his desk and sit in front of the computer. After an hour or so twiddling with the screensaver, the wallpaper, the title of the file, the placement on the desktop of the folder the file was stored in, the formatting, the font, the size, the colour, the margins and the stylesheets, he might type a sentence. He would look at it, change it to italics, swap the word order around, get up, stare at it some more. Hum, curse, growl and groan and then delete it. He would try another sentence. He would look at this one and now perhaps give a little puff of pleasure. He would stand up, stride across the room and hurl himself down to the kitchen, where Sue and I would be gossiping and smoking around the table, and make himself another incredibly strong coffee.

  'Dare I ask?' Sue would say.

  'Going well. I have the first sentence!'

  'Oh.' It would be perhaps July with the new novel already overdue the previous September. One sentence written so far. Sue would smile tightly. 'Well, that's a start at least ...'

  Douglas would nod enthusiastically and fling himself back up the stairs, coffee dripping in his wake. We would hear the feet thump across the floor above our heads and then an agonized cry of 'No! Hopeless!' would tell us that the proud first sentence was not, after all, up to snuff, and a banging on the keyboard would register its angry deletion. An author's day is tough enough, but the writing life of Douglas Adams was excruciating in a manner quite unlike anyone else's I have ever known.

  Carlton Club Crustiness

  Ben Elton, meanwhile, whose creative flow knew no constrictions of the smallest kind, could not be expected to be content with his thousand Alfresco sketches, two series of The Young Ones, the creation of a whole new comedy drama serial and the prospect of Paul Jackson's Channel 4 show. On his return from Happy Families filming in Staffordshire he immediately started work as a co-author on a new BBC situation comedy. Actually, to call it new would be wrong; it was in truth a second series, but one which wholly reworked the original.

  The Black Adder, starring Rowan Atkinson and written by him and his long-time collaborator and fellow Oxonian Richard Curtis, had been broadcast two or even three years earlier and, although crammed from end to end with simply superb performances and brilliant comic scenes, had been generally regarded as something of a disappointment. The BBC decided that, whatever else the show's qualities might be, it was certainly too expensive to continue with: its producer John Lloyd was later to describe it as 'the show that looked a million dollars and cost a million pounds'.

  Rowan had already at this stage decided that, even if it did get picked up for a second series, he would no longer be a writer on it, which left his co-creator Richard Curtis to decide whether he wanted to go it alone or find a collaborator. He opted for the latter course, and the writer he chose was Ben Elton. Richard Armitage, who was Rowan Atkinson's agent, believed that Blackadder certainly had potential enough to justify his pressuring the BBC to relent, but he entertained the gravest doubts about Ben Elton's suitability for the project. He called me into his office.

  'Elton,' he said. 'Richard Curtis seems to want to work with him on the next Blackadder.'

  'That's a brilliant idea!'

  'Really? What about all those farting jokes?' Richard had still not forgiven Ben for Colonel Sodom and his exploding bottom in There's Nothing to Worry About.

  'No, Ben is perfect for this, honestly.'

  'Hm ...' Richard sucked at his Villiger cigar and pondered deeply for a while.

  Ben is sweet-natured, kind, honest and true. He is one of the most extraordinarily gifted people I have ever met. As much as he is gifted he seems cursed with a woeful talent for causing people to disapprove of him and to wrinkle their nose in distaste and scorn. They distrust what they see as his faux Cockney accent (it isn't faux, he has always talked that way, as do his brother and sister), the earnest self-righteousness of his political views and the (perceived) unctuous manner in which he expresses them. Ben is all kinds of things but has never been a fool and knows this very well, yet the one accomplishment he seems not to have been granted is the ability to do anything about it. Richard Armitage was certainly one of those who found him hard to take, but he was too shrewd not to see that, if the decade could be said to have a comedy pulse, then no one had their finger on it more surely than this same Benjamin Charles Elton with his growly and unlovable accent and his predilection, to Richard's mind, for bottom, penis and wind-expulsion humour.

  'You really think so?' He looked at me with the blend of disbelief and disappointment you might expect to see on the face of the secretary of a Pall Mall gentlemen's club on hearing a member recommend Pete Doherty for election to the wine committee.

  I was flattered to have my opinion so valued. My contribution to the success of Me and My Girl, which had made Richard the happiest man in London, and the fact that I could be taken to any weekend gathering or dinner party without letting the side down, had led him to rely on me as a kind of intermediary between his world and the brave new one that was springing up around him.

  'Absolutely,' I said. 'There really is going to be another series is there?'

  'The question,' said Richard, snatching blindly at the receiver hanging on the complicated switchboard behind his right shoulder, 'is whether we can persuade the BBC to give it a second chance. They want to decimate the budget.'

  'That's not too bad. Only ten per cent.'

  'Hey?'

  'To decimate means to take away one in ten ...'

  This kind of footling pedantry makes most people want to give me a good kicking, but Richard always enjoyed it. 'Ha!' he said and then, as a voice came on the line, 'Get me John Howard Davies. By the way,' he added to me as I stood up to leave, 'we must talk about Me and My Girl on Broadway some time soon. Farewell.'

  I was not, of course, privy to Richard Curtis, Rowan, Ben and John Lloyd's discussions as they created the second Blackadder series, but I do know that the decision to reduce the scale of the show was, from Ben's point of view, a comic necessity; the fact that from the BBC's it was a financial one might be regarded as a rare and happy collision of interests. When the executives saw the scripts that Ben and Richard came up with they breathed a sigh of relief. The budget was more than decimated, it was at the very least quartered.

  It is not my job to speak for Ben, but this is how I interpret his conviction that it was comically necessary to pare the show back. The Black Adder had been shot on a grand scale, with many filmed exteriors and imposing locations. There were extras everywhere, there were populous battle scenes and much riding on horses and clanking of armour. The footage for each episode was edited and then shown to an audience, whose laughter was recorded on to the track. The resultant programme was without atmosphere, but more importantly without focus. I have a theory about situation comedy that I trot out to anyone who is prepared to listen or, in your case, to read. I see sitcoms as like a tennis match, where the most important thing for the spectator is to be able to see the ball. It does not matter how athletic, supple, graceful, fast and skilful the players are - if you can't see the ball all their athleticism is just so much meaningless gesture, inexplicable running and swiping and stroking; the moment you see the ball it all makes sense. The problem with The Black Adder, I thought, was that you never saw the ball. Wonderful and delightful were the mad shouting, conspiratorial whispering, machiavellian plotting, farcical hiding, dramatic galloping and wicked sword thrusting, but the ball of what was at stake from moment to moment, what the characters were thinking or saying or intending, was lost in the wealth of background: sentries at every gate, sweeping vistas, busy pages, squires and stewards busily paging, squiring and stewarding and, without meaning to, all taking the audience's eye off the ball. Ben wanted the whole thing stripped down to the essentials and he felt it imperative that the shows should be performed in front of an audience and taped in the tru
e multi-camera studio-based sitcom style that had given us Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army (which he venerated) and all the great classics of television comedy.

  I do not go so far as to claim that I was instrumental in the series going forward, but I do know that Richard Armitage's influence over the BBC was enormous - aside from anything else his boyhood friend Bill Cotton, the Managing Director of Television and Kingmaker in General, was one of the most powerful men in the corporation. They were both children of 1930s music stars. Billy Cotton the bandleader and Noel Gay the tunesmith were best friends who ran Tin Pan Alley, and their sons were best friends who ran much in the succeeding world of popular entertainment. Rowan and Ben were my friends, and I could not have been more pleased that the idea of a historical comedy series using their unique talents would be given another chance. I thought no more about it, other than nursing to myself the happy thought that I might have been responsible for persuading Richard Armitage that Ben was a good choice.

  It came as a great surprise therefore to be asked if I would consider playing a regular character in the series. The first I heard about it was during the course of what Ben liked to call a 'crusty'.

  For all his (utterly mistaken) reputation as a joyless, puritanical socialist Ben has always been, since I first knew him, inordinately fond of old-fashioned and very English style, manners and grandeur. He adores P. G. Wodehouse and Noel Coward and has a passion for English history. I share much of this. I love the world of clubland, old established five-star hotels, the streets of St James's and mad traditional institutions from Lord's cricket ground to the Beefsteak, from Wilton's to Wartski's, from Trumper's of Jermyn Street to the Sandpit of the Savile Club.

  Perhaps, as we were both from European Jewish families who escaped Nazi persecution, the ability to penetrate even occasionally and tangentially the fastnesses of the Establishment makes us feel more strongly anchored to the codes and culture we could so easily never have known. Perhaps, as with my insane collection of credit cards, being recognized by the hall porters and headwaiters of London's smartest institutions helped convince me that I was not about to be arrested.