An upbringing that might under different circumstances have been used for a complex secret betrayal of my tribe became instead a simple public mockery of it in Latin!, my first piece of proper writing, followed by Cambridge Footlights sketches and, in the outside world, Blackadder, Fry and Laurie and so on. Like the satire of the 1930s Berlin cabarets that, as Peter Cook observed, ‘did so very much to prevent the rise of Adolph Hitler’, the satire in A Bit of Fry and Laurie such as it was – privatization, obsession with the free market and so forth – had the force and effectiveness of a kitten armed with a rubber bayonet, but we never expected anything else. We probably didn’t imagine, however, that Old Etonians would still be ruling the country a quarter of a century later. Or indeed that they would be ruling the American TV and movie box office in the form of Damian Lewis, Dominic West, Tom Hiddleston, Eddie Redmayne and – ahem – m’colleague Hugh himself.
Male writers in Britain between the wars, as Martin Green brilliantly observed in Children of the Sun, could be divided into two classes: those that went to Eton and wished they hadn’t, like George Orwell, and those that hadn’t and wished they had, like Evelyn Waugh. I certainly cannot convincingly deny that I fall into the second category. The great advantage of an Oxbridge education is not that some mafia pushes you up the ladder as soon as you leave, nor is it in the education and living standards that you enjoy at either university: the real advantage is that you never have to deal with the fact that you didn’t go there. Many genuinely never wanted to, many brush it all off with a ‘Yeah, I could have gone, but the course at Warwick was so much better’, others simmer in rage at the number of us in comedy, television, the law and all the other establishment trades. As would I, had I not got in. So it is with Eton. It would have been nice to have gone there, but on the other hand I would probably have been expelled even earlier, and who knows what criminal abominations I would have committed with an OE tie and that spy-like deceitful manner?
Where were we? Travelling with my parents in a silent journey from Pucklechurch Prison back home to Norfolk.
The twelve months between 1976 and 1977 followed. My first ever year of self-control. Possibly my first and only year of self-control. Every day I worked on the one-year course of A levels that I had managed to persuade Norwich City College to allow me to sit for. Aside from the syllabus, I read every Shakespeare play, writing synopses and notes on each character and scene. I devoured Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, Dryden, Pope and all the literary giants that I supposed I would have to be expert in before Cambridge would even look at me. I read Ulysses for the first time, with the help of a reading companion written by Anthony Burgess. I worked part-time in a department store in Norwich. I didn’t steal or transgress. I was, it must be said, quite extraordinarily focused, sober, clean and concentrated.
Fortune favoured me, and I won a scholarship to Queens’ College to read English Literature. If you have read The Fry Chronicles, you shouldn’t be here, you should still be descaling the rabbit or tread-milling in the gym to the varied stylings of Jack and Meg White. You already know all of this, so I shall steam through for the others, and you’ll find out where to pick up from where I last left off.
I performed in lots of plays when I got to Cambridge. I fell in love with and shared rooms with a brilliant classicist and chess player (and more importantly wonderful person) called Kim, as in Philby. I produced articles for university magazines. I wrote the aforementioned play Latin! or Tobacco and Boys, which was performed at Cambridge and then taken to the Edinburgh Festival. This led to my meeting a tall fellow with a red flush to each cheek and a rather endearing way of saying ‘Hullo!’ He was James Hugh Calum Laurie, a name which can be convincingly expressed sixteen ways.
‘Hi, I’m Calum Laurie Hugh James.’
‘Laurie James Hugh Calum, at your service.’
‘James Laurie Calum Hugh, how may I help?’
Et cetera. So many permutations, but he chose to call himself Hugh Laurie, which is how the little world of Cambridge then knew him and how the wider world of the … er … wider world now knows him.
Together with friends Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer and Penny Dwyer, we put on a show in our last year. It won a new award called the Perrier Prize, which resulted in us going to perform our show in London, then Australia, before coming back to record it for the BBC.
This is the linear bit and dull even if you haven’t read it before. Kim and I shared a flat in Chelsea, while Hugh, Emma, Paul and I started to do a show for Granada Television in Manchester. We were, as it were, boy-banded together with Ben Elton, Siobhan Redmond and Robbie Coltrane to create a new sketch comedy troupe. The resultant show, Alfresco, was not much of a success, but we liked each other’s company, and new opportunities arose.
Kim and I drifted apart, but are still the warmest and best of friends. My fifteen years of so-called ‘celibacy’ began. Work started to come in the form of newspaper and magazine articles, a West End play, a stage run of Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On, and then Blackadder II.
Noel Gay’s musical comedy Me and My Girl came next. I worked on the ‘book’, in other words the story, dialogue and some of the lyrics. ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’ was a charming number from Noel Gay’s back catalogue, and the director Mike Ockrent and I managed to make it a suitable opener for the second half of the show. The verse
He’s been roasting niggers
Out in Timbuktu
Now he’s coming back
To do the same to you
needed a little tweak, one could not but feel.* With pulsating lyrical talent, Gilbertian wit and astounding geographical, agrarian and botanical understanding the verse now became, under my magical weaving fingers,
He’s been roasting peanuts
Out in Timbuktu
Now he’s coming back
To do the same to you
Nobody seemed to notice. No letters from outraged Malians denying that they had ever roasted a single peanut, not even in fun. No death threats from the guild of professional peanut roasters of Atlanta, Georgia. But the show was a success in the West End and then on Broadway. It made me money. I went mad buying classic cars, a country house, all kinds of things.
I filled every day with writing: book reviews for the now deceased Listener magazine, general articles for magazines like Arena and radio pieces for any number of programmes hosted by Ned Sherrin.
I became friends with Douglas Adams and began a lifelong love affair with all things to do with computing and the digital world.
In 1986, sharing a house with Hugh and others, just having finished recording the Blackadder II series, I was offered by an actor, who for obvious reasons shall remain nameless, a line of the illegal stimulant cocaine.
Right, all those who feel they absorbed Moab is My Washpot and The Fry Chronicles can come back in now. You will know from the latter that I seemed to have been born with a propensity to become addicted to things beginning with c. Sugar (C12 H22 O11) – in the form of Candy, Confectionery and Chocolates – Cigarettes, Credit Cards (other people’s to begin with), Comedy, Cambridge, Classic Cars, Clubs and so on.
But Cocaine. Oh dear. This has to be played delicately. If I go on about it too much it will sound like repellent braggadocio: ‘Wow, what a wild crazy-head this guy Steve-o is. Taking blow like a crazy rock star. Cool.’
If I drown myself in pity it’s no better: ‘I was in the grip of a disease, and the name of that disease was addiction.’ There’s something po-faced, self-pitying and sanctimonious about that, true interpretation as many would insist that it is.
We have heard it all before. In short-form magazine articles, in long tearful confessionals. It is yesterday’s news. Kind of. But it was fifteen years of my life, so it would be wrong of me at least not to – as it were – give you a sniff of the coke years.
Moral or Medical?
The Line-Up
Buckingham Palace
Windsor Castle
Sandringham Hous
e
Clarence House
The House of Lords
The House of Commons
The Ritz
The Savoy
Claridge’s
The Dorchester
The Berkeley
The Connaught
Grosvenor House
White’s Club
Brooks’s Club
Boodle’s Club
The Carlton Club
The United Oxford and Cambridge Club
The East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools Club
The Naval and Military Club
The Reform Club
The Travellers Club
The Army and Navy Club
The Naval and Military Club
The RAC Club
The RAF Club
The Beefsteak Club
The Garrick Club
The Savile Club
The Arts Club
The Chelsea Arts Club
The Savage Club
Soho House
The Groucho Club
BBC Television Centre
Fortnum & Mason
ITV HQ
The London Studios/LWT
Shepperton Studios
Pinewood Studios
Elstree Studios
20th Century Fox
Daily Telegraph offices
The Times offices
Spectator offices
Listener offices
Tatler – Vogue House
Vanity Fair – Vogue House
I take this opportunity to apologize unreservedly to the owners, managers or representatives of the noble and ignoble premises above and to the hundreds of private homes, offices, car dashboards, tables, mantelpieces and available polished surfaces that could so easily have been added to this list of shame. You may wish to have me struck off, banned, blackballed or in any other way punished for past crimes; surely now is the time to reach for the phone, the police or the club secretary. There is no getting away from it. I am confessing to having broken the law and consumed, in public places, Class A sanctioned drugs. I have brought, you might say, gorgeous palaces, noble properties and elegant honest establishments into squalid disrepute.
That was then, this is now, yet some of you will be reading this in horror, not because you are easily shocked, but because you thought better of me than this. You might have children who will read of my pathetic exploits and you fear that they will take them as permission or encouragement to imitate the chopping-out of that long line of cocaine that stretched from 1986 to 2001. Oh Stephen, how could you? Such weakness, such feeble-mindedness, such self-indulgence. Such an insult to the efficient and admirable brain with which nature graced you and the warm and loving home in which your parents brought you up with such care.
This is where it all gets damnably difficult. We come to choosing between what we might call the addiction approach and the personal responsibility approach. There are those, there will always be those, who simply do not buy this addiction concept. Most especially they repudiate the premise that addiction is a disease, one that grips you as permanently and assuredly as any chronic affliction such as diabetes or asthma. They only see weakness, lack of grit, absence of will-power and feeble, self-justifying excuses. They hear, most especially, figures in the public eye talking of ‘pressure’ and ‘stress’ and they want to puke up. Here are rich, overpaid, over-praised, over-pampered, overindulged ‘celebrities’ who scrabble and snuffle and snort like rootling truffle pigs at the first bump of naughty powder they are offered and then, after years of careless abuse, when their septum finally surrenders, or their mind turns so paranoid on them that they lose their only true friends, they bleat, ‘But I’ve got a disease! I’m an addictive personality! Help!’
I’m painting it as blackly as I can, yet I know some of you will see the foregoing as the correct, or at least as a convincing, analysis. Addicts are looked at with the same wrinkled-nosed disgust that is directed at the morbidly obese waddling through Target and Walmart stores in the Midwest states of America. Those poor clams can at least claim indigence and ignorance as the root cause of their addiction to the high-fructose corn syrup, ice cream and corn dogs that are slowly killing them. Does a rock star, City whizz-kid, actor, journalistic feature writer, best-selling novelist or comedian have the same excuse?
In the opposite corner there is the straightforward reverse of this pitiless verdict. It argues that addiction is indeed a condition, often inherited or congenital, and that the only way to defeat it even if it is not a ‘real’ disease is to treat it as if it is.
I can quite see how one view speaks to the contempt, envy, resentment, scorn and impatience many in the modern world have for what is so revoltingly called and yet so revoltingly is ‘celeb culture’. A spoiled minority, to which I find myself belonging willy-nilly,* seem to be encouraged to believe their views on everything from politics, art, religion and society are more valid than that of everyman or -woman. Oh how we oh so modestly and smilingly lord it over the rest of society: unto us is given more than we need by way of freebies, attention and opportunity, while ordinary, real people struggle with the daily round, unattended to, unheard, bulldozered or at least elbowed aside by a brutish, shallow culture which values fame even above money.
I have been fairly well known in my own country for a quarter of a century, and beyond, in Russia, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, for perhaps fifteen. My books have been translated into dozens of languages, but mostly I find when wandering in Eastern Europe or South America that I am taken for a strangely morphed compound of Jeremy Clarkson and James May from BBC Television’s Top Gear. Something to do with being a tall, fleshy Englishman with odd hair who rings a faint bell in the eye of the average Bulgarian or Bolivian, if bells can be rung in eyes, that is.
I remember a marvellous line of Anthony Burgess’s when he reviewed, in, I think, the Observer, William Goldman’s peerless Adventures in the Screen Trade. Burgess used the phrase of film stars: ‘those irrelevantly endowed with adventitious photogeneity’. Or it may perhaps have been ‘those adventitiously endowed with irrelevant photogeneity’. It so happened that I got to know William Goldman well in the early to mid-1990s when John Cleese, in a breathtaking act of generosity, chartered a boat for about thirty to go up the Nile. All we guests had to do was turn up at the Cleesery in London, and the rest was taken care of: carriage to the airport, flights, laundry, food, sight-seeing, informative evening lectures – everything was looked after for us on the floating Claridge’s that glided up from Cairo to the Aswan Dam.
One afternoon comes back very clearly to me. We were shading ourselves in the shadow of an ancient pylon in Luxor while our tour guide spoke of hieroglyphs and higher things. I asked Bill a few questions that I had been too shy to previously. He was hero enough for having written Adventures in the Screen Trade and earlier The Season, a still perfectly relevant and never less than insanely readable summation of one year in the life of Broadway. But Goldman was the screenwriter who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man and The Princess Bride and was, even then, chewing over whether he would accept the offer from Rob Reiner and Castle Rock to adapt Stephen King’s Misery.
Unforgivably gauche as it seems, I found my mouth forming the shy sentence: ‘So, er, what’s Robert Redford really like?’
‘Well,’ said Bill, ‘tell me what you would be like if for twenty-five years you had never heard the word “no”.’
Which is as good an answer as could be given. It is far from necessary and sufficient not to have heard the word ‘no’ for decades to become a brat, or spoiled or impossible to deal with, but it goes a long way to explaining some of the more painful characteristics of those who are called stars.
It’s rather like the argument used to defend those brought up in poverty and abuse, however. It fails to explain those many who, under the same intolerable, horrific circumstances, do not become members of gangs or crack-smoking thugs who coul
d remorselessly beat an old man to death for asking them to keep the noise down. There are those who have endured childhoods we can’t even imagine who go on to university and lives of fulfilment, kindness and familial bliss. Similarly there are long-established stars, Tom Hanks to pull a random name out of the Starry Sorting Hat, who are as kind, self-deprecating, professional, unspoiled and modest as it is possible to be.
So we return to drugs. How can I explain the extraordinary waste of time and money that went into my fifteen-year habit? Tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as many hours, sniffing, snorting and tooting away time that could have been employed in writing, performing, thinking, exercising, living. I can’t begin to explain it, but I can at least attempt to describe it.