Paperweight Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  Also by Stephen Fry

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Section One: Radio

  Donald Trefusis

  Rosina, Lady Madding

  Trefusis’s Christmas Quiz

  Jeremy Creep

  Trefusis Overdresses

  Sidney Gross

  Trefusis on Education

  Trefusis and Redatt

  Sir John Raving: Cricket & Golf

  Trefusis on Exams

  Trefusis is Unwell

  Trefusis on Boredom

  Trefusis on Hating Oxford

  Trefusis on Old Age

  Trefusis’s Obituary

  Trefusis Nibbles

  Trefusis and Rosina

  Trefusis Accepts an Award

  Trefusis and the Monocled Mutineer

  Trefusis Blasphemes

  Trefusis on Any Questions

  Trefusis Goes North

  Lady Madding Again

  Trefusis’s Postcard From America

  Postcard Number Two

  Postcard Number Three

  Postcard Number Four

  Section Two: Reviews & Oddments

  The Tatler and Sex

  Books Do Furnish A Room

  The Annotated Father Brown

  Arena

  The Book and the Brotherhood

  A Television Review

  Adolf Forster

  Brand X

  Don’t Knock Masturbation

  Cricket, Lovely Cricket …

  Bernard Levin

  The Satire Boo

  Child of Change

  Agony Cousin

  Lord’s: The Great Lie

  The World Service

  Section Three: The Listener

  Naked Children

  The Family Curse

  A Glimpse of The Future

  Friends of Dorothy

  Thatcher on TV

  Sock Fury

  Wimbledon Horror

  Saying Fuck

  Worse – By Design

  Christ

  Bikes, Leather and After Shave

  Your and Your Toffee

  Christmas Cheer

  Predictions for the Year 1989

  The Talker in The Listener

  Ad Break

  Absolutely Nothing At All

  The Young

  Me & A Stapler Of My Own

  Give Us Back Our Obfuscation

  Compliant Complaint

  How I Wrote This Article

  Tear Him for his Bad Verses

  The Adventure of the Laughing Jarvey

  Section Four: The Telegraph

  Extra Sensory Deception

  This Sporting Life

  A Question of Attribution

  Carefree Panty-Shields and Intimate Wipes

  The Stuff of Dreams

  Answers to The Stuff of Dreams

  Piles

  A Friendly Voice in the Polo Lounge

  Drawing up a Hate List

  Blithe & Bonny & Good & Gay

  God Bless Worcestershire

  Back on the Road

  Zoo Time

  Trefusis Returns!

  A Bang on the Head

  Dear Sid

  As Mad As Mad Can Be

  The Appearance of Reality

  What Are We Fighting For?

  Making the Right Moves

  Licked By the Mother Tongue

  Let the People Speak

  Playing the Political Game

  My Leonardo

  A Chatterer Chatters

  Game Show Heaven

  A Drug on the Market

  The Moustaches From Hell

  She Was Only the President’s Daughter

  The Sin of the Wheel

  Patriot Missive

  Oops

  Comic Belief

  The C Word

  Don’t Thank Your Lucky Stars

  Good Ole Country Boys

  Grammar’s Footsteps

  Careering All Over the Place

  Tolerance to Disease

  A Strange Man

  Fun With Dolphins

  My Sainted Aunt

  A Simple Backwardsman

  Goodbye, Fat Owl

  And the Winner is

  Taxi!

  Another Question of Attribution

  The Tracks of my Tears

  The Mouse that Purred

  A Game of Monopoly

  Education is a Wonderful Thing

  Role Credits

  The Analogizer®

  A Signing of the Times

  Good Egg

  Mad as an Actress

  Motor Literacy

  Vim and Vigour

  A Critical Condition

  Heartbreak Hotels

  Mercury, Messenger of the Gods

  Thar’s Gold In Them Thar Films

  Valete

  A Matter of Emphasis

  Section Five: Latín!

  Programme note

  Latin! or Tobacco and Boys

  Act One

  Act Two

  Copyright Page

  Paperweight

  Over the years, when not wearing his acting, television or novelist trousers, Stephen Fry has written many articles and itemries for magazines, newspapers and radio. Collected together in this excellent volume the reader will find the print debut of Professor Donald Trefusis, a previously undiscovered Sherlock Holmes mystery, discourses on the subjects of piles and critics and many more witty and incisive articles from the pages of the Listener and the Daily Telegraph.

  As the title suggests, Paperweight will make a handy desk-top accessory as well as a friendly literary guacamole into which the tired and hungry reader might happily dip the tortilla chip of his curiosity whenever the fancy takes him.

  ‘Huge, crammed, wise, hilarious and utterly captivating’ Literary Review

  ‘Moving effortlessly from odd socks and coffee granules to the meaning of life, there is punch behind every punchline . . . Engaging and witty’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘Achingly funny’ The Times

  ‘[Fry’s] particular enjoyment of the English language is what makes his writing so funny: he stretches out the syllables of a word to get at least six innuendoes across, and the glory of having seen him so often on the screen is that he comes alive in your imagination to deliver the lines he has written’ Daily Mail

  Also by Stephen Fry

  FICTION

  The Liar

  The Hippopotamus

  Making History

  The Stars’ Tennis Balls

  NON-FICTION

  Moab is My Washpot

  Rescuing the Spectacled Bear

  The Ode Less Travelled

  with Hugh Laurie

  A Bit of Fry and Laurie

  A Bit More Fry and Laurie

  Three Bits of Fry and Laurie

  Paperweight

  Stephen Fry

  Introduction

  Welcome to Paperweight. My first act must be to warn that it would be a madness in you to read this book straight through at one sitting, as though it were some gripping novel or ennobling biography. In the banquet of literature Paperweight aspires to be thought of as no more than a kind of literary guacamole into which the tired and hungry reader may from time to time wish to dip the tortilla chip of his or her curiosity. I will not be held responsible for the mental indigestion that is sure to be provoked by any attempt to bolt the thing whole. Snack books may not be the last word in style, but for those sated and blown by the truffles and quenelles of the master chefs in one kitchen, or flatulent with Whoppers and Super Supremes from the short-order cooks in the other, it may just be that Paperweight will find a place.

  Perhaps, however, it will be the other end of the
alimentary canal that furnishes us with a clue as to how to manage this book: its natural home may well turn out to be the lavatory, alongside The Best of the Far Side, an old Harpic-stained copy of The Sloane Ranger Handbook and everyone’s cloacal favourite, The Collected Letters of Rupert Hart-Davies. It may be that each article of the book should have been flagged with a number or symbol indicating the length of time the article would take to read, that number or symbol corresponding with the health of a reader’s bowel. In this way the reader could determine which sections to read according to his or her diet and general enteric condition. The whole book could then be got through without ever impinging on the customer’s quality time. But whatever use you find for Paperweight, whether you do follow a lavatorial regime, whether you take the hint of its title and press it into service as a desk accessory, or whether you merely wish to deface the photograph of that disgusting man on the front cover, I wish you years of trouble-free, stain-resistant use.

  To collect together the swarf of six or seven years of occasional toiling in the workshops of journalism and radio (an absurd metaphor and of a kind that belle lettristes do not seem to be able to avoid … how is writing articles even remotely like toiling in a workshop? Get to the bloody point) might seem like an act of insupportable arrogance. My only answer to that is to say that the publishing atrocity you hold in your hands is, in fact, an act of supported arrogance. It exists because over the years I have received many letters from readers and listeners asking if there might be made available to them some permanent record of the articles and broadcasts which I have so pitilessly inflicted upon an incredulous public – presumably with a view to threatening their children or using the resultant book as an accessory in some satanic ritual. Paperweight is, anyway, the consequence of such entreaties, I trust those responsible will profit from the lesson.

  (What’s all this ‘there might be made available to them some permanent record’ and ‘the consequence of such entreaties’? Why do you have to descend to this greasy style traditional in Forewords? And where do you get off with all this mock humility? ‘this publishing atrocity … I have so pitilessly inflicted’. Repulsive.)

  My first forays into the kind of writing represented in this book (Forays? forays? What kind of word is that? Get a grip.) began in 1985 when Ian Gardhouse, a BBC radio producer of previously unspotted character, asked me to contribute to a programme of his called Colour Supplement. One or two of the broadcasts I made for this short-lived venture are contained in the ‘Radio’ section of this book.

  Colour Supplement gave way to Loose Ends, on the first programme of which I introduced a character called Professor Trefusis. It was Ian Gardhouse’s idea. The week before our first transmission, a real-life academic, it seems, had been appointed by the government to inquire into sex and violence on television. Gardhouse thought it would be appropriate for me to broadcast as that academic, delivering opinions on a medium with which a cloistered don would be completely unfamiliar. I came up with an ageing Cambridge philologist of amiable but sometimes vituperative character called Donald Trefusis.

  I liked Trefusis. His advanced years and further advanced eccentricity allowed me to get away with spiked comments and straight rudery that would have been unthinkable if uttered in the normal voice of an aspiring comic in his twenties. Over the next two or three years I continued to perform Trefusis and his ‘wireless essays’, on Loose Ends. A generous, some might say over-generous (cloying mock humility again … though you’d call it fausse humilité, I bet), selection is included here. I also dragged up from time to time in the guise of Rosina Lady Madding, faded Society Beauty, until pressure of work forced me to retrench on so giddy an expenditure of time. (oh, give it a rest, will you?)

  Apart from anything else, such spare hours as I had when not prancing about on stages or in TV studios were being taken up with writing a weekly column for the now defunct Listener magazine. Its new editor, the peerless Alan Coren (well, ‘peerless’ is all right I suppose … at least you didn’t say ‘that consummate good egg, Alan Coren’) had hoicked me over from the books pages where I had been contributing occasional reviews for the literary editor, Lynne Truss. Some of those book reviews and a selection from the column itself are here reproduced in the section marked ‘The Listener’. For the Christmas issue of 1987 I contributed a Sherlock Holmes story which I have taken the liberty of including too (what do you mean ‘taken the liberty’? It’s your bleeding book isn’t it? Where’s the liberty? Really). A brace of articles (you mean ‘two’) written for Arena magazine are collected in a Reviews and Oddments section, together with a couple of pieces I wrote for the Tatler under the editorship of that supreme figure, since sadly gathered, Mark Boxer. I have also included a few articles I wrote as television critic of the Literary Review.

  The Listener changed publishers in 1989 and Alan Coren left, as did I. A little later the magazine folded entirely. (We’re supposed to make a connection there, are we?)

  A few months after this, Max Hastings, the amiable and modest editor of the Daily Telegraph (you like simply everyone don’t you?) sent me a note one afternoon, care of the stage door of the Aldwych Theatre, where I was performing in one of the most significant flops of the season, a play called Look Look. He asked if I would consider a column for his newspaper. It so happens that a few months earlier I had changed, as a reader, from the Independent to the Telegraph. Although no Conservative, I found and continue to find myself more at home in the pages of that newspaper than in any other, so I agreed readily and happily (ooh, this is exciting).

  For two years I wrote a column under the heading ‘Fry on Friday’, relinquishing the post in late 1991, under pressure of filming and writing work. It was an immensely enjoyable discipline, that of having to find the weekly topic, although there were times when I was writing ten times as many words a week, answering the huge number of letters that were flooding in from Telegraph readers, than it took to write the articles themselves. I dare say the great columnists of our age, the Waterhouses, Levins and Waughs would find my post-bag laughably thin, but for me the challenging, intelligent, friendly and sometimes not so friendly letters from readers proved one of the great surprises and delights of that period of my life. I may say that towards the end, my time crisis having grown to such frightening proportions, I found myself unable to answer a great many of the letters and take this opportunity to apologise for the perfunctory nature of any replies with which correspondents were forced to be content (what a creep).

  The final part of Paperweight is the complete text of a play of mine called Latin! or Tobacco and Boys. I have included the programme note for its performance at the New End Theatre, Hampstead, which should explain the background to the piece. Latin! is I suppose the reason for my doing what I do. I wrote it during my second year at Cambridge. As a result, Hugh Laurie, who saw it at Edinburgh, asked Emma Thompson to introduce me to him in the hope that I might write with him for a Footlights revue. I have been writing with him, on and off, for the last eleven years and I hope to do so for many more yet.

  I should like to record my thanks therefore to him, to Emma Thompson, to Alan Coren, Max Hastings, Ian Gardhouse, Ned Sherrin, Lynne Truss, Nick Logan of Arena, Emma Soames (quondam editrix of the Literary Review) and the late Mark Boxer. Thanks too to Lisa Glass of Mandarin Books for her patience and to Jo Foster for helping me to track down the disjecta membra of so many years. (You had to do it, didn’t you? You had to end with a bloody Latin tag. What a git. And where do you get off with ‘quondam editrix’? Jesus.)

  Stephen Fry

  Norfolk, 1992

  Section One

  Radio

  Donald Trefusis

  This is the first Trefusis broadcast, from Loose Ends. As explained in the introduction, it makes reference to a governmental decision to invite an academic to view a year’s television and pronounce on whether or not the violence shown on our screens was harmful to the public and most especially, of course, the dear children of thi
s country.

  VOICE: Dr Donald Trefusis, Senior Tutor of St Matthew’s College, Cambridge, and Carnegie Professor of Philology, was asked by the government last year to monitor a large part of the BBC’s television output, paying particular attention to scenes of violence that might disturb or influence young children. Here, he reports on his findings.

  My brief, to inspect the rediffusion of violence in the BBC’s television programming, was on the one hand appalling to an inveterate lover of the wireless, and on the other appealing to an avid student and chronicler of modern society, and on the other flattering to one who is – oh dear, I seem to have three hands here, never mind, suffice it to say that I approached the task with a glad, if palpitating, heart.

  My predecessor on the Queen Anne Chair of Applied Moral Sciences1 here always held that television, already an etymological hybrid compounded, as it is, of the Greek ‘tele’ and the Latin ‘vision’, was also a social hybrid, a chimera that awaited some modern crusading Bellerophon, athwart a twentieth-century Pegasus, to slay it before it devoured our culture whole in its filthy, putrescent, purulent maw.

  I, however, essentially a man of the people, a man with his alert and keen young fingers very much on the thrusting, vibrant pulse of our times, incline to no such intemperate view. For me television represents a challenge, a hope, an opportunity – or, in the words of T.E. Hulme, ‘a concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities’. And it was with this high heart that I approached the duty my government had called me to do. In fact, when young Peter from the Home Office approached me for the task in the smoking library of the Oxford and Cambridge Club, I had to confess to him that I hadn’t actually ever watched any television before. One is so busy. But Peter, whom I am proud to say I taught for the Classical Tripos in 1947, took the view that a fresh mind was what the problem needed: it was, therefore, with the confidence of ignorance and the blithe cheer of inexperience that I sat down to my brand new Sony Trinitron to sample the broadcast offerings of the corporation.

  Violence, I need hardly remind a wireless audience, derives from the Latin word vis and its cognates, meaning strength. The violence I was briefed to hunt down, however, was a horse of a very different kidney. I shall keep you guessing no longer and reveal that what I saw shocked me to the very core of my being and disturbed me in a fashion that it is beyond my power to describe. Programme after programme violent, harrowing and potentially ruinous to the soft, impressionable minds of the young.