Monday, October 01, 2007
Ponder Post 14: Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry and I share a birthday - August 24th - but little else. This time round, Fry was 50 and the BBC has marked this rite of passage with a Stephen Fry Night on BBC4 and, last night, with Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out on BBC2. I watched the latter with mounting incredulity. The first problem was Emma Thompson. Everything she says sounds desperately phony and patronising. The second problem was the format of simply asking a lot of friends and colleagues to say how great Fry is. It was, in fact, a straight luvvie-fest. The third problem was: why? I've never quite got Fry. I can see he is gifted and intelligent. But I simply don't find him that funny and the soupy voice and prose are deeply off-putting. (Many of the luvvies said he 'loved language/words' - this is only ever said by and about the illiterate. Saying somebody loves language is like saying they love air. Fry is not illiterate and he doesn't, therefore, love language.) I now admire him, however, because I heard him talking about manic-depression on the radio. It was unaffected and moving. But even those who do find him funny must have been startled by all this incontinent gush just because he's 50. He is big, but, surely, not that big. He is, psychologically, interesting, but gushing luvvies are not qualified to explore that. So Fry at 50 as a cause for a big TV fest - why?
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
At last. I thought it was just me. QI is an amusing and intelligent quiz show and I was very impressed by his trip to Slovakia tracing his family tree. His hosting of the BAFTA film awards is usually worth watching too. Apparently his writing is very good - although I don't know anyone who has read any of it. He correctly lauds PG Wodehouse, but his and Hugh Laurie's Jeeves and Wooster was rather lame. I enjoyed some aspects of his birthday celebration on BBC4, but noticed that he can drone on. But I think he ticks all the right BBC/Richard Curtis boxes for the media luvvies. He's gay, leftish, arty and has done the cocaine thing. Still, rather him than Johnathan Ross as a BBC totem. (And you're bang on about Emma Thompson too)
ReplyDeleteThat's so odd. I've been writing about Fry after I discovered over the weekend that he's started a blog. I still don't know what to make of it. He writes exactly how he speaks and at extraordinary length. I can't decide whether I admire it for its dexterity and wit or whether I just find it… well, annoying. He’s one of those places where my comic instincts fail me. I couldn't even get through the one novel of his I own.
ReplyDeleteWodehouse is often cited when talking about Fry and their humour certainly comes from the poetry of their language but with Wodehouse there's never any sense that the style is alien to the characters or world. In fact, it's one of the great criticisms, that even in the 1970s, Wodehouse was still writing as though it were sixty years earlier. Fry tries the same thing but whether in his writing or his speaking (but most notably in any profile I see about him) he always strikes me as a somebody trying so desperately hard to show everybody what an absolute genius he is. I'm not sure that this is the sign of real genius, or at least, not when it comes to comedy.
Its the Cambridge/gay/luvvie thing. He's like all the rest of those who have never grown out of being undergraduates. He's just turned it into a career rather than a social posture.
ReplyDeleteNever mind Bryan, when you hit 60, we'll all get together to stick verbal daggers into you!
Three shrewd observations. I think the eternal undergraduate thing explains why Fry and others always seem to be playing at what they do. Jeeves and Wooster was the best example. One never lost the sense of watching Fry and Laurie play at this. Compare that to Ian Carmichael and Denis Price who became the characters.
ReplyDeleteAll spot-on. I'd add that, in a sense, the Great Logorrhaeic is all the BBC has in the Lovable National Treasure line, plus he's incredibly prolific and says Yes to anything, so the Stephen Fry Weekend, Fry At 50 etc were inevitable. The much more interesting, much more talented Laurie would never lend himself to such a thing, nor would the BBC dream of thus 'honouring' him.
ReplyDeleteI get him. He's an oasis of intelligent British loveliness in a desert of stupid British televisual nastiness.
ReplyDeleteAdmittedly the novels aren't great but Paperweight is uniformly brilliant.
Never mind the luvvie love-in - at least he is an interesting guy with an opinion and the ability to express himself. How about Fry for Mayor of London? Far more sensible than Boris.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about the Ian Carmichael/Dennis Price Version of Jeeves and Wooster, Price was light years ahead of Fry as Jeeves. However, I must put in a word for Hugh Laurie as Wooster, He certainly portrayed the air head silly ass to perfection. To compare him with IC is not comparing like with like. IC was the best Lord Peter Wimsey as well!
ReplyDeleteOn a scale of 1 to 10, Fry's all right.
ReplyDeleteI didn't watch it. I always make a point of missing this type of programme. It isn't how I want my licence fee spent.
I'm not old enough to know who Ian Carmichael was but I see he is in The Royal with Sinbad and Wendy Craig so I wonder how good he is.
Oh yes, you are so spot on about Emma Thompson. It's that insufferable 'more feeling, knowing, emoting' bloody voice she puts on, along with the ridiculous actorly mannerisms: leave that stuff for the stage, my dear, when being interviewed for a documentary, try and talk like a member of the same society as the rest of us.
ReplyDeleteAs for Fry, he's fine in his own way, and can be amusing, intelligent and perceptive. But he is inflated to such a farcical level by the world of television and its hangers-on. He puts a (false) intellectual gloss on their received wisdom. The fawn at the feet of someone who essentially believes what they do but does it in a - to be like Fry himself - sesquipedalian fashion.
The same applies, amongst certain of the literati crowd, to Will Self.
Some odd thoughts about an odd man: First time I ever saw him was in Jeeves & Wooster. I tought he was fine, although I agree Laurie was far better. As the series went on, I thought both were less impressive. (Never saw the Carmichael/Price version but saw some still photos - Carmichael was over 40 when he did that and looked it.)
ReplyDeletePaperweight was fine as far as that type of collection goes, and if treated as a one-off. His political views are as tedious as they are the product of a shallow intellect in that regard. The "Look at me I'm gay/celibate schtick" palls pretty quickly as well, the former not being all that novel by the time he came of age and the latter falling into the category of "the less said the better" unless one wishes to write a dissertation on masturbation. Saying f*** on the special program fits right in with this - somebody else did it first (Cleese?) and with more panache. It was neither daring nor appropriate but it was attention-seeking. That said, like spongebob, I was impressed by the program about his search of his family tree. (It is the only one of that series I did see and I have no clue how I managed that feat.)
Sorry Ronin, it was Matt Lucas who graced the occasion with a f*** - I shld have rewritten that bit. However it wld have been no surprise if Fry had.
ReplyDeleteI too was impressed by the Who Do You Think You Are? - tho Fry came across as oddly snobbish and dismissive about anything to do with his father's side of the family. It wasn't till he got into the mother's family tree that it came to life.
Thanks, Nige! I dimly remembered that he sort of ignored one side but not which one. It left with me with that feeling as well. I thought the show turned out to be somewhat more revealing than intended, but never having talked to anyone about it, figured I was probably reading too much into it. Comedians are well-known for being frightfully insecure and Fry seems par for the course in that regard. I don't know why, but the other feeling that I came away from that program with was a reinforcement that he is quite class-conscious and does not consider himself a legitimate member of the class he either aspires to be in or thinks he is in.
ReplyDeleteStephen Fry and Matt Lucas together? If that's what Radio 4 is about, I demand its immediate closure.
ReplyDeleteAnd while I'm on about it, Bryan or Nige, are we regulars allowed to do requests? Could we possibly have a post tomorrow where I get chance to say how much I dislike Matt Lucas and Little Britain?
Yes, as someone who could listen to him drone on all day I found the programme startlingly rubbish (let's celebrate a man who is never lazy and unimaginative and always concerned about how authentic he is, in the laziest, least imaginative, most inauthentic way possible). I suppose they made it because he's the most popular BBC2-friendly celeb, and because it filled an evening and plugged various BBC2 products.
ReplyDeleteI thought Emma Thompson was sending herself up with the feather boa, no? I do suspect these Footlights people are best kept apart though.
There was a telling
ReplyDeleteAplogies for the cryptic first post, I did something stupid. This is what I was trying to say:
ReplyDeleteThere was a telling moment on the Fry show about his ancestors when he was pondering the fate of his English great grandfather who languished in the poor house. Fry imagined travelling back in time to reassure the poor unfortunate that his descendents would one day be university educated and affluent, that things were not, therefore, so bad. It was the most astonishingly egocentric thought, the more so because Fry appeared to be completely innocent of the fact. He really seemed to believe that historic suffering was somehow vindicated by his mere existence.
As an American who has seen Fry only in Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster, I can honestly say that I never found Fry all that talented. Laurie always seemed the far more talented of the pair and beyond a doubt the funnier. I did try to read one of Fry's books but after a couple of chapters I decided that life was too short to waste it on this much drivel and the book was never finished. Perhaps he is too British for an American to get? There must be more to getting celebrated at 50 than just writing awful books and knowing Rowan Atkinson.
ReplyDeleteFry is one of my favourite Brits. Like Simon, I could listen to him wittering on for hours. He's head and shoulders above most of the philistines on the box.
ReplyDeleteFry is OK-the problem is that the BBC
ReplyDeletehave decided he is a national treasure.
He's a massive egoist, like most celebrities. He's deeply insecure, like most celebrities. He's attention-seeking, like most celebrities.
ReplyDeleteDoes that about cover it? No, there's more.
He'll rail on against 'self-pity' and comes off as one of THE most self-pitying celebs I've ever listened to. "Poor me, I say 'yes' too often. Poor me, I'm SO nice I don't know what to do with myself. But I'm learning how to be a rude dolt. Aren't I wonderful?"
Really Stephen?
Really?
You think we're all THAT stupid do you?
Carry on then...