The Fry Chronicles

  Thirdly, look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. Does one really want to side with such apoplectic and bombastic bores? I should know, I often catch myself being one, and it isn't pretty. I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts.

  Against all that it might be said that the quarrel is not with harmless idolatry. The problem, some would argue, is not that everybody worships celebrity, but they want it for themselves. Online user-generated content and the rise of the talent show and reality TV have bred a generation for whom it is not enough to flick through fan magazines, they want their own shot at stardom. They want, moreover, to go straight to fame and fortune, short-circuiting tedious considerations like hard work and talent. Well, we all know how satisfying it is to recite the shortcomings and hollowness of others - especially those who have money and recognition where we have none. It is certainly more pleasurable than inspecting our own shortcomings. I dare say we do live in a cheap age, an age where the things that should have value are little prized and things that are empty of worth are too highly rated. But who on earth could think for a second that this is new to our race? Anyone familiar with Aristophanes, Martial, Catullus, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dryden, Johnson, Pope, Swift ... You get the point. It has always been the case, since humans could first record their thoughts, that the 'wrong people' have been seen to have arrived at the highest positions. The emperors, kings, aristocrats, ruling classes and gentry, the arrivistes, parvenus and nouveaux riches, the financiers, merchant princes and industrialists, the artists, designers, literati and cultural elite, the actors, sportsmen, television stars, pop singers and presenters, they have all been unfairly elevated to positions they do not deserve. 'In a just and properly ordered world,' the angry ones wail, 'I should be up there too, but I am too proud to say so, so I shall carp and snipe and rant with indignation and show my contempt for the whole boiling. But deep inside I want to be recognized. I just want to count.'

  I was like that all through my teenage years and early twenties. Desperate to be famous but very, very ready, if I didn't make it, to vent my scorn on those who did. I contend that people like me who burn for fame and recognition are much rarer than the prevailing view would have us believe. I take my brother Roger and his family as my touchstone for all that is sane, sound and decent. They are as modern and connected to the world as anyone else I know. I recall, and I seem to be able to picture it in pin-sharp high-def widescreen 3D detail, an evening at the pantomime in Norwich when I was seven and Roger was nine. Buttons made his entrance and asked if there were any boys and girls out there who would like to join him up on stage. Roger dropped down in his seat trying his hardest to look invisible. The idea of being up there in the lights in front of a staring audience horrified him. I meanwhile was leaping up and down thrusting my hand into the air desperate, absolutely desperate to be picked. Two boys, eighteen months apart in age, bred in the same conditions and by the same parents. There are many more Rogers in the world, praise be, than Stephens.

  Maybe the childish desire for attention I felt then is all of a piece with my childish desire for sweet things. The desire to be famous is infantile, and humanity has never lived in an age when infantilism was more sanctioned and encouraged than now. Infantile foods in the form of crisps, chips, sweet fizzy drinks and pappy burgers or hot dogs smothered in sugary sauce are considered mainstream nutrition for millions of adults. Intoxicating drinks disguised as milkshakes and soda pops exist for those whose taste buds haven't grown up enough to enjoy the taste of alcohol. As in food so in the wider culture. Anything astringent, savoury, sharp, complex, ambiguous or difficult is ignored in favour of the colourful, the sweet, the hollow and the simple. I know that fame to me, when I was a child, was much like candy-floss. It looked magical, it was huge and dramatic and attention-grabbing. It is tempting to write here and now that, like candy-floss, fame turned out to be little more than air on a stick and that the small part of it that has substance was cloying, sick-making and corrosive to me, but I shall keep such thoughts, if I truly have them, for later. I am, thus far in my story, not famous at all and I cannot yet tell what fame is like - only that it is a condition I long for.

  In fact, I think few people are really obsessed with being famous in the way that I was. Most recoil at the thought, squirming down in their seats like my brother at the very idea of public exposure. They might consider from time to time what fame would be like and conduct thought experiments in which they feature on a red carpet being lit by flashbulbs, but that is no more than the normal fantasy of opening the batting for England or volleying the championship point at Wimbledon. For the most part, most people are mostly for a quiet life out of the public eye and have a mostly sane understanding of how peculiar fame must be. They are sensible enough not to judge all celebrities as alike and civil enough not to despise people because they have committed the crime of being a pop singer, a golfer or a politician. Most people are tolerant, wise, kind and thoughtful. Most of the time. People like me eaten up with ambition, simmering with resentment, white-hot with neediness at one moment and sullen with frustration and disappointment the next, we are the ones who obsess about fame and status, and it gives us nothing but dissatisfaction, vexation and horrible doses of heavy angst.

  All this is embarrassing for me to admit. Those in my line do not own up to such vulgar, cheesy and undignified yearnings. It is all about the work. If your work happens, unlike insurance, accountancy or teaching, to bring celebrity in its train, or riches, then so be it. You aim for the game bird of accomplishment; fame and fortune just happen to be the feathers it flies with. Yeah, right. We know these worthy precepts, I echo and endorse them. But the needy child that hid within the tweedy man screamed to be fed and the needy child, as always, wanted what was instantly satisfying and instantly rewarding, no matter how shallow and devious that might make him. Shallow and devious is what I was (and probably always will be), and if you have not yet understood how profoundly shallow and how straightforwardly devious I am, then I cannot have been doing my job right.

  Work was coming in thick and fast. The musical, the play, the film script and a thick miscellany of writing and radio assignments to which we might come in a moment. There is no doubt that amongst magazine and newspaper editors, radio, film and TV producers, directors, commissioners and casting agents I was a coming man, a young shaver useful for all kinds of odds and ends. But I was not famous. A few invitations to film premieres and first nights began to trickle in, but I found that I could walk the red carpet entirely unmolested. I remember going to some event with Rowan Atkinson, the press night of a new play, I think. To hear his name shouted out by photographers and see the crowd of fans pressing up against the crash barriers caused the most intense excitement in me, combined with a sick flood of fury and resentment that no one, not one single person, recognized me or wanted my picture. Oh, Stephen. I have clicked on and selected that sentence, deleted it, restored it, deleted it and restored it again. A large part of me would rather not have you know that I am so futile, fatuous and feeble-minded, but an even larger part recognizes that this is our bargain. I cannot speak for others or presume to drag out their entrails for public inspection, but I can speak for (and against) myself. Maybe I was an advance guard for a new kind of Briton: fanatical about fame, addictive, superficial, gadget-obsessed and determinedly infantile. Maybe, to put a kinder construction on it, I was living proof that you could want to be famous and want to do the work, you could relish the red carpet and relish lucubrating into the early hours, cran
king out articles, scripts, sketches and scenarios with a genuine sense of pleasure and fulfilment.

  Commercials, Covent Garden, Compact Discs, Cappuccinos and Croissants

  On top of the major projects in film and television there tumbled in other requests for work of all kinds. Lo Hamilton at Noel Gay Artists fielded these and passed them on. I think I understood that I had the option to refuse, to turn down, to inquire further, but I cannot recall that I ever did. When I look back at this time it seems to be a paradise of variety without pressure and novelty without nerves. Everything was fantastically new, exciting, flattering and appealing.

  Sometimes together and sometimes apart, Hugh and I found ourselves inside the world of the commercial voiceover. Neither of us yet had the kind of vocal heft that afforded us the chance to do the really sexy part of the work, the endline - that final slogan which was most usually the province of either hard-smoking and-drinking fifty-year-olds like the legendary Bill Mitchell, whose vocal chords had the deep, authoritative resonance that carried the advertiser's message home, or of vocal magicians like Martin Jarvis, Ray Brooks, Enn Reitel and Michael Jayston, who were in such heavy demand that they carried little pagers clipped to their belts so that their agents could push them from job to job at the shortest notice. I remember David Jason, another very busy and talented voice artist, showing me how they worked. They did no more than beep, which was a signal to phone the agent, but I was hugely impressed. One day, I told myself, I would own such an object and I would treasure it always. Somewhere I have a drawer filled with at least a dozen old pagers in assorted stylings and colourways. None of them is treasured; they were barely used at all.

  At our level Hugh and I were required usually to do silly comedy characters for radio ads, a huge new booming industry that was taking advantage of the proliferation of independent radio stations that were popping up all over Britain throughout the early eighties as a result of 'second tranche' franchise contracts. It is very beguiling to look back at a period of time and imagine that one was happy then, but I really believe that we were. Life in the glass booth was simple but presented pleasing challenges. Often an engineer or producer would press the talk-back button and say something like, 'Yeah, that was two seconds over. Can you do it again, shaving off three seconds, but don't go any quicker.' That kind of apparently absurd request starts to make sense after a while and Hugh and I both took great pride in our ability to make good on them. An internal clock starts to build itself in the brain so that within a short time we were both able to say, 'That was bang on, wasn't it? Maybe half a second under?' or 'Damn, at least thirty-five, that one, we'll go again ...' and be proved right when the engineer played it back with a stopwatch. A trivial skill, the proud acquisition of which some might think a waste of an elite and expensive education, but I know, as I have said, that we were happy. How do I know? Well, we said so. We actually dared to say it.

  In those days the studios we found ourselves in most often were those of Angell Sound in Covent Garden, opposite the stage door of the Royal Opera House. Hugh and I would emerge from a session, blink in the bright sunshine of the day, say 'Shirt' and walk south-west along Floral Street, crossing James Street until we reached Paul Smith's. At that time this was the great designer's sole London presence. Perhaps he had a shop in his native Nottingham, but the Floral Street branch was certainly the only one in London. Like David Jason he is now a knight, but back then Paul Smith was just beginning to achieve a name as the designer of choice for men who were shortly to be dubbed 'yuppie'. His reputation, unlike that of the yuppie, has emerged unscathed from such a calamitous calumny. In the early to mid-eighties the first noises of what was to be the post-Big-Bang, newly enriched, newly confident professional classes were beginning to be heard as they clamoured for stylish socks, shirts, croissants, frothy coffee and - God help us all - conspicuous braces. I suppose Hugh and I fell into a subset of this new category.

  One morning as we emerged from Angell's I distinctly remember us having a conversation that went something like this:

  'Bloody hell, this is the life.'

  'We are so fucking lucky.'

  'Twenty minutes in a studio, not a minute more.'

  'No rope was older and no money ... moneyer.'

  'We should buy a shirt to celebrate.'

  'We should always buy a shirt to celebrate.'

  'And then maybe a CD or two.'

  'And then definitely a CD or two.'

  'Perhaps followed by a coffee and a croissant.'

  'Certainly followed by a coffee and a croissant.'

  'You know, I bet we will look back on these as the best days of our lives.'

  'When we're old, fat, bitter and unhappy alcoholics, we will remember when we would saunter into a voiceover studio, saunter out again and buy a shirt and a CD and go to a cafe and have a croissant and a cappuccino.'

  We have so far missed becoming alcoholics, and Hugh has never been fat. I am not sure if we are bitter, but we are certainly old-ish, and I think each of us would admit that the realization that we were unlikely to be as happy again was accurate. We really can look back and see those days as perfect. Intensely acute moments of love and parenthood and achievement might, and did, come to one or other of us at different times, but never again would we experience such a period of chronic content. We wanted nothing, we were slowly earning reputations and money without being crushed by celebrity and riches. Life was good. The most unusual aspect of it is that we knew it at the time. If you tell a schoolchild that they are currently experiencing what they will look back on as the best years of their lives, they will tell you, if they favour you with anything more than a black look, that is, that you are talking crap.

  London was extraordinarily exciting to me. The CDs, cappuccinos and croissants were the acme of sophistication and symbolic of the great social and political sea change that was coming. The process of gentrification that was already beginning to remodel the seedier parts of Islington and Fulham was being contemptuously described as 'croissantification' by those alarmed at the incoming tide. The Falklands Conflict had transformed Margaret Thatcher from the least popular prime minister in fifty years to the most popular since Churchill. A surge of patriotism and confidence was beginning to swell in the political seas. It would soon enough become a tsunami of conspicuous spending for the lucky ones who rode high on the wave and a deluge of debt and deprivation for the victims of 'the harsh realities of the marketplace', as Keith Joseph and the Friedmanites liked to call monetarism's collateral damage. I wish I could say I was more politically alert, angry or interested at this time. Smoky, boozy nights up in the bar of the Midland Hotel with Ben Elton had gone a long way towards pulling me out of my instinctive dread and dislike of the Labour party; the sheer vulgarity and graceless meanness of spirit of Margaret Thatcher and so many of her ministers made it very hard to feel any affection or admiration for her, but my eyes were too firmly fixed inwards towards myself and the opportunities coming my way to think much about anything else. If I colaphize myself too drastically for such an unremarkable and venial failing in one so young it would sound unconvincing. After the teenage years that I had undergone, I find it hard to blame myself for taking pleasure in the fruits that the world now showered down upon my head.

  Crystal Cube

  Aside from the individual assignments that had come my way - the musical, the film and the offer of a part in Forty Years On - Hugh and I wanted to continue writing and performing together. The spanking to our self-confidence administered by Ben's astounding prolificacy notwithstanding, we still hoped (and somewhere inside ourselves believed) that we might have a future in comedy. Accordingly, Richard Armitage sent us to a meeting at the BBC.

  In those days the house of Light Entertainment was divided into two departments, Comedy and Variety. Sitcoms and sketch shows flew under the Comedy flag and programmes like The Generation Game and The Paul Daniels Magic Show counted as Variety. The head of Light Entertainment was a jolly, red-faced ma
n who could easily be mistaken for a Butlin's Redcoat or the model for a beery husband in a McGill seaside postcard. His name was Jim Moir, which also happens to be Vic Reeves's real name, although at this time, somewhere in 1983, Vic Reeves had yet to make his mark. Hugh and I had first met the executive Jim Moir at the cricket weekend at Stebbing. He had said then, with the assured timing of a Blackpool front-of-curtain comic: 'Meet the wife, don't laugh.'

  Hugh and I were shown into his office. He sat us down on the sofa opposite his desk and asked if we had comedy plans. Only he wouldn't have put it as simply as that, he probably said something like: 'Strip naked and show me your cocks,' which would have been his way of saying: 'What would you like to talk about?' Jim routinely used colourful and perplexing metaphors of a quite staggeringly explicit nature. 'Let's jizz on the table, mix up our spunk and smear it all over us,' might be his way of asking, 'Shall we work together?' I had always assumed that he only spoke like that to men, but not so long ago Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders confirmed that he had been quite as eye-watering in his choice of language with them. Ben Elton went on to create, and Mel Smith to play, a fictional head of Light Entertainment based on Jim Moir called Jumbo Whiffy in the sitcom Filthy Rich & Catflap. I hope you will not get the wrong impression of Moir from my description of his language. People of his kind are easy to underestimate, but I never heard anyone who worked with him say a bad word about him. In the past forty years the BBC has had no more shrewd, capable, loyal, honourable and successful executive and certainly none with a more dazzling verbal imagination.

  Hugh and I emerged from our meeting stupefied but armed with a commission. John Kilby, who had directed The Cellar Tapes, would direct and produce the pilot show that we were now to write. We conceived a series that was to be called The Crystal Cube, a mock-serious magazine programme that for each edition would investigate some phenomenon or other: every week we would 'go through the crystal cube'. Hugh, Emma, Paul Shearer and I were to be the regulars and we would call upon a cast of semi-regular guests to play other parts.