"Stephen Fry has often seemed like a man with all the answers, not only as the encyclopaedic presenter of QI, but as an actor and writer, first with Hugh Laurie in sketch shows," "Jeeves And Wooster and Blackadder, and then on his own in the movie Wilde and the TV series Kingdom." "There has also been an apparently effortless stream of novels, screenplays and even a book about poetry." "But, throughout his 50 years, it's become increasingly clear that many questions lie under the polymathic comic exterior." "A suicidal teenager who was in prison for credit card fraud, he later walked out of the West End play Cell Mates and again considered killing himself." "He recently revealed in a documentary that he suffers from a severe form of depression, bipolarity, which causes dangerous mood swings." "You're coming to your 50th birthday, when people often take stock." "How does your life compare with the expectations you had for it at this point?" "I would say almost every aspect of my life has exceeded the expectations I would have had at, say, the age of 15." "I couldn't possibly have imagined that things would have turned out so pleasingly." "L-I can remember..." "I'm one of that generation that used to watch Parkinson, and there was still that sort of glamorous end of Hollywood, the Cagneys and things." "The idea that I would ever be on Parkinson - preposterous." "The idea that I would be stopped in the street for my autograph was an unimaginable, unattainable golden city." "On your website, in a recent entry, you say, "Stephen Fry is now a man content."" "Given what you've been through, the various emergencies in your life, which we'll talk about, it can't really be as simple as that, can it?" "No, it isn't." "Actually, I didn't write that." "It's my official website, but there was a sort of guy who interviewed me." "And I said, "By all means put in whatever your gloss on the interview is", and he put, "A man content."" "It sort of suggests someone who had f-fires of rage and purpose built up inside him and they have now kind of gone down to a small, little, happy, little, warm twinkle, rather than the inferno they were." "And I don't think I was ever stormy in quite the way some people I know are stormy." "But I don't think I'll ever be "content" in quite that way either, which is not to say that" "I'm interestingly morose or interestingly unstable, particularly." "I suppose it's quite well known that I have a mood disorder, and so I go in cycles of elation and depression, but if there's a mean to that, then that's what contentment is in anybody's life, really." "It's neither happiness nor misery, is it?" "For most of the time, one yearns for that, if you're someone who tends to peak and trough in your moods." "I was alluding to the mood disorder, because we're some distance now from the two-part documentary you did, in which, certainly on screen, you seemed appalled and surprised by the realisation of how serious a problem" "at least the medical profession thought you had." "A zero on that scale is somebody who has absolutely no features of being bipolar at all." "From what you told me, you would score probably about 70." "You fit well into the realm of people who have, y'know, full-blown manic episodes." "Yeah." "'It was foolish of me to be quite so surprised because,' after all, it's not a condition that you judge by, um, any particular symptoms, like the spots are this big or the headaches are that debilitating." "In a sense, the awful thing about depression is that the ultimate judge of how serious it is is how close you come to suicide and how frequently you have suicidal thoughts." "And I have what Martin Amis once called the writer's arrogance of assuming the feelings I have are the feelings everyone else has, that my observations about myself and my feelings, whether they're quite dark, sexual ones," "or trivial ones about people you see in the street, you assume they're shared by everyone else." "There's that famous stand-up comedian's nightmare of saying, "You know how it is" ""when you see this and you feel really horny?" And the audience goes, "No...?"" "I suddenly realised that with my suicidal thoughts." "I just assumed everybody had suicidal thought quite often." "The doctors were slightly shocked." "Not shocked, but they said," ""No, that is a sign of someone who really should worry more about their condition."" "My doctor does now remind me never to take it for granted that the day will come when..." "when I take it so seriously." "I don't want to sound trivial, but I'm so used to it being a background noise that the periods come when I suddenly don't see any purpose in life and don't see any huge disadvantage in ending life." "I mean, it takes a little bit of extra energy to want to kill yourself, and I rarely have that much pain and despair, but I have enough to think, "It would be so convenient if I just suddenly got hit by a train or something." ""I wouldn't actually have to do it, but it would just be great." ""I've had enough." It's just that, "I've had enough."" "Almost like George Sanders's famous suicide note." "Something like, "I was bored." Just a sense..." "An awful guilt about being jaded, perhaps, that there is no..." "That's part of what depression does." "It's been written about by many writers and people who've experienced it, as well as the everyday person who experiences depression." "They're aware of..." "It leeches colour out of things, and flavour." "And when the colour and the flavour goes, you realise that they're not an extra ornament on the business of life but actually they are the thing that actually makes life worth living." "It's a bit like Wilde's point about art being useless." "It's not that he didn't believe in it." "He was the high priest of the aesthetic movement of his time, and he believed in art fully, but he observed that it was useless." "I was surprised that you were surprised by the diagnosis, because you had, as you say, you had at least twice tried to kill yourself, first as a teenager, again after the Cell Mates incident, when you walked out on the play." "If I knew someone who had twice tried to kill themselves," "I'd watch them quite carefully, but it seemed that no-one was watching you for that." "In a way not, I suppose." "And certainly not myself." "It was daft of me not to realise how serious it was, because it's so easy to judge." "If you twice try and kill yourself, that's a serious problem you've got to watch out for." "Actually, now, I have people who do care very much for me, I think, and do worry about me and, I think, are quite good at detecting when I'm in a bad phase and do things, little..." "How does the poet put it?" ""Little unremembered acts of kindness" that are extremely touching and show that they are thinking." "And, you know, they'll just call or send a little text message or something just to say, "Please call me", because they want to hear my voice and just satisfy themselves that I'm not too, you know, zoned out in... in misery." "And that's a wonderful thing, because, if you added loneliness to depression, you really are in a world of appalling pain." "HE CHUCKLES" "Sorry, "A world of pain" makes me think of John Goodman!" "That's important because, for a lot of your life, you had been alone." "You were adding loneliness to depression." "You're absolutely right." "I had... really since leaving university almost, right up to the mid-'90s, I had lived alone." "And I had thought that I could do it alone and that indeed, I was happiest alone." "And for a lot of the time, I was, because I worked incredibly hard, and writing, which I did quite a lot of, is something..." "The way I do it and a lot of writers do it, is you're completely absorbed in it." "Other people are an encumbrance you really can't be bothered with, and it would be rude, really, you would be forced to be rude to them, because you just don't want to be with other people." "So, yeah, I was alone." "I didn't think I was lonely until that, whatever the word is, official word, "debacle"" "of the Cell Mates." "And then it was sort of while recovering from that, in its aftermath, that I discovered that I had been lonely." "Reading your autobiography and also the interviews in the early part of your career, there are, to me, quite alarming levels of self-disgust, self-hatred, even." "Mmm." "I think a lot of them are certainly physical." "I've had what, I think, if you wanted to make it sound grand, you would call a Swiftian or morbid disgust at my own body." "I'm not the kind of person I would fancy, and that's always very disturbing, I think, or at least it is to me." "And if you're gay, of course, you are the gender you'd fancy, so it means a lot more." "Most men who fancy women obviously don't want to look like a woman, so it's not a problem with them." "But I've always found attractive nippiness and fleetness and neatness, compactness, sort of agile swiftness and all the things I'm completely not." "I'm slow and lumbering." "When I was thin, I was gawky and now that I'm tubby, I'm just sort of like a bin-liner full of yoghurt, as I've put it in the past." "So it doesn't give me any pleasure to look in the mirror, and so there's that side of self-disgust." "Um..." "And there's just those feelings of... disconnection from others that I've had." "Things like sport and music and so on just made me feel different, not to mention sexuality and even race, to some extent, being different from an average public schoolboy." "Those things made me feel separate, and I liked it as well as hating it." "I think I wrote somewhere in the autobiography that it is that pull of wanting to be part of the crowd, part of the tribe, desperately yearning to belong, and that desire to be separate and individual and different." "The tension between those two irreconcilable ambitions is what makes, in a sense, the adolescent, very often, but the permanent adolescent in my case or, as various literary critics have observed, the anti-hero." "The Bourgeois anti-hero of 20th-century literature is that... that rather forlorn and pathetic problem of wanting both to belong and to be separate." "And the way you speak and write, which is familiar to a lot of people now, which is a vivid vocabulary, rolling qualifications..." "STEPHEN LAUGHS" "Yes..." "References, allusions to all sorts of literature, science, whatever... if I'd met you as a child, as an adolescent, how much of that would have been there?" "When did that - if I can say manner - when would that have become fixed?" "It's very interesting, and I puzzle over this enormously myself." "I don't know..." "Of course, I sort of know what my manner is because I'm told it so often, and you believe it." "Do you remember those first times you were ever told about writing, and you were told there was such a thing as a tone and then that there was such a thing as a style, and that one had to achieve it?" "I remember my father criticising me - in a way that really upset me - for being a pasticheur, for having no original cast of mind, no original thought or no original manner, having no original style," "I was a butterfly." "How old were you?" "12, 13, or something like that." "I was an enormous reader." "So I sort of put that down, to some extent, to insomnia, but I think it's a kind of horse-and-cart thing." "I think I was insomniac because I read so much, as well as reading so much because I was insomniac." "But I'd read three or four books a night sometimes, easily." "My parents had a lot of books in the house and there was a mobile visiting library, being in the middle of the country." "So, you know, I did read voraciously and remembered the patterns I read, the speech patterns of everything from the sort of orotundity of a Conan Doyle to the elegance of a Jane Austen or whatever, and so you absorb them, and then Wilde - the language of The Importance Of Being Ernest " "things like that got into my system." "So I would talk half like an early 18th-century squire and half like a caped Victorian and..." "I can't have another half, can I?" "You know what I mean." "HE LAUGHS There was this sense of this preposterously posey child who was trying on different verbal intellectual clothing all the time and eventually, suddenly, a particular look sticks or a particular style seems to emerge." "There were certainly the three Ws - Wodehouse, Waugh and Wilde were big in my universe, and were an influence." "But that period of reading and trying on those voices was crucial to your acting career, as it turned out, because you went on and played Wilde." "Yes." "But also that character, there in General Melchett, is there in many of your characters," "Jeeves..." "The upper-class, English upper-class figure has been crucial to your acting persona." "Yes, it has." "I think it's that thing, because I'm not quite the real thing, not quite the top drawer." "There are certain British actors, like Jeremy Child or whatever, the sort of Etonian baronets, who actually are the real thing." "Nigel Havers, he's the real thing." "Exactly!" "Those sort." "They are possibly too close to be able to mock it, in a strange kind of way." "But I was, I suppose, a kind of snob when I was a teenager, in as much as that fantasist part of me that loved the worlds that were painted by Wodehouse and by Evelyn Waugh, I thought they were fascinating." "It's not that I actually wanted to be mistaken for a duke or anything, but I found them simultaneously funny and preposterous, which is almost a quotation from a diary entry of Alan Bennett's once, actually," "when he's writing about a time when he went for a walk and heard this band." "It was the band of the Royal Marines or whatever beating a retreat." "He writes about how he found his face wrinkled into a kind of sneer and his lips almost expressing a raspberry of contempt at the preposterous absurdity of this sight, while having to be aware that there were little tears running down his eyes at the same time." "And I think that's the key, that sometimes people are rather dumb about noticing that human beings are capable of two different emotions simultaneously." "It's often the case, for example, that if you have a hero or a beloved character who might have died in terrible circumstances of self-sacrifice as the subject of a comedy sketch, that people will assume that you have contempt for that person." "I remember having to defend Tony Slattery doing an extremely funny Douglas Bader walk in a charity stage show that I directed, and trying to get it across to the person who'd complained - it was a Channel 4... where you meet the public who disapprove of what you've done " "that it was possible to think Douglas Bader was one of the bravest, most extraordinary men of the Second World War, and that one had read the Paul Brickhill novel, Reach For The Sky, one had seen Kenneth More play him, you know." "Actually, I'd nearly met him." "I'd seen him on a golf course and watched him play and I had great admiration for him, but I thought his walk was funny." "Can't you understand the two don't cancel each other out?" "Blackadder Goes Forth is interesting in that respect." "Before it happened, they were rounding up Chelsea Pensioners to say, "This is disgraceful..."" "Worse than that, sadder than that was Ben Elton - who co-wrote it with Richard Curtis - his uncle, Sir Geoffrey Elton, a very well-known historian, had written to Ben virtually disowning him, saying, "I am disgusted to think that the name that your father and I adopted when we arrived in Britain," ""Elton, is now being attached to this poisonous, ignorant, foolish, contemptuous, stupid piece of work."" "And Ben was devastated, but it had a happy ending because, after the last one," "Uncle Geoffrey wrote back to Ben and said, "I take back every word and I'm extremely proud."" "Ben, as you can imagine, wept with joy and relief." "When you mentioned class, you said you weren't the real thing." "It's interesting, as many Americans might think you are the Duke of Uppingham or whatever, the Honourable Stephen Fry." "But your background wasn't that at all." "Your parents, when they chose your schools, and then later they had to choose others for reasons we'll talk about, they were trying to educate you as an English gentleman." "Yes and no." "Both my parents had been to private schools." "My father had been to public school." "He'd been a choirboy at St Paul's during the war, a chorister, and had gone to public school and then on to university." "My mother had boarded at a very posh girls' boarding school, Malvern College, from a very young age, hidden away in the countryside for the war." "So they went to Gabbitas Thring, the scholastic agency, and said, "We want somewhere very friendly", so this prep school was chosen, run by a headmaster and his three daughters, who were incredibly warm and sweet." "It really was a lovely place." "So whether they wanted me to be an English gentleman or not, I don't know." "Certainly, the house I grew up in and everything, looking back now, it would seem very grand." "Gardeners and, you know, all kinds of traditional, old things." "It was a way of life that is quite uncommon now." "The only children I saw were other children like me who were away at boarding school and I didn't really know anyone, didn't know any girls, didn't know any working-class people." "It's not out of snobbery, just out of living in the middle of the country." "You just don't." "But I think..." "I mean, I think what they wanted for both of us was for us to be at ease and for us to be happy and for us to fulfil our potential." "When I say to people I was sent away at the age of seven to a prep school 200 miles away, they imagine me at boarding school, they think of a seven-year-old today and how impossible that would be," "and think I must have:" "A, been miserable B, thought myself hated by my parents" "C, thought myself singled out for special punishment, but they ignore the obvious truths." "One is that everybody else at the school with you, all the other boys are in the same boat, so you kind of think that's fine." "Also, all the other boys you know back home are also going off to school and your parents went off at that age and your brother did, and any child faced with such a set of circumstances around them" "doesn't think, " Ah, but there are millions and millions of children my age who are not sent away!"" "They just think that's what happens." "You go to school and you probably blub for the first few nights and then you're OK." "Your mother's desire for a friendly school is interesting, as John Cleese once said to you that your politeness will be your downfall." "Yes." "That was quite a big thing for you, was to be..." "Eager to please, say yes, to delight..." "Absolutely." "People still detect it in me." "It's one of the sides of me that I seem to find impossible to get rid of." "I can't help it." "There is an eagerness to please and it's not a particularly attractive quality." "And I know that being over-polite is not attractive necessarily." "It can be charming for a few moments, but even the word "charming" is not a good word for an Englishman, is it?" "We'll let Latinos be charming, with their hint of gigolo." "In the '50s, "a charmer" was a term of abuse." "Yes." "It was someone who was a conman." "Precisely." "I don't attempt to be charming, it's what I've become." "I can't watch someone not saying "thank you", you know." "And I can't not say it myself." "I would have to..." "If I noticed I hadn't said it," "I'd have to come back in the room and say "Thank you"." "It's feeble." "It's like Shakespeare's view of dogs." "It's kind of fawny and..." "You know, and it's not very..." "It's not something I'd like to have." "After all, I don't dislike people who are not polite." "I know quite a lot of people who are quite rude." "And as long as they're not..." "As long as they don't upset people, not bullies, it's perfectly acceptable to be... not brusque, but just to say what you think." "Actually, you then treasure it when they're warm to you because they're mostly quite sort of distant." "Then occasionally, they'll say something kind and you'll think, "Oh..." You melt completely." "But I couldn't be like that." "I could not." "I would see myself being, you know, exhibiting hauteur of some kind or being cold to someone and I would just collapse." "And you once had to leave a lunch because your host" "And you once had to leave a lunch because your host was being rude to the waiters." "Yes, I think Michael wouldn't mind me saying this." "The theatre producer, Michael Conrad." "Indeed." "I remember once having occasion to go and have dinner with him in a restaurant that had just been opened by a restaurateur in Covent Garden." "He was very anxious to please Michael and he was appallingly beastly to this man." "I actually put my knife and fork down and said, "Michael, I've got to leave." He said, "Why?"" "I said, "Because you're being so rude and I can't stay in the room while you're being like this."" "He found it the funniest thing and he tells the story now." "Probably the people who ran the restaurant knew Michael well enough to know that that was just his way." "And... my absurd, you might almost call it bourgeois, need to hear the niceties of the "thank yous" and "pleases", just struck him as absurd." "And maybe they are." "I think what it took me a long time to realise is that when Cleese said my politeness would be my downfall, he meant it." "He actually meant "You are too polite."" "In another way, I think your manner was almost your downfall because you were sending out, looking back, quite severe distress signals." "You were being expelled from schools, you were attempting to commit suicide." "And yet, because you had this surface perkiness, people don't seem ever to have realised quite how bad things were with you." "No." "I think that's true." "Including your parents, I think." "I think they would probably agree with that." "That's right." "And it's an unfortunate..." "I don't know whether it's..." "There's a name for it, a name for a sort of pathological inability to project what you're feeling." "Which is a strange thing for someone who tries to be an actor from time to time." "The meat and drink of being an actor is the ability to project feelings." "But there you go." "But that is the English way." ""I am not going to allow my emotions to go all over you."" "Certainly, the most destructive, um... vice, if you like, that a person can have, more than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins, is self-pity." "I think self-pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have." "And the most destructive." "It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think hatred is a subset of self-pity, not the other way around, it destroys everything around it except itself." "Self-pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfil all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself." "It's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by and that things are unfair and that one is under-appreciated and that if only one had had a chance at this, if only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier." "If only this..." "That one is unlucky." "All those things, and some of them may well even be true." "But to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice." "I think it's something we find unattractive about the American culture - a culture which I find mostly extremely attractive and I like Americans and I love being in America." "But just occasionally, there'll be some example of the absolutely ravening self-pity that they are capable of." "And you see it in their talk shows..." "It's an appalling spectacle and it's so self destructive." "I almost wanted, once, to publish a self-help book saying How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry." ""Guaranteed success."" "And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages and the first page would just say "Stop feeling sorry for yourself" ""and you will be happy." ""Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings."" "And that's what the book would be and it would be true." "It sounds like, "That's so simple." But it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself." "It's bloody hard." "Cos we do feel that way." "It's what Genesis is all about." "The book of the Bible, not the rock group?" "Yes!" "Maybe, I don't know." "Maybe the rock group is as well." "Reading your autobiography, there's a very touching, very English moment where, after your adolescent suicide attempt, your father appears to have worked out what it's about and he comes to talk to you." "He comes up to your room." "Mmm." "He seems to know that it's to do with attraction to a boy." "Yes." "It's love, essentially." "That's how I interpret it in the book." "That I think it was love that really screwed me up more than anything." "Of course, I would have been screwed up anyway." "I was deceitful, dishonest, lazy, sly - all the things that I was accused of by the school teachers and all the things that maddened my parents." "But... um... all of that was really completely thrown into total disarray by falling in love." "It's one of those strange things, love, is that, you know, as a child, we recoil against it." "Whenever in a film some kissing starts, you really just cannot understand why they would have a perfectly good story and then ruin it." "It's pathetic, the thing of two people looking at each other like that and then touching their lips." "And you think, "Oh, come on!" "Fast forward."" "Not that my generation said fast forward, of course." "Then suddenly, it hits you and it all falls into place." "You suddenly understand why almost every novel you've ever read is a love story." "You're suddenly connected to all these extraordinary voices that had passed you by before it had hit you." "But you also feel a kind of curse." "You feel that welcome pain." "And, for me, it was just so colossal." "Catastrophic, in the proper sense of the word." "Not necessarily disastrous, but absolutely life-changing and turning." "And I just knew that nothing would ever be the same again." "It just altered everything." "It sharpened my senses." "It made me all of the drippy, obvious things." "It made me love poetry and painting, nature and landscape." "It all connected up into one great thing." "And you wrote a vast epic poem." "I did." "I wrote a parody of Don Juan." "It was about catching sight of the loved one for the first time." "That's the thing that so shocked me, that it was so instant." "I didn't gradually fall in love with this boy." "It was the moment I saw him, I was completely devastated." "Absolutely devastated by it." "And I would go miles out of my way, learn his timetable, just in order to be anywhere close." "One always felt the universe was conspiring in one's favour because there were so many coincidences, where I hadn't worked out how to be close but I'd find myself next to him in a queue." "The whole body would go electrically weird." "So I was always trying in poetry or anything else, to recapture that extraordinary thing, that the very first time you cast eyes on someone, you're completely in thrall to every part of them." "And the way that it transforms every part of them." "But, when someone is beautiful, every part of them..." "Their elbow is astonishing, the way clothes hang on them is so much more classy than on anybody else." "And their feet are gorgeous." "Every single part of them is made beautiful." "And that, to me, was just..." "I mean, it still is, the great miracle of human life." "What happened to the boy?" "Is he head of Civil Service?" "I won't give any details." "It was embarrassing." "But he has a successful career, yes." "Have you been in contact with him?" "No." "His wife got in contact with me, oddly enough." "She read the book." "She said that he'd recognised something that he'd said and wanted me to know that it was fine." "So that was rather nice of her." "And your father, as you recount, the way he broached all this was..." "It involved tarot cards." "So odd and so unlike him." "It was most peculiar." "It was his way of, I think, trying to objectify it." "Is that the word?" "I'm not sure." "Trying not to make it look as if he had seen through me but that it was..." "I think he thought it was a kinder way of doing it or something." "So what he said that he'd met a tarot-card reader who had told him that love had come into your life." "Yeah, that's right." "He said, basically..." "He's a physicist, for God's sake." "He wouldn't think that." "The bollocks of tarot cards." "It was strange, but..." "But touching, because he was trying to say that he understood." "Yes, exactly." "Exactly." "Um, and..." "God knows." "I don't know what it's like for a parent." "It seems a short time ago because it was in my own lifespan, and one refuses to regard that as being a huge amount of time, although it's half a century that I've been on the planet." "But it was still a bigger deal then than it is now, to have a gay son." "The word "gay" wasn't used even." "There were suggestions that it was an illness, a medical condition that could to be sorted out." "It was a dysfunctional thing to be." "Even if none of those was accepted, it was pretty much accepted that it would leave you a life of loneliness and of outcast state." "So, even if you were sympathetic and tolerant, it's, "Oh dear, you're either going to have to live abroad, in some more sympathetic climate," ""you'll find somewhere, some little sunny island."" "So there was some sympathy, as much as understanding." "But we've moved on since then, it's a totally different world and a much better one to be born gay in." "No question." "The credit-card fraud, do you regard that as an absolute one-off, an aberration, or do you fantasize about robbing banks, plundering pension funds, that kind of thing?" "No, I don't at all." "I regard myself now as painfully honest and, actually, I really dislike dishonesty and I don't know..." "It was a strange phase of dishonesty and I shudder to think of it." "It's horrible because of what it does to others." "It does upset people." "We all know as householders and car owners, what it's like to be burgled or have one's car window broken." "And I try extremely hard not to get too upset about it." "For two reasons:" "One, because I can sort of just about do the thought experiment to understand what it's like to be some kid who does these things." "I don't expect a 15 year old growing up on an estate to have a fully-fledged bourgeois sense of property and meum et tuum." "Plus, I don't want to have that much of a sense of an investment of my identity in my property either." "I don't want to get incredibly upset by the idea that I no longer have this object." "Obviously, if I lose my phone later this afternoon or tomorrow," "I'm going to be so angry about it because it's immensely inconvenient." "But at least one should have it as an ideal not to get too upset about the loss of property." "When the film of your life is made - you speculate at various points about this - the big moment in the first act will be - and people will think it's made up, but you write about this " "is when your mother comes to see you in prison and she pushes..." "Yes." "...She has a batch of the Times crossword..." "Cut out." "...Cut out, and she pushes it under the grill." "Yes." "Pretty extraordinary moment, that." "It was extraordinarily touching." "It said so much." "My mother has always had enormous faith in me and always had great belief in me and in my future and in my capacity and so on." "And I remember when I got thrown out of Uppingham and then thrown out of another school, and there was this college in King's Lynn, NORCAT it was called" " Norfolk College Of Arts And Technology." "She went along with them to talk about what course I was going to do." "And she said, " And what about an Oxbridge scholarship paper or something?"" "They went, "I don't think that would be appropriate." My mother was outraged. "Yes, it would!"" "Really, I owe a good great deal of my curiosity, I think, to her." "I always had it and she always fed it." "So even doing some simple chore, I'd turn it into a quiz and she had to ask me questions, poor woman." "Endlessly." "Which I would try and answer." "Crossword clue is quite a good symbol, in a strange way, of whatever qualities I do have, as being a sum of my parents' qualities." "Because my parents between them can always do the Times crossword, so I grew up watching them doing it together." "There was a kind of clue that my father would get and there was a kind of clue that my mother would get." "And when I started looking at these things, I found that I could do it on my own, because I had that part of my father and that part of my mother, which meant that I could do it." "But to her, it symbolised her faith in me, her belief in me and that feeling that I was the sum of her dearly beloved husband." "And they are one of the great couples I've ever met." "So she saw me as that, I think." "So it had that wonderful sense of unconditional love that only a mother can provide." "We haven't mentioned Cambridge University, which your teachers hadn't believed you'd get into, but your mother did." "It's significant for you in two ways, that people didn't think you'd get in, yet it being when you started to turn your life around." "The other is the people you met." "Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, who became hugely significant." "Yes." "The first bit that's always interesting in double acts, the very first meeting with Hugh Laurie." "I had seen him on stage because, his first year - he'd gone up to university to row, he was a fine oarsmen and had rowed internationally for under-18s for England and so on." "So he was obviously going to get his Rowing Blue." "But in his first year, he got glandular fever." "Some fellow Etonian had said to him, "You're a funny sort of fellow, why don't you go for the Footlights?"" "So Hugh though, "OK."" "I went to see the Footlights Revue, and there was Hugh, being brilliant." "And Emma as well, who was in the same year as me." "They were all in the same year as me." "And I thought, "Gosh, he's very good."" "He did a brilliant American accent and I thought "God, he can do a good American accent."" "It turned out to be very true!" "It now makes him, what, a million an episode or something in House?" "He does pretty well, certainly." "And I knew Emma because I'd done some "straight plays", as actors would say, serious sort of Shakespeares and things like that, with Emma." "She, in my last year, the very beginning of my last year, said that Hugh had seen a play I'd written at Edinburgh called Latin!" "Latinl, yes." "That's right, which was a comedy." "And he'd said to Emma, "You know him, don't you?" She'd said "Yes"." "He said, "I'd really like to meet him" ""because I'm going to take over the Footlights next year."" "Apparently he had a choice and flipped a coin as to whether he'd be president of the Boat Club or the Footlights." "It came down Footlights." "But I think he was too smart to be an oarsman all his life." "So, Emma then got in touch with me and said, "I'm going to take you round to meet him," ""because he wants to meet you."" "So I went round and he said," ""Hello." He said, "I've just written a song, would you hate it if I sang it to you?"" "I said, "No, I'd love to hear it."" "He sank this very funny song about Americans who raise money for the IRA, which was very good." "And we started writing." "We started writing straightaway, about 20 minutes in." "And it was as if I'd known him all my life." "It was just extraordinary." "I mean, it was absolutely..." "I found him funny and charming, and I knew that his judgment and my judgment were roughly in the same area." "It was just so easy." "It was just wonderful." "Just an instant synergy, I suppose, people would call it." "Although you're both tall, there has to be physical dissimilarity in a double act, which did help, didn't it?" "Yes, I think so." "I'm slightly taller than Hugh and Hugh always astonished people when they met him and saw how tall he was." "They assumed that I was average height and Hugh therefore was quite short." "In fact, he's 6'2"and I'm 6'5", so there is quite a difference." "Um..." "Yeah." "Generally speaking, the relationship, although it wasn't consistently so, was that I'd be the rather verbally mouthy one and he would be the rather more charming dumb one." "Certainly, in some of the early sketches we did that were successful, things like masterclasses in which I'd be the pompous teacher and he'd be the rather, sort of, not exactly gormless, but not either particularly sharp pupil." "Because he had the big, round, blue eyes and so on." "What's the word, I wonder, that Shakespeare decides to begin his sentence with here?" ""Time" is the first word." "Time." "Yep." "Time." "AUDIENCE CHUCKLES" "Yep." "AUDIENCE LAUGHS" "And how does Shakespeare decide to spell it, Hugh?" ""T-l-M-E"." "T-I...? "M..."" "M-E." "Yep." "And what sort of spelling of the word "time" is that?" "LAUGHTER" "Well, it's the ordinary spelling." "The ordinary spelling." "It's the conventional spelling." "Oh, right." "There were other ones where occasionally the roles were reversed." "We both had the same sense of... er... guilt, I suppose." "We were aware, just as we were leaving Cambridge, that the wind was blowing from another quarter." "Alexei Sayle had started up, and Rik Mayall was beginning to make a noise in the world, so we thought, "Oh, well, it's too late." ""Our timing's abominable." "No-one's going to want to know anyone from Footlights any more." ""It'll all be this alternative stuff."" "So we felt incredibly lucky and grateful and guilty that we won this first Perrier Award and then were asked to do the show in London, then the BBC asked to do it, and we got this series with Granada, in which we were put together with Ben Elton and Robbie Coltrane," "so it was these young people who had just left university but were different." "We'd got this Cambridge tradition, but we'd got these young spiky ones as well." "'They're looking around now." "'I think they may just be 'beginning to get a little bit suspicious now." "'I think they may have sensed the camera." "'Have they rumbled our position?" "I think they've rumbled it." "Pull out, pull out." "'All units." "Trouser, Trouser, Trouser." "All units." "Trouser, Trouser." "Pull out!" "'" "There have been double acts who ended up not speaking, communicating through lawyers, separate dressing rooms, all of that." "Yes." "You never had any of that with Hugh?" "No, not at all." "We were incredibly lucky in that regard, although we often say that almost everything in which we regard ourselves as being lucky may be a curse." "The fact that we haven't had these stormy relationships, the fact that we haven't fired people or formed companies to make money and do co-productions with other people, we're all very pleased about, but then we think, "Well, maybe we would have been more successful" ""if we'd done all of those things, if we'd taken control."" "But we just felt slightly embarrassed to be where we were, slightly not worthy, slightly..." "We couldn't pretend to be of the street, streety." "We couldn't go, "Right, yeah, yeah, OK, yeah."" "It was hopeless." "That wasn't gonna fool anybody." "So we'd had to be who we were, but we were aware that that was no longer an interesting thing for anyone to be, that it was old hat." "But we hoped that people would overlook the disadvantages of public school and Cambridge and be nice to us and allow our true voices to come out." "No longer can ordinary people, such as we... use an ordinary word like "gay"" "in an ordinary example of the great British sentence." "Without people thinking that you mean poofy." "It's a disgrace!" "There's another one." ""Poofy"!" "You can't say that any more." "Of course you can't!" "Used to." "All the time!" "Yes, but now..." "Now People think you mean arse bandit." "AUDIENCE LAUGH" "Our show was quite old-fashioned." "No moving graphics, all the things that were just beginning." "Even in its day it looked quite staid in terms of the way it was shot and made." "And we didn't want to go for parodies and instant catchphrases, and our parodies were not really parodies of anything specific..." "People would say, "Who are you being?" "What programme?" We'd say, "It's not any programme..."" ""Oh!" You know?" "And so we almost bloody-mindedly didn't do things that would make us popular, which is stupid, really." "One aspect of showbiz you've found hard is criticism." "You've found that very hard to take, almost." "I have." "I have to say, if you can't mellow in your fifties, then you're never going to, and I have mellowed in that regard, and I know that I was incredibly prickly and thorny and was very contemptuous of criticism and, indeed," "used to make severe remarks about the days when you were doing it, indeed " "The Late Show, things like that." "Late Review." "Late Review, yeah." "I mean, it is a very mockable thing to be a TV critic, a pundit... on hire for any critical thing, you know?" "And Hugh and I used to do these critics, who would talk about the number of levels on which things worked and so on." ""Oh, 17?" "I counted 18."" "All that sort of thing." "But, now, I've mellowed and also, the fact is, I don't read newspapers any more, so I don't really read that much criticism myself." "In fact, I don't read any of it." "I tried desperately hard to make sure everybody I know knows not to say," ""Oh, I saw that awful thing in the Mail about you." ""I hope you're not too upset," because I won't know about it." "I genuinely will not know." "When did you stop reading?" "Oh, seven years ago." "I haven't subscribed to a paper for 20 years - I genuinely don't read them." "Was that because of something written about you?" "Not necessarily." "That didn't help, I have to say." "I have to be absolutely frank and say I've had an incredibly good ride from the newspapers." "I've got nothing to complain about." "The odd person may have said nasty things about me but, God, compared to what some people put up with, like Ben Elton, for example, or, bless him," "George Michael." "So it's completely improper of me to claim that I've been savaged and cornered or indeed that they've dug into my private life or done anything particularly unkind." "That said, it's also true that I hate reading negative things about myself because they stick in my mind for a very long time." "I can remember almost everything unpleasant said about me, and I can't remember anything nice said about me." "That's true of most actors, I'm sure." "I prefer not to know." "But when you directed your first film, Bright Young Things, you must have wanted to know what the reviews were." "Of course." "It affects whether you make another one." "Exactly." "I'm an executive producer on it, anyway, so you have to know the whole thing of it, you have to know everything about it, really." "And you get sent books of cuttings." "And, so yeah..." "And actually the TV series I'm doing at the moment for ITV..." "Kingdom." "Kingdom, yeah." "And you just can't not get the producer saying," ""ITV's thrilled." "It's getting wonderful figures." You're confronted with its raw, naked success in terms of faces turned towards the screen." "Plus they'll say, "Oh, the Guardian really liked it, the Times hated it and the Telegraph were OK about it,"" "and this and that, "but generally speaking, we seem to have got away with it,"" "sort of feeling or "it's been welcomed" or whatever." "So you naturally know that, but I just don't read the individual things." "And in terms of Bright Young Things, because I wasn't in it, oddly enough," "I didn't mind so much the criticism of my direction or the screenplay which I wrote for it, but I felt terrible if they didn't like any of the actors." "I hadn't predicted how protective of your cast you would feel as a director." "The strangest headline you've ever generated, which you do know, because you had to read it in the TV documentary, is "Lucan mystery of TV's Jeeves"" "which is on the front... which is brilliant, in its own way..." "It's great." "I wish I'd cut it out and had a facsimile of it." "...on the day when you disappeared from Cell Mates." "That, again - there are still theatre critics who talk about "doing a Stephen Fry"" "which is seen as sensitivity to reviews." "Yeah." "They still believe you left because of the reviews of that." "Mmm." "And I'm sure the reviews didn't help, and I'm sure they precipitated the action." "I've a very strong feeling, though, that if I hadn't gone that weekend," "I would have gone another weekend, and very close to it." "And maybe the reviews tipped me over the edge, and they certainly contributed to this feeling that I had that I was a failure, which was a strong thing at the time." "I didn't know how to put it." "I don't think you put in a goodbye letter "I feel lonely, so I'm going away on my own"" "because that doesn't make any sense." "I don't know what my feelings were." "It was just an overwhelming confluence of incredibly bad feelings that I had - incredibly negative feelings - which expressed themselves essentially as a kind of desperate pain and misery and distress." "I felt stricken." "It's very hard to say." "It's an odd thing, isn't it, that we can't really remember pain?" "We can remember having it, but you can't bring it back." "I just remember it as being perhaps the most overwhelming feeling of distress I've ever been in, of acute, world-ending misery, and that's the point." "It was impossible to conceive of any future for myself of any kind." "And it wasn't helped by the fact that I wasn't enjoying my experience in Cell Mates and I don't think I was very good in it and suited to it and just not comfortable." "Every now and again, I bump into someone who says," ""I'm one of those few people who saw you in Cell Mates." "I thought it was really good."" "And I go, "Thank you very much." ""NOW you tell me!" But it wasn't precisely because of that." "This thing we talked about, not being able to say things to people." "You couldn't say anything to Rik Mayall, your co-star, about it." "And that's the ultimate betrayal, actually, isn't it?" "It's more, "Why couldn't he say?" "We could have sorted something out," ""given him a week off, done this, done that,"" "all of which was possible, and I wouldn't have needed to threaten," ""Either you are nice to me and help me with my problems or I walk out." No, that wouldn't have been it." "It's a very odd thing." "The richest resource we have, we're always told and we always tell ourselves, is our friends" "And yet, the way I put it is like this, if you, Mark Lawson, were to develop a strange wart on the end of your penis, you wouldn't show your mother or your friends," "but you'd happily show it to a stranger, a doctor." "And that's the way we are with our mental ones, as well." "When we have some strange feeling that is not normal and we're not used to, and especially if it's close to some part of us that we're embarrassed about, our self-worth, our feelings of who we are," "we're not going to share it with a friend, although supposedly that's what friends are for, but we will share it with some strange psychotherapist or psychiatrist somewhere." "So in that sense, they are the equivalent of our genital warts!" "THEY CHUCKLE" "We've talked about the things you've done - an enormous number of them - acting, directing, presenting, novels, poetry more recently, plays, screenplays." "Do you have a preference among those professions?" "I used fliply to answer that I liked the one I'm not doing, and there's an element of truth in that, that if you are at six in the morning on a film set, shivering somewhere, having to line up with the cameras" "with a polystyrene cup of foul coffee in your hands, you think to yourself, "I could be in my pyjamas and dressing gown sitting at the computer thinking," ""'Shall I do a new chapter?" "Oh, I'll go and... '" And, you know, your time's your own." "The writer's life seems incredibly enviable." "But when you're sitting in front of the computer staring at the screen, going, "OH!" ""I can't think of anything!" "I've just written two hours' worth of rubbish!" ""I can't believe it!" "I'm going to have to delete it all!" ""I could be on a film set with people calling me sir and saying, 'Like some coffee, sir?" ""'We'll be ready in half an hour." "Go to your trailer.' There's your trailer," ""and it's got a DVD player and music and people to chat to." ""The film life, that's what I want to be."" "So the other man's grass is always greener, to that extent, but the highest charge and excitement" "I've ever got out of life is definitely writing." "That's the one which is the most exciting." "It's an incredible feeling, because I become so utterly lost in it." "I do do it very intensely, partly because of the constraints of time and because that's the way it comes." "So I will give myself three months in which I do nothing else, and I get up earlier and earlier and earlier in the day until it comes to literally three o'clock in the morning I'm getting up." "It's just mad." "And I'm writing, writing, writing and then going to bed at six in the evening!" "It's completely weird!" "But I just love that feeling of getting up and feeling the dawn break and the birds sing and just writing away and being the only person in the universe." "It's a fantastic feeling and this thing that overcomes you." "No novels for seven years or so now." "Is it that long?" "Gee whiz!" "The way things have gone!" "I'm about to do a big documentary series in America in which I visit every state of the Union, 50 of them, as you know, and I'm very much looking forward to that, and there is a book I'm doing for that," "as inevitably there is with these things, but I think it is interesting." "I think it's a jolly useful book." "I'd love to have a book which was divided into 50." "And it'll be personal, as well, it's not just a fact book about America, but 50 of these states." "And whenever I go to America and talk to American friends, with the exception of those who grew up in Hollywood or the middle of Manhattan, which surprisingly few did, just as I know surprisingly few people who grew up in the middle of London," "they all have a state identity." ""Oh, I'm an Oregonian." You think, "I don't know what that means."" "And I'd love to find out." "So I'm really looking forward to this great tour round these states." "So my next book, obviously, will be connected to that series." "But after that, in other words" "September 2008 maybe, I will be able to write a novel." "Bringing us back to where we started, in the documentary you were having to come to terms with how you would deal with the bipolarity - drugs or simply lifestyle changes." "A year or more on from that documentary, what did you...?" "What have you settled for, in the end?" "Oddly enough, the lifestyle change I've recently chosen has also involved drugs, because - this is really weird" " I thought," ""Well, sometimes when you can't change anything about your mood or your feelings," ""one part of yourself that you can always change, agony as it may be, is your body."" "It's displacement, perhaps, but it's a reminder that you do have control over that thing that is Stephen Fry." "And part of that thing is this pair of legs and that fat tummy and that part of me that's addicted to nicotine." "And I thought, with tedious obviousness, as July was approaching and the end of smoking in public, this would be a reasonable time to give up smoking." "And also because I'd just delivered two scripts, and so I'd done a major bit of writing, and writing and smoking are very hard-wired, as connected in my brain." "And so I went to my doctor and I said, "Now, I've heard of this pill" ""which started out in life as an antidepressant, oddly enough, a happy pill." ""And it was discovered to have this weird side effect of turning people off tobacco."" "Apparently a certain percentage it works with." "I've been on this for a month and I've not been smoking." "It's just been extraordinary." "But it's also had the side effect of making me slightly, slightly, dopily cheerful." "I mean not dopily in the sense of lack of energy, but just slightly pointlessly cheerful in a way that I'm not usually." "And I'm not sure that I like it." "But, no, it's not that famous Auden thing about don't take away my devils cos you'll take away my angels, too." "That's unquestionably been a fear in my mind that... bad as it can get - and I never want to get it as bad as it was in '95 in the Cell Mates business or in earlier periods of my life " "I'm determined that if I feel it getting that close, if the wind starts to blow from that quarter, I will ask for help, shamelessly and unembarrassedly." "But, on the other hand, some of the creative edge from the hypermanic stages and even some of the energy you get from depression - depression isn't all lassitude, there are mixed states that are common as one overlaps the other " "ghastly as they can be and quite difficult for people who live with me," "I do think they are so much a part of me that to expel them or to cover them up, in my case - and I'm certainly not giving this as an argument against pharmaceutical intervention - in my case just wouldn't seem right," "but I'm perfectly prepared to change my mind in six months." "Nothing's permanent." "And in the documentary there was a reference to sorting it out in the past with alcohol and street drugs." "You're not gonna run for president, so you can be as honest as you wish." "Absolutely." "No, I took a lot of cocaine for many years." "In fact, I found it almost impossible to be out in public without it." "Unfortunately, it's such a tedious and common story to hear from celebrities that I almost feel embarrassed to tell it." "It's like," ""Oh, God." "Him, too." "He wants to join this club."" "But it is true, I did do a great deal of the stuff." "And with it goes alcohol." "I found that I could drink virtually a bottle of vodka in an evening with cocaine would somehow not affect me." "But oddly enough, it didn't make me very sociable." "This is the strange effect it had on me." "You'll think I'm so sad when I tell you this." "For most people it's a party drug, it's a connector, it makes you talk." "I always used to say that I'm such a hypermanic person much of the time anyway that coke actually brought me down!" "And there was an element of that." "It made me want to drink." "I would go into my study with a bottle of vodka and a pint mug and tonic water and a great huge fat wrap of cocaine and I would either play - oh, please don't hate me for this - computer Scrabble against myself for hours and hours and hours" "or I would do Spectator and Listener-style crosswords one after the other." "And I just loved that." "And somehow I'd get lost in that and then eventually at five o'clock would take two sleeping pills and fall asleep." "Madness!" "I did that for years." "Just incredible!" "But I've never particularly liked alcohol, so once I stopped taking cocaine I found that I just was not interested." "I drink a glass of wine at some launch or something, where you're supposed to, and with food I'll have a glass of wine or two." "It'd be very hard for me to be an alcoholic unless I was a coke addict as well." "While you didn't write it on the website, Stephen Fry is a man content." "Avoiding glibness, whether it's anti-smoking, drugs, there is some truth in that?" "I think there is." "I think the bustle and noise of my life has quietened down to some extent, but what's interesting to me is that I'm probably working harder than I've ever worked in my life in terms of projects, if one wants to call them that," "a mixture of dramas and things, you know, like QI and documentaries and... screenplay writing and writing a pantomime, as I've just done, lots and lots of different things simultaneously that I've found immensely rewarding," "occasionally slightly too exhausting to be believed, but mostly fantastically fulfilling," "I think is the word." "I just feel very, if not content, I do feel quite fulfilled." "Not full up but fulfilled." "Whatever that means." "Stephen Fry, thank you." "Thank you, Mark." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd." "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"