Stephen Fry interview
by John Frame jvframe@ozemail.com.au
(Written 19th
February 2001)
On 7th
February 2001 John Frame (Queer
Radio on 4ZZZfm, Brisbane, Australia) chatted with acclaimed British actor,
author and narrator Stephen Fry - who was snuggled up with his computer on a
drizzly winter's night in London.
Stephen hosted the
BAFTA (
This is a significantly
abridged version of the complete interview which was played in 4 sessions
on Queer Radio on 4ZZZ fm102.1 at
- Altruistic morality:
JF: Many of the short
pieces in your collection Paperweight are articles you've written for
newspapers etc. A lot of them have to do with altruistic morality.
SF: I think that's right. I mean, that
it always sounds rather heavy to call oneself a moralist, but I think most
people are moralists in the sense that we celebrate when we hear something, or
we read something, which seems to us to be on the side of the angels. It's as
simple as that really. There's an extraordinary act of arrogance about being a
writer of any kind - it's a kind of arrogance and it's a kind of modesty,
paradoxically as well. It's the belief you have to have in order to be a writer
of any kind, whether of good journalism or fiction, in that your experience is
that of others too - it's not unique to you. And that however strange it might
be - if you've felt it, then others must have felt it.
I think that's what I tried
to do when I was a journalist - to assume that I wasn't a lone voice in just
believing small things. What seem to be small things are actually the most
important in people's lives. You can talk about left and right in politics. You
can talk about justice and what the Victorians used to spell in great capital
letters:- words like VIRTUE, MERCY and JUSTICE - but actually it's the
apparently small things, like kindness, that really matter in the world.
There's a wonderful story
that I always treasure of a young undergraduate who gets elected to a junior
fellowship of an Oxbridge college at the turn of the last century: - As he
arrives at the seniors' common room, there's an ancient old Don who says "Welcome, welcome young man" he says
"A word of advice - Don't try to be
clever, we're all clever here - only try to be kind, a little kind."
I think that's a marvelous motto. It sounds like a still small voice next to
all the great noisy words like justice and virtue and decency and morality and
so on, but it's actually kindness, I think, that most moves us - and is most
needed. I think that in Paperweight
I get most enraged by unkindness and most in favour of things that were kind.
- Youthful sexuality and older
activists:
JF: In your autobiography, Moab
Is My Washpot, you openly and honestly talk about your experience as a
quite sexually active young man. The reader is confident that you have lived
these experiences and feelings, because you don't hold anything back.
SF: That's right - I try not to. One
journalist, when it came out, talked about it being confessional - and I said "Yes
it is in many ways" and he then talked about all the sexual parts and
I said "No those are not confessional, to use the word
"confessional" about those is to imply that there's something one
wants to get off their chest because they feel guilty about it. It's
confessional in other things that I felt guilty about - being a liar and a
thief and a cheat - I'm confessing to those. As for my sexual growth and
activity - they're things I felt guilty about at the time, but I now do not in
the least feel guilty about."
The sexual nature of the
autobiography is something in which I wanted to try to recreate the pain and unsureness
and guilt and the overpowering nature of love that I felt at the time, and the
whole adolescent "schmeer". On the other hand I also wanted to make
it clear that the very act of being as candid about it as possible is a way of
showing that one is absolutely at ease with who one is now - but that one
recognises the fight one went through. In a sense I'm writing back to myself -
when I was a fifteen year old - trying to look at that poor tortured individual
and, indeed, for other fifteen year olds who happen to read it and still be
feeling tortured.
I mean life is easier, in a
sense, for people now. There's the internet; there are things like your radio
station and television programs and magazines aplenty for young people growing
up gay, which were just simply not available when I was fifteen. But there was
a library, and if you were an intelligent reader you could find out all kinds
of things through autobiographies: by connecting bibliographies - picking up
sort of a hint of something and reading another - and getting a sense that you
weren't alone. But almost everybody that you connected with was a dead English
"nance" who'd gone off to live in
But fortunately, some of
those just a few years older than me were brave enough to be part of that
generation of Stonewall in
I often like to say "Well
I remember being born and slipping out of my mother and looking back up and saying
"Well that's the last time I'm ever going up one of those!""
The pleasure and pride that
one can take in being gay I think comes out of that era of people who responded
to the whole vibration of the age in the sixties and early seventies, when
other barriers were being broken. I just hope that your younger listeners, if
they see an older gay person in a bar, instead of thinking "Oh he's too
old for me, I don't like him" - that they'll just pat him on the back
and thank him for helping make the world a better place.
- British Eccentricity:
Hear this section as a 1.4mb, 48kps mono mp3
JF: You have a broad
appreciation of music from Elvis Costello to the classics, but the 60's group
The Bonzo Dog Band particularly impressed you. Why?
SF: I think it's just that I wasn't a
cool "rocker". I was around at the time when Pink Floyd and what was
called "progressive rock" were the really big things at school, and
they were just a bit heavy and overblown for my taste. I loved the Bonzos
because of their wit. They were very, very funny but they were musically very
good - incredibly eclectic in all kinds of styles from jazz to fantastic
parodies of all sorts of music.
Vivian Stanshall had this
surreal almost dada-ist sense of humour - quite extraordinary - which was a
huge influence on me and a marvelous voice that was like rich gravy pouring out
of a jug. If you could embody the sound of old wireless valves from the 1940's, glowing
orange - with a dusty smell in a Bakelite wireless, with a sunburst on the
front of the speaker and it takes three minutes to warm up - and you get a very
clear "English" voice coming out of it - it was just marvelous to
have such surreal and extraordinary humour coming out of that totally British
sound.
It was that mixture that
led to Monty Python - a huge influence on them. In fact Neil Innes, the other
main member of the Bonzos, wrote most of their music (what Eric Idle didn’t
write).
It was a very formative
thing, the fact that you could be quirky and surreal and eccentric and bizarre
within the cloak of being incredibly English. It's part of the English thing,
and Australians share it too, that if you're wearing punk clothes and you fart,
it isn't funny or interesting - but if you're wearing a tweed suit and you
fart, it's somehow funny.
That's a very typical thing
about
- BAFTA & partner:
JF: Over the last couple of
years it's been refreshing to see recipients at Award ceremonies acknowledge their
same sex partners. You're hosting the
SF: He certainly will, yes, absolutely.
He comes with me just about everywhere and the press are actually great about
it. They know he's a shy chap and doesn't want to be plastered all over the
newspapers, but on the other hand it's not as if we're hiding or ashamed of
anything. It's a difficult balance to walk in terms of the public perception of
these things. It's the same for a husband or wife of a famous person. On the
one hand, you don't want to look like you're camera greedy yourself, and you
might be a shy person and you prefer not to be photographed - but that's not
saying you're ashamed of the person you're with or that they're ashamed of you.
You just have to hope that
the Paparazzi are aware of that, and fortunately I'm on really reasonable terms
with the actual photographers. You get to know the major ones and so my partner
tends to hang back when we arrive at a premiere or something, and the
photographers leap forward. There are plenty of photographs of us together as
well - but they respect the fact that he doesn't want to be like, say David
Furnish, who is much more professionally connected with Elton John. My partner
is not in show business and is rather shy of all that sort of stuff.
- Family proud?:
JF: Your sister is your
agent, but your family - your parents especially - have stood by you. They must
be really proud of how you've turned out.
SF: Of course they say that they're
proud of some things I do, but I think what's nice is that they're most proud
of the fact that I'm happy, that I'm content and that they can think of me as a
good person. It's not just simply because I'm "famous" or have
"succeeded". That, in itself, is not enough to make someone genuinely
proud of someone else. I could have written books, or come out with opinions,
or lived in a way that they thought was not worthy of me.
I think what they're proud
of is much more the "who" I am, than what I am, and I think that
would be true of any parent actually. But that's a testament to them - they are
extraordinary people themselves.
- Value of acceptance as openly gay:
JF: You're one of several publicly
cherished, proudly gay British celebrities, such as Sir Ian McKellen. Do you in
turn cherish that public acceptance?
SF: Yes, there's no doubt. As I wrote in
my autobiography, it's a strange thing, adolescence and I think it's a thing
that lingers through our whole lives. Most of us have a part that yearns to
belong to the tribe, and another part that yearns to be separate and distinct
and individual. I think that's a thing that's particularly true of gay people,
that on the one hand we want to be accepted and on the other we relish and
celebrate our difference - and they can often tug us in two different
directions.
But I think that to deny
one's need to feel accepted would be absurd, just as to deny one's need to feel
different and part of a special group would be absurd.
Yes, it gives me enormous
pleasure to know that everyone who says hello to me in the street in
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