The Fry Chronicles

by Stephen Fry

  'Yes, well. In future I think it would be better if you mimed,' says Mr Hemuss. Kirk grins triumphantly and moves on, and I am left alone, hot, pink and quaking with humiliation, shame and terror.

  The memory shrinks and moves away as Michael Joseph's reassuring Magyar tones continue to solace me. 'It has been a painful memory, but now it is one that makes you smile. For you can see that this is what has been locking up the music inside you all these years. Tomorrow evening you have to sing, yes?'

  'Yes.' My voice seeming to come from a long way away.

  'When you have to sing, is there a ... how you say ... a cue? Is there some cue for you to sing?'

  'Yes. My friend Hugh turns to me and says, "Hit it, bitch."'

  '"Hit it, bitch?"'

  '"Hit it, bitch."'

  'Very good. "Hit it, bitch." So. Tomorrow, when you stand before the audience you will feel confident, happy and filled with belief in your ability to triumph in this moment. And when you hear the words "Hit it, bitch" all tensions and fears will melt away. This is the signal for you to be able easily to sing the song you need to sing. No fear, no tightness in the throat. Ease, confidence, assurance. Repeat that to me.'

  'When I hear the words "Hit it, bitch" all tensions and fears will melt away. It is the signal for me to be able to sing the song I need to sing. No fear. No tightness in the throat. Ease. Confidence. Assurance.'

  'Excellent. And now I shall pull on the rope and bring you up to the surface. As I pull I count down from twenty. When I reach "ten" you will begin to awaken, refreshed and happy, quite able to remember our conversation and all its details. At "five" your eyes will begin to open. So. Twenty, nineteen ...'

  I stumbled away, rather amazed that this memory of cong. prac. had been revealed and fully confident that I would indeed be able to sing when the moment came. I believe I even hummed to myself as I walked from Maddox Street to the Oxford Street tube station.

  The following evening I told Hugh that, if he muffed his cue and said 'Hit it, baby,' or 'Cue it, bitch,' or anything like that, then our whole enterprise would fail. All was well, the moment came, Hugh delivered the line correctly, and sounds came out of my mouth in more or less the right order and employing more or less the correct musical pitches.

  Did the experience unlock singing for me? Absolutely not. I am as hopeless as ever I was. At weddings and funerals I still prefer to mime. At John Schlesinger's funeral at a synagogue in St John's Wood some years ago the person I stood next to said to me encouragingly, 'Come on, Stephen - you're not singing. Have a go!'

  'Believe me, Paul, you don't want me to,' I said. Besides, I was having a much better time listening to him.

  'No. Go on!'

  So I joined in the chorus.

  'You're right,' Paul McCartney conceded. 'You can't sing.'

  I suppose, in career terms, Saturday Live was a good move. It was watched by a large audience and generally went down well. It was especially successful for Ben, who moved from being a regular contributor to permanent host. His sign-off, 'My name's Ben Elton, good night!', became the catchphrase of the show until Harry and Paul, tiring of the very successful Stavros, devised a new character for Harry to play. They came up with a loud-mouthed Sarf London plasterer who fanned his wad of dosh at the audience and shouted 'Loadsamoney!' with gleeful, exultant braggadocio. He seemed to symbolize the second act of the Thatcher play, an era of materialism, greed and contempt for those left behind. As with Johnny Speight and Warren Mitchell's Alf Garnett, much of the audience seemed either to be deaf to or chose to disregard Paul and Harry's satirical intent, raising Loadsamoney to almost folk-heroic status.

  Ben, Harry, Hugh and I fell into the habit of winding down, after the recordings, in a Covent Garden club called the Zanzibar, usually bringing with us the guest comedians or musicians of the week.

  Wedged in a semicircle of banquette one night, I had the opportunity of observing Robbie Coltrane's romantic and poetic seduction technique. He picked up the hand of the girl sitting next to him.

  'What fine, delicate hands you have,' he said.

  'Why thank you,' said the girl.

  'I love women with small hands.'

  'You do?'

  'I do. They make my cock look so much bigger.'

  The Zanzibar swarmed with media people. Jimmy Mulville was often there. This sharp, witty, fast-brained Liverpudlian had been something of a legend in Cambridge, having left the year I arrived. He had gone up to read Latin and Ancient Greek, and a less likely Cambridge classicist you could never hope to meet. The rumour was that his father, a docker from Walton, had come home one night when Jimmy was seventeen and said, 'You'd better do well in your A levels and that, son, because I've just been to the bookies and put down a bet on you getting all A grades and a scholarship to Cambridge. Got a good price too.'

  'Christ, Dad!' Jimmy is reported to have said in shock. 'How much did you bet?'

  'Everything,' came the reply. 'So get studying.'

  They say that today's schoolchildren now suffer more exam pressure than my generation ever did, and generally I have no doubt that this is true, but I don't suppose many have had to endure pressure of the kind Jimmy did that year. He duly obliged with the straight As and the scholarship.

  It is too good a story for me to check up and risk the disappointment of it being proved a distortion or exaggeration. What is certainly true is that, when Jimmy arrived at Jesus in 1975, he brought a wife with him. It is not uncommon for people of a working-class background to wed before they are twenty, but it is very uncommon for students to be married, and how the young Mrs Mulville coped at Cambridge I do not know. Jimmy became President of the Footlights in 1977 and by the time I am writing about he was starring in and writing the Channel 4 comedy Who Dares Wins with his Cambridge contemporary Rory McGrath. He would go on to found Hat Trick, one of the first independent television production companies, famous for bringing shows like Have I Got News for You to television and slightly less famous for giving shows like my own This Is David Lander an airing.

  Who Dares Wins had established itself as something of a cult, singled out as being responsible for the post-closing-time scheduling slot that Channel 4 made its own. Its beery style was not very close to the kind of thing Hugh and I did, but for me the flashes of brilliance in the writing more than made up for its laddish manner. It gave the world one of my favourite jokes. There is something very pleasing about one-word punchlines.

  The show nearly always ended with a long, complex party scene, shot in a one-camera single take. In one of these episodes Jimmy approaches Rory and picks up a can of beer. Just as he's bringing it up to his lips, Rory warns him, 'Um, I've been using that as an ashtray actually.' Jimmy gives him a hard look, says, 'Tough,' and swigs.

  Another occasional habitue of the Zanzibar was the remarkable Peter Bennett-Jones, also a Cambridge graduate, and now one of the most powerful managers, agents and producers in British television and film. I remember helping to give him the bumps outside the club at half past two on the morning of his thirtieth birthday and watching in alarm as he dropped to the pavement and announced that he would now do thirty press-ups.

  'You're an old man!' I said. 'You'll give yourself a heart attack.'

  P B-J, as he is universally known, did the thirty and then another twenty, just because.

  A friend of mine claims that he was at a loose end in Hong Kong years ago. A hotel concierge recommended a restaurant.

  'Go Kowloonside and ask for Chou Lai's.'

  On the quay at Kowloon he was pointed to a junk that was just leaving. He leapt aboard.

  'Chou Lai's?' he asked. Everyone on board nodded.

  After half an hour's chugging through choppy waters he was dropped off on an island. Nothing. He thought he had been (almost literally) shanghaied. After what seemed an eternity another junk phutted its way to the jetty.

  'Chou Lai?' called the skipper, and once more my friend hopped aboard.

  An hour followed in which he pl
oughed deeper through the South China Sea, beginning to fear for his life. At last he was deposited on yet another island, but this time there was at least a restaurant, strung with lights and vibrating with music. Chou Lai himself came forward, a bonhomous fellow with an eyepatch that completed the superbly Condradian feel of my friend's adventure.

  'Hello, very welcome. Tell me, you American?'

  'No, I'm English as a matter of fact.'

  'English! Ah! You know P B-J?'

  One wonders how many perplexed English customers had been asked that question without having the slightest idea who or what a 'P B-J' might be. My friend did know but doubted Chou Lai could possibly mean the same one. It turned out he certainly did.

  'Yeah! Pe'er Be'ett-Joes!'

  My friend had a free dinner and a ride back to Kowloon in Chou Lai's private launch.

  There you have Peter Bennett-Jones: with his long lean frame, a line in crumpled linen suits and a ripely old-fashioned 'dear old boy' manner, he looks and sounds the part of a superannuated colonial district commissioner from the pages of Somerset Maugham, yet is younger than Mick Jagger and as sharp, clever and powerful a force in London's media world as you could find.

  I was fortunate or unfortunate enough to miss the evening at the Zanzibar when Keith Allen, one of the pioneers of alternative comedy and a man I was to come to know well, stood up on the bar and began to throw bottles back and forth, destroying much of the stock as well as most of the mirrors and fittings. Keith did get arrested and on his return from a short stretch found himself permanently banned, or Zanzibarred as I preferred to put it. The owner, Tony Macintosh, was good-natured enough not to exclude him from his new establishment, the Groucho, which he and Mary-Lou Sturridge were on the point of opening in Soho.

  My years of hurling myself headlong into the world of Soho Bohemia were still ahead of me, but I was beginning to look at figures like Keith Allen with a kind of admiration tinged with fear. They seemed to own the London in which I still felt like a shy visitor, a London which was beginning to vibrate with enormous energy. I was afraid to enter the fashionable nightclubs like the Titanic and the Limelight; after all, they seemed to be about nothing but dancing and getting drunk, neither of which I was very interested in, and even the Zanzibar was not a place I would ever dream of visiting except in a group, but a demon in me whispered that it was wrong for me to be nothing but a machine for churning out words. 'You owe it to yourself to live a little, Harry...' as Clint breathes to himself in Dirty Harry.

  Who was I at this time? I still found that people were bothered by my front, my ease, my apparent - oh, I don't know - effortlessness, invulnerability, lack of need? Something in me riled ... no not riled, sometimes riled perhaps, but mostly intrigued or baffled ... something in me intrigued or baffled, triggered a mixture of exasperation and curiosity.

  How could somebody be so muffled up against the cruel winds of the world, so armed against the missiles of fate, so complete? Be great to see them drunk. See their guard down. Find out what makes them tick.

  I really do believe that there are those who would like and trust me better if they saw me weeping into a whisky, making a fool of myself, getting aggressive, maudlin and drunkenly out of control. I have never found those states in others anything other than tiring, awkward, embarrassing and fantastically dull, but I am quite sure that people would cherish a view of me in that condition at least once in a while. As it happens I am almost never out of control no matter how much I drink. My limbs may well lose coordination, but they have so little to begin with that it is hard to tell the difference. But I certainly never become aggressive or violent or weepy. This is clearly a fault.

  Back then I could see that outsiders looking in on the Stephen Fry they encountered saw a man who had drawn life's winning lottery ticket. I did not seem to have it in me to project the vulnerability, fear, insecurity, doubt, inadequacy, puzzlement and inability to cope that I so very often felt.

  The signs were writ large for those with the wit to read. The cars alone screamed so much, surely? An Aston Martin, a Jaguar XJ12, a Wolseley 15/50, an Austin Healey 100/6 in concourse condition, an Austin Westminster, an MG Magnette, an MGB roadster ...

  People saw me riding around in these woody, leathery chariots and thought them the automobile equivalent of the tweed jacket and cavalry twills in which I still dressed myself. 'Good old Stephen. He's from another world, really. Quintessentially English. Old-fashioned values. Cricket, crosswords, classic cars, clubland. Bless.' Or they thought, 'Pompous, smug Oxbridge twat in his young fogey brogues and snobby cars. What a git.' And I thought, 'What a fraud. Half-Jewish poof who doesn't really know what he's doing or who he is but is still the same sly, skulking, sweet-scoffing teenager he ever was, never quite fitting in. Destroyed by love, incapable of being loved, unworthy of being loved.'

  Till the day I die people will always prefer to see me as strong, comfortable and English, like a good leather club chair. I have learned long ago not to fight it. Besides, and this is more than a question of good manners (although actually good manners are reason enough), why should anyone bleat on about what they feel inside all the time? It isn't dignified, it isn't interesting and it isn't attractive.

  Any armchair psychologist can see that someone with my history of teenage Sturm and adolescent Drang (the needy sugar addiction, alienation, wild moods, unhappy sensualism, blighted romance, thieving, expulsions, fraud and imprisonment+) who is suddenly given a new lease of life and the chance to work and make a preposterous amount of money, might well respond as I did and make a series of silly and self-conscious attempts at display, to prove to himself and to the family whose life he made such a misery that he was now someone. Someone who belonged. Look, I have cars and credits cards and club memberships and a country house. I know the name of the head waiter at Le Caprice. I am stitched into England like Connollized leather into the seat of an Aston.

  If asked, I would have told you that I was happy. I was happy. I was content, certainly, which is to happy what Pavillon Rouge is to Chateau Margaux, I suppose, but which will have to do for most of us.

  Saturday Live was adjudged a hit, and perhaps as a result of our appearances on it Hugh and I were summoned once more to Jim Moir's office to see if we couldn't waggle our cocks in the air and get someone to kneel and suck, or 'put a show together', as other, lesser comedy executives might have put it.

  After the BBC's lack of interest in The Crystal Cube, we were leery about high-concept programmes and determined that we should have a shot at committing to screen what we knew best, sketch comedy.

  'Excellent,' said Richard Armitage. 'You can do that next year. But first Stephen ...' He rubbed his hands together, and his eyes gleamed. 'Broadway.'

  Clipper Class, Cote Basque and Choreography

  Mike Ockrent and I flew to New York together in clipper class, PanAm's equivalent of business, where you could eat and drink and smoke until your eyes, liver and lungs bubbled. We had a few days, and our job was to dazzle Richard's potential financiers and co-producers. Robert Lindsay was already there. This was my first-ever trip to the United States, and I had to keep hugging myself. I had often fantasized about America as a child and felt that, when I got there, I should find that I already knew it and love it all the more for that.

  I shan't distress you too much with my thoughts about the Manhattan skyline. If you haven't visited New York City yourself, you have seen it in film and television and you know that there are a lot of very, very tall buildings crowded together on a relatively small island. You will know there are long tunnels and rattly bridges. There is a central oblong park, wide avenues that run arrow-straight down from one end to the other, rhythmically intersected by numbered streets. You will know that the avenues also have numbers, except when they are called Madison, Park, Lexington, Amsterdam or West End. You will know there is just one exception, one daring diagonal thoroughfare that carves its way down from the top-left corner of the island, ignoring the symmetry of
the grid, creating squares, circuses and slivered scalenes of open space as it slices its way south-west - Verdi Square, Dante Park, Columbus Circle, Madison Square, Herald Square, Union Square. You will know that this outlaw diagonal is called Broadway. You will know too that where Broadway meets 42nd Street at Times Square, the heart of New York theatre beats and has done so for a hundred years.

  I walked around the theatre district, rubbernecking the neon, bowing to the statue of George M. Cohan ('Give my regards to Broadway' it says on the plinth, and to this day I get a lump in my throat every time I see that - more out of veneration for James Cagney's impersonation of him than out of love or knowledge of Cohan himself), seating myself in the Carnegie Deli to write postcards, subjecting myself to the overwhelming rudeness of the waiters and trying to make sense of a Ruben Special. Everything in New York is exactly what you expect and yet it still astonishes you. Had I come to Manhattan and found that the avenues were winding and bendy, the buildings low and squat and the people slow, drawling and kindly and that there was no trace of that fabled charge of energy that you drew from the very pavements as you walked on them, then I would have had cause to blink and shake my head in wonder. As it is, the town was precisely what I knew it would be, what legend, fable, literature and Tin Pan Alley had long reported it to be, down to the clouds of steam blooming from the manholes, the boatlike wallow of the huge chequer cabs as they bounced and flipped their tyres on the great iron sheets that seemed to have been casually slung by a giant on to the surface of the street and the strange smoky whiff at every street corner that turned out, on inquiry, to be the smell of new-baked pretzel. Just what I had always known. Yet every five steps I took I could not but stop and grin and gasp and stretch my eyes at the theatre of it all, the noise and rudeness and vitality. Affirmation of what we absolutely expect comes as more of a shock than disaffirmation.