YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen Fry

lines on the record: 110
first: 2022-12-05
most recent: 2022-12-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I agreed that it was nonsense. I had my head this idea that I would go up from Hamburg and Hanover up Schleswig-Holstein, which is the border with Denmark and go up into Denmark, and somehow in the north of Denmark I would sit on a rock in a thick white pullover with a pipe clenched between my teeth writing impossible poetry and teaching English to Danes and be forgotten, you know, and just live the rest of my life. Total fantasy. But no, Hughes said, come on, it's fine. Come home. We really want to see you. Everyone wants to. And so I drove back overnight to Amsterdam and my father had got a flight to Schiphol and we met in a hotel in Skipol and then got a flight, little aeroplane back to South End.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no. And this was 93 or so. There was no worldwide web as such. It was just beginning to happen. Tim Bernersley in Switzerland was beginning to develop the World Wide Web. But there were these things called commercial online servers like CompuServe and America Online rather than direct kind of internet connections. I had been connected those for some time and I'd taken my computer with me, I guess. So I was in a hotel in Hamburg. Then I've got a message from my friend Hugh, who said old fellow you must come home. Be in touch at least. And so I kind of sent him an email on this CompuServe thing.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Concur with me that there comes a moment where you just start saying to yourself, what's the point? It's a strange phrase because, you know, anyone could say it at any point, but there's some moments when you say it, it seems so truthful there is simply no point in anything around oneself. And that's how it seems. Anyway, so I got in the car and drove to the south coast to Dover, I think it was, or no, Folkeston, and got on a ferry to Zebruga in Belgium and then ended up in Bruges in Bruges like Colin Farrell and Brendan. And I then wandered a little further east into Holland and then into Germany and Hanover and Hamburg.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know I know I just want it out, really that's it, I just wherever I was I wanted to be somewhere else and if it was nowhere that would be that would be at first that was the most perfect place to be I just didn't see the as anybody listening who's had the misfortune and the terror of considering taking their life suicidal ideation as it is.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And really, what I first wanted to do was to take my life, and I did run the car engine in the lock up garage of the flat where I was in London and then realized it was a catalytic converter and that he wasn't really going to do much harm to me and that there was stuff of it that I was just coughing a bit.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, things like Blackadder and Jeeves and Worcester and Fry and Laurie had happened and my books had been selling. So I was in the public eye, I was well known. Anyway, one Saturday, there was a Saturday night, I guess the press night had been on Friday or something like that. So we then had a Saturday night. And then on Sunday there were the Sunday papers of which I saw some, and some of which were deeply unkind to me. And that did make a difference. I mean, I've said I didn't go just because I didn't like the reviews. It wasn't entirely that. That would have been a bit weak and certainly it was a weak thing to have done anyway. But it was a whole concatenation of something wrong in my head. I just suddenly saw myself as in the wrong place doing the wrong things and I wanted to get away from everything I need.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was never comfortable in the play, and I was beginning to feel lost and adrift and deeply unhappy, and I couldn't understand why. It wasn't that much of a disaster. I mean, they had good audiences and they applauded at the end. Some people said, yeah, I don't think it's his best play, but it wasn't an absolute catastrophe, shall we say?”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was pretty grim. I mean, we'd done previews of it in Guildford and maybe what Guildford and Richmond, I think, before coming into the West End, into the Nell Cowd Theatre as it is now, the Albury as it was, I think. And I was with Rick Mail, whom I loved, and sweet, funny man, and he was brilliant and charming as always. The rest of the cast were nice. It was written by Simon Gray, a British playwright, and he also directed it. And I was playing George Blake, the spy, the British spy who was sent to Wormwood Scrubs and then amazingly escaped.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“earring or some sort of jewelry or something external to the face but it's a very odd one so that makes parties even more difficult”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely heart and gut wrenching because you are convinced that people think you're looking down at them and you don't care about them. You haven't bothered to remember them because they're unimportant to you. And it really isn't that. I remember names all the time. Most people the other way around. The other way around. Yeah, I remember faces but not names. And I have a little card in my wallet that says prosopagnosia society. And I give it to people. I say, oh, God, I'm so sorry. But look, believe me. You know, like I said, I did an event for mind last night and there were some wonderful people in it. I was moderating it, the mental health charity. And I was thinking in the cab on the way home, I said, if I see anyone of those people, we had this wonderful conversation. The chances of my recognizing their faces are so low. It's awful. And, you know, teach yourself various things like the colour of what someone's wearing on a particular day, or if they have a...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've ever met a person or read about a person that I hate as much as I hate parties. That's a bit strong. Do you hate parties more than you hate Hitler? I said, well, that was just a sort of weird moment. And I do go to parties, but I don't. Standing up talking to people with a drink in my hand, it's just my idea of agony. Because I'll tell you another secret, which you may have uncovered, but it's an embarrassing one, is that I have a condition called prosopagnosia. It means face blindness. It means I will see you in the street two days' time and I will blank you because I won't recognize you, I'm afraid.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“15 years that you've done far too much research, haven't you? But yeah, and I mean, I look back at it and I think I cannot believe I was such an ass. But on the other hand, there are friendships I made that I don't regret and things I discovered and learned about myself and so on, but mostly, of course, it was a very, very wrong course, fortunately not a fatally wrong course either in literal terms or in terms of career. But I realized that I am a very, very quiet domestic soul. I don't like going out. I don't like parties. I said to my husband a couple of years ago, I said, I don't think...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This film I told you I'm learning Polish at the moment to be in a film. And I'm very excited and ambitious about the film, not because I want it to win awards and be a huge success, but because I really am, I haven't done anything quite like it for a very long time. And so that's a thrill. And otherwise I you know I suppose I just I don't need I don't need to connect to people in the way I used to I used to be slight, really shy enough to need cocaine to stay up at night and to go to parties. There was quite a few years of that”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I'm much calmer I think I'm more accepting of things. I feel less need to prove myself. It may not sound like that the way I've been rattling on. I, of course, have found a kind of permanent love, kind of, that's very ungracious, but I got married nearly eight years ago. And that has changed things to be married, especially talking about that child early on who knew he was gay and saw ahead of him only a life of exile and shame, the prospect that I could ever actually be married and live happily and for it to be of no big deal to anybody. I mean, there must be people, I suppose, in the world who think it's disgusting, but you don't often bump into them. That's made a big difference. And I'm ambitious only for if there's an exciting project.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This and this gives life to thee you know he was aware that there is there is a way that we communicate beyond language the actual sound in the throat of words being said vibrating the ear is one way for language to get into us the other very recent invention only 5000 years is is reading characters on a page and writing them but the other way is more is harder to understand isn't it but we do connect with people who are dead who are away from us whom we remember and their self is as real without a body As the self of someone who has a body. So in that sense, there is an immortality, but it's held together by communal memory and by means of communication like print. And if they die, then the selves of the past die as well, didn't they?”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What that self is, how it can be in any way quantified, it can't be removed from the body, as far as we know. I mean, obviously there are superstitions and people talk about astral projection and so on, but there's no evidence that it's ever been done. You can, in a metaphysical way, reach yourself into other people's selves even after you're dead. Shakespeare does that every day to different people reading his sonnets or Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon does, or whoever. I'm reached by David Bowie when I turn on Starman. I feel his self is connecting with me, his art, yes, his poetry, his vision, but also the self. He talks to you. That's what art does. And in that sense, you are immortal. Indeed, that was Shakespeare's obsession, so long as men can live and eyes can see so long lives this.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brings in a tray, and there's a cake on it. We'll look at each other and we'll know we each want that cake. We've projected into the other's mind. I mean, in the most simple way theory of mind shows us that.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Peugeot doesn't exist. It's a myth. You know, it has a symbol. It has people working for it. But there is no such thing as Persia. There's a Peugeot car, but that's not Peugeot. And so on. And similarly, there is us. Now, if I cut my toe off, I'm still Steven. I'm just Stephen. I'm missing a toe. If I cut my head off, I'm dead. So obviously, you know, I'm the remains of Stephen. But if I start cutting more and more bits, when do I stop being myself? It's such an extraordinary idea. We're aware of our own self. And unless we have particular problems on the neurodiversity scale, for example, we also fully understand other people's selves and that they have a self and that therefore they have their own will and their own desire and the chances are their appetites will be similar to ours. Not eaten for a day and someone”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At such a good point, I mean, we are, in that sense, we are a story, and the story is a mixture of different elements. And a story is a myth. It doesn't happen. It's a bit, I'm sure you've read the Noel Uval Harari, that wonderful chapter where he just sort of proves that...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we all live as if free one exists, and we all have to live as if we are accountable for our actions. Otherwise, society falls apart. But if deep down we know that really there is no free will. I mean, the most extreme examples are, in a sense, the easiest to see it. A psychopath is not just a murderer, but it's a murderer who is cunning and who plans coldly their killing. They choose to kill. So you may say they're the most evil kind. But no one on this earth has ever chosen to be a psychopath. It's a condition. It's like saying, oh, he's an asthmatic. We must lock him up. Well, you don't choose to be asthmatic. You don't choose to be psychopathic. The case of psychopathic, you're harming a lot of people and causing misery. So clearly we've got to find a way of removing them from the natural orbit of humanity. But, you know, it's...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someone like Samuel Beckett and the absurdists and just say there is no meaning to any of this. It's absurd. Life is absurd and meaningless. I know very well that in philosophy there are... Very, very few professional philosophers who believe in free will.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really is. I'm not a model of moral probity and rectitude of any kind, but I do have that loud voice and I've always had it. When my grandfather died, And this is very, and I first learned to play with myself. I was terrified that he was watching me because he died. And I thought, I can't do this because my granddaddy's watching me and that's just awful. And in a sense, there you have it in one image. That's what humanity's been cursed with since our birth. The Big Daddy in the sky is watching you and it's making you self conscious and you're holding back from your true nature because, oh, I can't do that in front of God, you know. And somehow we have to square that and give ourselves permission to be who we were born to be and allow ourselves to live the full lives that we feel that we're on a journey to, but accept also that we will feel that we let ourselves down and that we're guilty of this and guilty of that. It's very tempting to be more like, you know,”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you feel. It's right, and we all like that, but we don't pay much attention to that, and yet it's the most extraordinary thing about us.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eat and sleep and mate just like other animals, and sometimes very quite close to the other animals, if we, depending on what part of the world we live, but we can also see that we have these other things that animals don't. Who gave them to us? Where did they come from? What did they mean? And how do we live up to them? Are they a curse or a blessing? Still really Obsesses, particularly now, of course, because in the age of AI we are able to be gods ourselves. We are making sentient beings and we will have to decide whether like the Greek gods we give them fire or deny them fire and maybe they'll kill us. But will they have what we have this sense of I try to be good? I mean you try to be good, don't you?”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't thinking, oh God, I was a terrible Amazonian tree frog yesterday. I really let myself down. I was mean. I was unkind. I must try to be a better Amazonian tree frog. What we admire about animals is they spend a hundred percent of every day being themselves. And we as humans are fully aware that we don't. We are not fully ourselves. We lie, we hide behind, we pretend, we fail, and we judge ourselves. Now that peculiarity of humanity has tried, people have tried to explain it in different ways. Obviously, the genesis myth is that we ate a fruit. It gave us the knowledge of good and evil and the sense of shame of our physical selves, all those things that separate us from animals. Since we were cognitively conscious, have been aware that we're animals, because we can see that we defecate and eat.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I fall asleep at night and feel I've been a reasonably okay person that day? Is this when I have to apologise to next morning? Did I was I short and sharp with someone? Was I a bit mean? Was I lazy? Did I lie and because I wanted my own way there? And I'm not suggesting I'm a saint to them. I always manage it to, but I do have a very loud voice in my head. Philosophers call it a deontic or deentological voice, this sense of obligation that is a peculiarity, it seems, of our species. As far as we know, the image I always use because they look so cheerful, an Amazonian tree frog perched on a branch with its big grin”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“a certain set of ideas and so-called truths in order to be part of that community. But I can understand how... Looking at a wider sense of life and it's really about when you're falling asleep at night and this may just be me.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an interesting point, and of course I obviously understand that there are people who need to meet goals in order to pay debts and that there are certain amounts of money they have to have to pay for the heating and their mortgage and all the rest of it. And I'm obviously not suggesting that that's valueless because you need to keep a roof over your head and everything else. But in terms of one's own personal sense of fulfillment and self-worth and achievement, I'm more and more convinced that it comes from how you treat people and how they treat you back and how you try to be a better person. I know it sounds really silly. I'm not a religious figure at all, but I'm very interested in religions. And I can understand that in some cases religions help cement a sense of community. Where I don't like it is where it's exclusive, of course, where you have to buy in.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, like a tree when a tree's young you can bend it's a green stick as they called it. You can bend it and shape it and so on. But once it gets old, you know, and it starts getting that bark. And if you tried to bend it, it would snap. And we become a bit like that”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“his face, just being happy to have his friends around him. It's a simple thing, and yet it's the best thing, and we chase things that give us less time to see our friends. We chase work targets and we chase journeys and holidays and things with individuals and so on. And I think we grow away from it. I think the older you get the less you appreciate friendship, which is really sad. When you're in your 20s, you tend to do things as a group. You go on holidays as a group because you haven't yet got married and partnered off and paired off. So I don't know if you agree with me, but I do think maybe that one of the jobs of getting older, well, I'm convinced it when the jobs of getting older is not to become older.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A blow of a drug or something like that, and that couldn't be a more fake happiness. And there's the happiness of sitting around a table with friends that's beautiful, fleeting moments with friends and family where it's all working and people aren't shouting at each other and you can just look at each other. I was at a memorial service for a very dear friend, the composer, Leslie Brickas, you know, who wrote Feeling Good and Pure Imagination for Willy Wonka and Goldfinger and a lot of great songs. It was an amazing songwriter. And I remember I had this diary entry, which is just getting to know him when there was a party, I think it was his birthday, and it was full of people, some of whom super famous and extraordinary people, but I remember just catching sight of him and thinking he looked so like a Persian cat just looking from one friend to another with his huge smile on him.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Full and achieved life of friendship and elements of sacrifice and so on. But you know that there's a hope for it. But if you mislabel it and think that it's connected with money or cars or mortgages or jobs or status, you're never happy because of your status because of things you've achieved. Happiness comes from somewhere else and of course I have yet to meet anyone who can tell you. Where it comes from regularly, where it can be tapped like some resourced art. That's where you get your happiness. We know there's fake happiness from a”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We tend to set ourselves goals of if only I could live in that kind of a village in the south of England, quite near a station and nice little house, but not too expensive. And then you get it. And so, yeah, you live in the suburbs. Hooray. Maybe that car, that new one there, that Tesla or whatever, then I'll be happy. You don't literally say then I'll be happy, but there's a kind of sense of that's all I really want. And each of these goals is met, and it isn't it. There's the line of T.S. Eliot. That's not it. That's not it at all. And we go through life thinking, that's not it. That's not it at all. There is something in all of us, a whole need for connection and love and truth and a sense of something beautiful beyond. And we can, if you're religious, you call it heaven and if you're a humanist, you call it a...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suddenly the war's over. Every single day you were in a spitfire you were facing death, you were doing such amazing things, and now there's nothing. And Simeon, in a long play, of course it's nothing like being in the Air Force. It's of no importance to anybody except other people. But nonetheless, it does cause the similar kind of shakes in your body and the excitement. And then that's the end of the run. Stop. And it does explain, I think, a lot of the substance abusing the addictions and the kind of unhappinesses and breakdowns and short-term marriages and relationships that are also common in the acting world. I mean, it may be true that there is something good for mental health, but I don't think anybody would say. So it's a complicated story, really, isn't it?”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“if it's a long run. You're standing in the wings, you're talking to the stage management people like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'll see you after this scene and you go on. Doctors have done this. They've wired people up. Your heart rate is as high on that night as it would have been on the first night. It's just you've got used to it. The comparison, and it's not a comparison of quality or value, is with an RAF pilot. Every day they're flying up like that. And it's they love it. They just made for it. I mean, it's frightening and they hate to see their companions killed and so on. But the awful thing is when it stops.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“birth and our perparentage and environmental upbringing and yet he would rather have cut his arm off than go on stage and I would cut my arm off in order to go on stage and that's just something that was built in and that was when I was too young to be self-conscious to have if you like those kind of issues of self-worth and you know wanting to lose myself somewhere else it was just a young show offie I want to be up there that's you know you see a stage you want to be on it much of what you say about the mental health aspect is true but it is also the case and I'm sure you've sort of heard stories about this that even when you're in a very long running play when you're in the wings for the first night you know there is you are trembling you are white your heart rate is really up and and you step on stage and you do it but the weird thing is six months later”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the usual thing happened, buttons comes out and goes, Hello, boys and girls. Who'd like to come up on stage with me now and sing a song? My brother dived under the seat and made noises like a piece of dust so that no one would notice him, like most children. He was damned if he was going to get up and make an exhibition of himself in public. But I stood on my tiptoes with my arm up so high that I nearly split the membranes of my underarm, you know me, me. And we both had the same parents, we both had the same DNA, more or less, not identical, but not identical twins. But, I mean, really, we're pretty similar in terms of art.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's true. I mean, it is also the acknowledgement, the love or the sense of attention you get from an audience that it's not, I mean, of course, it's a kind of vanity, but it's not that you want to be praised exactly. It's just you want to experience that moment and keep experiencing it. It's not, oh, look, you must write marvelous things about me or come up after the show and tell me I'm a genius. That's all embarrassing. But the moment you're on stage and you feel that people are looking at you and not admiring you, Stephen, but that they are, you have won them over. They are following the story of the character you are and they are sucked up into it and you've made it. It's a wonderful feeling. But something even more primal than that because I can remember when I was very young, five maybe, and my brother was seven going to a pantomime in Norfolk.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I, thinking that either I was going to stay at Cambridge to be an academic, or maybe I was going to go to a drama school afterwards and join the Royal Shakespeare Society and hold spears and bellow speeches. And now there was this strange possibility of using comedy as a way of going forward and maybe not staying at Cambridge at all, but trying to, you know, tread the boards in an amusing way.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ideas, and then we built it up into three or four verses and choruses, and the song was finished. And then he picked up a piece of paper. We started to write a sketch. And Emma and Katie were just staring at us and said, what's happened? We didn't, you know, we barely didn't ask each other our names. We just immediately just fitted. I'm sliding my fingers into each other to give an example. I described it as like falling in love, but a platonic comedy love. We just seemed to gel straight away. It was most extraordinary. So from that moment on, we started writing stuff together for our show.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that went to Edinburgh and it won a prize. And Emma came to see it and brought someone along to watch it that she thought might enjoy. And I didn't remember this experience. But that person was Hugh Laurie, and he apparently came and watched the play and said hello briefly. Then at the end of my second year, I was approached by Emma, who said, I'm going to come around and introduce you to Hugh. There you have met him. And I said, No, I haven't. And she said, yes, you have. Anyway, she took me over to his college and knocked on the door and the door opened. He was sitting on bed with a guitar in his lap, and he said, Hello. And I said, hello, and his girlfriend was there making a cup of tea, and he said, I'm just writing a song. And he started to play a bit the verse of the song. And I said, Oh, it's fabulous. And I sat down next to him. We started to work on the lyrics of it. And I added some...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They never asked. But it is extraordinary how everything turned because, you know, in the first kind of week I met Emma Thompson, who was an undergraduate reading the same subject, English, and I then saw her in a play and I was just knocked out. I couldn't believe it. I had considered maybe I should do some acting at Cambridge. I started doing that and really enjoyed it, but did lots of other plays as well. And I wrote a play called Latin. It was a comedy.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't seem like my part. It doesn't seem normal. And while I was at Cambridge for the first year, I was on. I remember saying to one of my tutors or supervisors, I said, oh, look at the date. I said, I'm no longer on probation. And he said, you weren't on probation, thinking I meant some sort of academic probation, you know, that I hadn't done good enough essays and that I was being given a warning that I better work harder. He said, you're not on probation. I said, well, actually, I told him. He said, what the hell? Get out. Why didn't you tell us? I said, well, why didn't you ask me?”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or abstinence and sorrow, and just there was no possible way the world would be open and free for me. It would just be the best I could do after a disastrous childhood, I decided in prison, was now concentrate on getting into Cambridge, become an academic, forget anything about the world because the world wasn't for me. And that would be enough. And it would also repay my parents for the extraordinary stress and distress I'd given them. And so when I was put on probation finally at the end of the prison thing, having served quite a bit in Ramand, I was just put on two years probation, went home, told my parents I would look after myself entirely, got jobs, got myself a moped, went into Norwich, did a course, and amazingly got a scholarship to Cambridge, Ulster. Yeah. So that... Everything.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the average person, you know, who was born queer, had a miserable outcome. It was illegal. And the police would treat you dreadfully and newspaper articles. And so I saw ahead of me a life of shame and secrecy.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like hot lead leaking in the stomach whenever I contemplated my sexuality, this feeling. Because I read and read and read around it. You know, you go to a library in those days, of course, there was no world wide web, so you used what was known as the bibliography at the back of a book, which would recommend other books that were sources for that book. And so you would build a web of connections. So I read a biography of Oscar Wilde, and that led me to biographies of other figures in his circle and other figures later and so on. And I saw there was this extraordinary tradition of literary artistic people who were queer, as we'd say now. And of course, the ones I was reading about were born mostly into an elite part of the society that allowed them to go and live in North Africa or Italy or Greece or somewhere where it wasn't quite so dark and oppressive.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The psychiatrist had written bipolar question mark which I knew nothing about at the time. That was when I was 15. So there was clearly some mental, they recognized there was a mental kink, if you like. A hundred years earlier it would have been called a moral kink, basically. They're just saying he's a bad lot, you know. But we were on our way to being more understanding about children's behavior. But yeah, it's that whole mixture of my love of literature and stories and wanting to be involved in the world of ideas desperately to learn more and to understand more and to share ideas. A cheap wish, watching Parkinson every Saturday night to be famous, but not sure how that could happen. It seemed absurd. And a deep, deep, like a...”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's exactly right. And my post did send me to a psychiatrist when I was 14, 15. He was oddly enough a member of parliament and a junior health minister as well as a psychiatrist. So a very grand Harley Street office, you know, with one of those enormous mont blanc fountain pens the size of a small submarine with which it slowly writes things down. And he was slightly annoyed my parents weren't in the diplomatic service because apparently the way I behaved and the things I did were very typical of people from unsettled families and constantly moving and so on. But he prescribed me something. And later I found out when I was doing a documentary about mental health and I went all the way back to my school and spoke to my old schoolmaster. He had a copy of a letter from that psychiatrist in which”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I stayed in the hotel in Swindon, and that's when I got back to my room, having been shopping. There were a couple of men in the room, which I thought was rather weird, and being used to hotels by this time, I assumed they were like cleaning or maintenance people. I said, no, it's all right. Don't need anything. Then said my name, only not my name, the name that was the name of the fellow whose credit cards I had stolen. Let's say his name was Smith. So they said Mr. Smith. And I went, yes. And they said, Wiltshire CID held up there. Suddenly I realized the jig was up. I was sent to prison on Remand, I was sent to a young person's institution on Remand while they waited. There were seven counties, I think, that had paperwork that I'd traveled in with these cards that had to be caught up with.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was aware because my father had once lost his Berkeley card that it was the bank that paid, not the poor fellow whose cards I'd stolen. So I didn't feel guilty in that rather pathetic way we do when we try and square our dishonesty. Eventually I ended up in Swindon of all unlikely towns. I think I was going to meet a school friend and the idea we were going to go to the Reading Festival.”
2022-12-05 · The Diary of a CEO · Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT