Stephen Fry

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Speaker 40:21

Uh

Presenter0:34

My Castaway this week is Stephen Fry. It's tempting to unabashedly embrace the cliche he needs no introduction. Seems almost redundant to list his endless credits and achievements on T V, stage, film, radio, and paper, because

Presenter0:48

Well, because he's Stephen Fry, and we've been watching, reading, and listening to him for three decades marvelling at his highly impressive but lightly worn intellectual capacity, savouring his knowing and often frisky prolixity, and admiring his untypical candour. And then there's the voice a pitch perfect cocktail of Englishness, erudition, mischief, and warmth.

Presenter1:11

A few of his triumphs include A Bit of Fry and Laurie, his highly acclaimed film performances Oscar Wilde, his best-selling series of memoirs, and his long-running chairmanship of the TV show QI. His troubles include falling on his face in the playground and breaking his nose, an early spell in prison for credit card fraud, coping with depression, and kicking a 20-year-long cocaine habit. These days, it's impossible to ignore just how dashed happy he looks. He recently married. He says, if you talk about something, it gets it out, and like a wound, once you start getting the oxygen on it, it starts to heal. And so, Stephen Fry, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

Stephen Fry1:51

Thirsty.

Presenter1:51

Uh healing and talking then. We know you're very good at talking. More than any other castaway I think I've spoken to. Your life is out there. You have written so much about it in quite a revelatory way. Um has all that made you feel better?

Stephen Fry2:05

Gosh, it's so hard to tell, isn't it? Because I can't have a parallel life in which I haven't spoken to compare it with. But it seems to be that I have this desire to bring out all the source, as you put it. I can't understand it. I think it may have started as a fear of being found out. So I thought I might as well be open about everything to do with myself so that no one could discover it. And if you're in the public eye and you have certain problems or certain issues, I think it's important to try and share and help, if that isn't too holier than thou. I I've always had this.

Stephen Fry2:44

image of myself when I'm about fourteen or fifteen as a rather miserable, lonely figure. And I I think I still write to that character. Um and I want to tell them that it's going to be okay. And maybe it's guilt at my own luck.

Presenter2:59

You've been married now to Elliot for five long months.

Stephen Fry3:02

Uh

Presenter3:02

How's it suiting you?

Stephen Fry3:04

I'm just adoring it. I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase. I think we both are. I hope so. Um and uh new and miraculous things happened in our culture and and I wanted to celebrate that and what better way than than to be married? It's it's bliss. I do carry a ridiculous beam on my face and I can't help it.

Presenter3:22

You've written that music takes you to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, that music is in fact the dog's bollocks.

Stephen Fry3:29

Did I say that?

Presenter3:30

You did say that. And what is the what does music do for you? When do you need music?

Stephen Fry3:31

Uh

Stephen Fry3:36

I find more and more, actually. I I need it. I need it when I'm walking. I need it when I'm uh in my uh office study working. It's become so, so much a part of everything I am, and I'm still discovering new music all the time. That's what's thrilling. And at least two of the pieces I've chosen are examples of this, of music that I've come to after years of almost resisting. Something to do with my father. We'll come to that, I fear.

Presenter4:00

Yeah. Tell me about your first choice, Stephen Fry.

Stephen Fry4:03

Well, this is a perfect example. My father is a wonderful musician. He was a a a choir boy at St Paul's Cathedral and he plays the piano. One of the composers he most values is Johann Sebastian Bach. And for many years he never really did it. I could see the intricate patterns that were very, very clever, but it never spoke to my soul, if you like. But especially thanks to one incredible figure, the eccentric and marvellous Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist, I have come to value all of the keyboard works. So I'd like to hear Glenn Gould playing Bach's Partita No. 1, The Jig from It.

Presenter5:38

The Gig from Bach's Partita No. One in B Flat Major, played by Glenn Gould. I was in the back of a cab today, and I said I was coming here to to record Desert Anand Discs with you, and the the cab driver said to me, Does he know all that stuff on Q I?

Presenter5:52

And I said, well, you know, he has a large pile of cards, but I get the feeling he probably memorizes it, and once it's in, it's in.

Stephen Fry6:00

It it tends to be, yes. I'm so fortunate in that regard. I do think um memory is perhaps an undercelebrated uh function or or part of part of being human. Uh the Greeks Hesiod I think in Daughters and the Nights Mnemosyny is the the mother of the Muses, and I think that's really true. I think memory is the mother of all the arts.

Presenter6:22

Um, you have many passions, I think it would be fair to say included among them cars, darts, Norwich Football Club and cricket. What's the common theme?

Stephen Fry6:30

Well, kind of theatre. With cars, it was actually a particular passion in the eighties when I'd written the book, as it's called, of a musical, rewritten it, Me and My Girl. And it it was a hit. It was a hit in the West End, it was a hit on Broadway and around the world, and I suddenly found myself in possession of a rather large amount of cash. And I think having, as you mentioned in your introduction, been to prison for credit card fraud, I suddenly realised that now I was a real legitimate person and could spend my own money, and I overdid it. It was just sort of nuts.

Presenter7:01

You were a young man when that happened to you. I'm wondering if at that point it increased your s your sense of you've spoken sometimes about this feeling of separateness from the world. Did that uh was that uh you know, going out and buying eight cars is one thing, but it only reinforces the fact that you're you're not like other people.

Stephen Fry7:10

Get that.

Stephen Fry7:17

Yeah, and joining clubs was another thing I did. I m I must be a member of nine clubs. And um I think it reflects a need to be a part of the world and connect. But I have this other pull which is to be apart from and and I think that's what sort of often tears me apart,'cause I've never joined in.

Stephen Fry7:38

Music and dancing and performing and sport and everything I I'm just hopeless at. And I feel I feel inadequate and I'm terrified of being laughed at if if ever I must sing or dance. So I deliberately do a comic dance'cause I don't know any other kind. And and I can't paint and I can't, you know, I can't do almost anything except use words, use language. And so that's what I've poured all my joy into, really. Language.

Presenter8:05

Language and expression and words then a sort of a a carapace as well as a comfort?

Stephen Fry8:10

They very much are, yes, absolutely. But it's interesting, isn't it? The nature of oneself. It's a bit like a signature. You know, when you're a teenager, you tend to practice a new signature all the time and you think, oh, I think I'll do a straight-down Y or I'll do an F that's backwards or something. And then after a while it becomes your signature. And it's a bit the same with your personality. When you're a teenager and a young adult, you think, I'll try this pose, I'll try this interest, I'll try this style of dress. And then slowly it is you.

Presenter8:39

Let's have your next piece of music. Tell me about your second choice.

Stephen Fry8:41

Ah well now a composer I absolutely love is Franz Schubert. One of his best known and most wonderful pieces is the Traut di Forella, which is a song in fact. And I particularly want this version because I have a friend called Thomas Addist who is one of the great British composers and conductors and pianists and he's playing the piano in this version of the Traut Quintette.

Presenter10:04

Variations two and three from Schubert's Piano Quintette in A with your good friend Thomas Addis there. Uh you were born in Hampstead in London in nineteen fifty seven to Alan and Marianne Fry. I don't need to tell you that, really, but I'm telling the listeners. Um who stands out more strongly in your childhood memory particularly, your mother or your father?

Stephen Fry10:14

You try telling the listeners

Stephen Fry10:22

Well

Stephen Fry10:23

My mother, through presence, and my father through absence I mean not um not actual absence, but he worked extraordinarily hard and I felt very in awe of him. Um he was gaunt and pipe-smoking and had a mind of extraordinary fierce logical analytical genius, extraordinary man he is, um but he was also uh quite impatient of children and he especially didn't like me sitting watching television or being in the house reading when I could have been outside or or doing what he did when he was a boy, like building an outdoor motor or a radio, which he did. But my mother was a warm uh presence, immense faith in me, so important, especially in my young life, troubled as it was, was the fact that she never ever lost faith in my abilities.

Presenter11:10

I'm interested to concentrate on your early childhood, and you've written of it you you say, you know, you're always in trouble, never stable, never settled or secure. Now you see, if you've got a very loving mother, it's it's it's you know, it's tempting to wonder why.

Stephen Fry11:21

Yeah.

Stephen Fry11:23

Yeah.

Presenter11:23

Sling.

Stephen Fry11:23

Um in my earlyish teenage I um I was sent to a psychiatrist, and he was a little bit frustrated that my parents weren't in the diplomatic corps or in the army, because uh

Stephen Fry11:35

Everything that I did and all my troubles s seemed to fit in a syndrome of someone who had absent parents or moved a lot and didn't have a settled and secure nest. But I did. But it was in the country, deep, deep in the country, as Sidney Smith, the great Sidney Smith said, simply miles from the nearest Lemmon. And it was a bit of a blow for me because I had I was a sort of male Madame Bovary. I had fantastic dreams of myself being a huge success, both sort of romantically and striking a figure in the world. And you can't do that in the middle of the lanes of Norfolk.

Presenter11:42

Or move.

Presenter12:12

But you were sent to boarding school at seven, which would have been typical for somebody from your background, and one can't help thinking that all of the things you did there and you were terribly, terribly naughty, were

Stephen Fry12:14

Cool for

Presenter12:22

We're a bid for your parents' attention, though I

Stephen Fry12:24

I I g I mean, I'm sure that is true. You have to remember, though, that that was the fate of my brother, and of my parents themselves when they were young, so there was no sense of feeling uh abandoned i in a strange way. And it's perhaps difficult then to explain quite why my brother didn't seem to have the same issues that I did.

Presenter12:43

Um could I put it down to to something as banal as artistic sensibility? Do you think you were just sort of incredibly sensitive and perceptive and rather an open wound?

Stephen Fry12:53

I think that is true. I think I was I'm still very sensitive. I absolutely can't bear it when people are nasty about me. That sounds really silly. Because if you're in the public eye, they're going to be nasty about you whoever you are. I mean, if you were Francis of Assisi, rolled into, you know, Shakespeare and you know, if you were an utter genius and the most benign figure in the world, someone would be writing something nasty about you, especially in the current world of of social media. And maybe I should be stronger. I tweet, but I don't read tweets, which is very perhaps.

Presenter13:21

Sensible.

Stephen Fry13:22

I think sensible. It reminds me of Noel Cowd's great remark, you know, when he was asked if he'd seen something on television, and he said, Television is not for watching, it is for being on. And I feel t Twitter isn't for reading tweets, it's for tweeting.

Presenter13:35

Let's have your third. What are we gonna hear, Stephen?

Stephen Fry13:37

Well, Beethoven, you cannot escape the greatness of Beethoven. I think perhaps of all the artists and humans in history that I've ever read about, the most great humanitarian, the one who most speaks for all of us. And again, my father always used to go on about his late quartets, and I found them frightening and strange and disturbing. But that's because they are frightening, strange and disturbing, but they're also transcendently beautiful. And this is the 14th quartet, and the presto from it, the fifth movement, and C Sharp minor, and it so bustles with life. Is it angry or is it puzzled? Is it sorrowful? It's all the emotions in one. It lives with you forever, this piece.

Speaker 414:55

Uh

Presenter15:18

The Guarneri Quartette, with the presto from Beethoven's String Quartet No. four, opus one three one. Why so often do you denigrate your own intellectual capacity?

Stephen Fry15:28

Well, I there's a part of me that feels a bit like Salieri, you know, in the um Amadeus, the Peter Schaffer play, that that I have just enough talent to recognise real talent in others, but I don't have quite what they have. I'm not a real intellectual. I'm not, you know, I'm not like some of the academic friends I have, and I'm not an artist, and I really respect artists. I can remember when I used to go to the Groucho Club a lot, and in the very early days this figure from Leeds would appear and we'd fall into conversations, and I was absolutely fascinated by his self-confidence, his absolute certainty about everything. And it was Damien Hurst. And I thought he just has some strange gift in his head that allows him to look at one thing and one thing only and decide upon it and think about it hard and not get distracted by what people think. And I care so much about what people think about me. You still do? I think I do. I think less, perhaps, than I used to. But you can't be an artist if you care about what people think. But you can be an entertainer. And I think that's probably what I was put on this earth to be, to entertain, to please, if you like.

Presenter15:52

Period.

Presenter16:16

You still do?

Presenter16:29

When did you first learn that you did absolutely have the facility to entertain?

Stephen Fry16:34

Actually, at school, like a lot of entertainers, it was being the class clown, and I was pretty good at that. I was a good impressionist, so I could always do just different teachers, and that always delighted people. Always went too far. I was always the one facing the class doing expressive and extraordinary things, then seeing their faces and thinking, Oh, he's come in, hasn't he? He's standing behind me. Yes, he is. And out you go, Fry. And so it was all part of that. There was something transgressive about entertaining. I think that's what was interesting to me. And I think it always should be a little bit transgressive, and that's what comedy should be.

Presenter17:08

What do you think the teachers thought of you? I mean, report cards and so on. What did they say?

Stephen Fry17:12

Some of them were quite florid in their denunciations. Others were weirdly complimentary when I look back on them. I when I started stealing at school, I was sent to a psychiatrist because they thought I must be mad. Who happened bizarrely to be a Conservative health minister called Dr. Gerard Vaughan. And since having had the opportunity to see what he wrote. And this was, I was fifteen, I think. And he wrote bipolar question mark? It was really extraordinary. But my particular version has expressed itself a lot in mania. I have you know, hypermanic. And that's what I was as a teenager. It couldn't contain me. It was like, I don't know, being a tiger in a very small cage. I was just bound to

Presenter17:32

Yeah.

Stephen Fry17:57

Try and break it.

Presenter17:58

Do does it make you feel sad to think of that? I mean, it makes me feel very sad and I didn't know you.

Stephen Fry18:02

No, it it does make me feel sad. There are all kinds of things I wish I had done. Of course, when you when you get to your you know, mid to late fifties, as I'm in, you you start thinking about all the opportunities that you missed as a as a young person.

Stephen Fry18:16

On the other hand, I'm happy now, so I can't be sure that everything that went before wasn't, you know, a pathway to present felicity, if you like.

Presenter18:26

Let's have your next piece of music. Tell me then about this. It's your fourth choice of the day.

Stephen Fry18:30

Well, when all the problems I won't say faded away, but a lot of them seemed to, I found myself in Cambridge in my last year joining the Footlights, which was headed by one Hugh Laurie. And every time Hugh and I went to the club room to practise sketches, to write, to do things, he would sit at the piano for a while. And one of the pieces he would play was the piano music that used to introduce Film Night. And I later discovered that it was actually a song with wonderful lyrics. And it's most beautifully sung by the great Nina Simone.

Speaker 419:03

I wish I knew how.

Speaker 419:08

To be free.

Speaker 419:11

I wish I could pray

Speaker 419:14

All the chains holding me

Speaker 419:19

I wish I could say all the things that I should say Say them loud, say them clear.

Speaker 419:30

For the whole round world

Speaker 419:34

I wish I could share all the love that's in my heart.

Speaker 419:42

Remove all the bars that keep us apart I wish you couldn't know

Speaker 419:53

What it means to be me

Speaker 419:57

Then you'd see and agree that every man should be free.

Presenter20:05

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free. So you've spoken a lot then about all of these these problems throughout your childhood and and and adolescence, and yet here you sit today as this person as well known, as uh accomplished and successful as you are, and therefore I wonder, was there

Presenter20:23

a s a sort of single moment that was a turning point when suddenly everything went in a very different direction.

Stephen Fry20:30

Well, I it for me there's no doubt that university was a complete change of everything. Up until then all my life had been a kind of failure, uh so much so that obviously I'd ended in prison. Uh and f from then on things seemed to go so much better for me.

Presenter20:47

Did you win praise, great praise from your parents for managing that? Yes.

Stephen Fry20:51

Yes, they were intensely proud.

Presenter20:53

Did you get a good degree?

Stephen Fry20:54

Uh, 2-1, not bad. It would have been an outrage if I'd got a first, to be honest, because I did absolutely no work. I went to.

Stephen Fry21:00

three lectures in my entire three years at Cambridge, I think. I I just spent every m moment of the day doing drama. I I would do seven, eight plays a term at least. Um

Presenter21:11

Whenever I've read about your time that you've written about yourself at university, it seems like this golden time and you made, you know, Emma Thompson and so on, and you Laurie, of course, we know about these these very solid friendships that would last you uh all the way through your life. But I

Stephen Fry21:17

Take a look at the

Presenter21:23

Given that the first time that you had attempted suicide was at seventeen, did you feel at university that that that you were free of this, that you were deep deeply happy?

Stephen Fry21:31

Yes, I thought actually that I'd sort of reinvented myself. I thought that that person, that weltering in misery th through his adolescence, was was dead, was like a you know, like a caterpillar and I was a butterfly. But of course you're not, you're the same. Um so that that part of me was always carried inside me. But it was such an exciting adventure being at being at a university, especially after that horror, I think.

Presenter21:59

Um depression w characterized by the the author Matt Hague so succinctly as this disease of thoughts. Can you yourself tell when it's on its way?

Stephen Fry22:11

Um yes. It's a kind of tightness uh in the chest and my heart beats uh so that I can feel it all over the chest. And of course uh a sort of darkness of uh it's hard to say exactly, it's a sucking, it's as if something is being sucked from you and the things that are being sucked from you are energy and hope, a sense of a sense of the future. You have no sense of the future at all and it's it it it is meaningless and black and has no um prospect of of of being anything other than that.

Presenter22:40

Has there been a cost to you? And and I understand what you said earlier, that you know if you can get air around these subjects, but is there a personal cost to you in putting

Presenter22:50

all of these truths about your mental health out there.

Stephen Fry22:53

I think there is, and I hadn't realized that there was. For a start, I'm obviously not a doctor or a sort of therapist or any kind of professional, but I can become a sort of professional in terms of a go-to person and and I actually find that a bit destructive to myself because it means I'm I'm never free of thinking about my mental health or other people's mental health.

Presenter23:13

Let's have your next piece of music. We're on your fist. Do tell me about this.

Stephen Fry23:16

Well, I hope your hearts won't sink when you hear that it's going to be Wagner. I made a film about this extraordinary, puzzling, beguiling, maddening man. Um this is to me as transcendent and rapturous as anything that was ever written. It's Tristan the Nissolda.

Speaker 423:40

Here's a form that affairs me.

Speaker 424:00

Let's move on.

Speaker 424:08

Yeah.

Presenter24:34

Oh sink down from Act Two of Wagner's Trision and Is Older sung by Hersten Fleigster and Ludwig Zuthaus from the nineteen fifty two recording conducted by Wilhelm Furtweinfer. Stephen Frey, I I read that when your younger sister was seven you sat on a window sill and said that your magic could make her fly. Um are are you still full of devilment?

Stephen Fry24:55

I'm a wicked, wicked, nasty piece of work to have done that to a seven year old girl. Um she trusted me implicitly, my sister Jo, and I had told her that I would teach her to fly, but only on her seventh birthday. I perched on the window sill at the top of the house and told her, Go on, off you go.

Stephen Fry25:11

Fortunately she didn't believe that she did have the power to to fly, and she learnt a bitter lesson about her brother, I suspect. Amazingly, we do get on. But yes, I do have an imp of mischief in me that I don't suppose will ever be expunged.

Presenter25:24

Why did you decide to write about your cocaine habit?

Stephen Fry25:28

Well, I felt I couldn't write about those years of my life in or in my autobiography, given that it was sort of going from one period to another to another. Uh it would just be a lie if I missed it out.

Presenter25:37

Uh

Presenter25:40

But then you didn't have to write another autobiography.

Stephen Fry25:43

You're absolutely right, Christian. And and part of me wishes I hadn't that the whole thing slight slightly makes me blush and um and tremble.

Presenter25:50

Well, I fear I may make you blush a little more then, because I'm dying to know what your good friend, his Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, made of your admission that you tooted away in the bathrooms of Buckingham Palace.

Stephen Fry26:00

I think it's safe to say that he knows I'm naughty. I think he's not a judgmental, mean, prissy sort of man. I d think he would not be especially pleased at the idea of people doing that in the palace. But nor would he leap to you know to point to the exit door and say never return again. I I would say this.

Stephen Fry26:27

without, I hope, letting myself off the hook, is that if you have a a condition where your moods are are victim of some strange illness inside your m mind and brain, but you don't know you've got an actual illness with a name, you don't you s you haven't seen a doctor about it

Presenter26:38

Mm.

Stephen Fry26:46

Alcohol and street drugs change your mood in a way that nothing else will.

Stephen Fry26:51

And it's, of course, a a bad idea. It actually exacerbates the problem. And obviously I don't want to sound as if I'm saying it's all the fault of my mental illness, but I do think there was an element. I do think it was a strong part of it. And really once I was properly diagnosed, then the the need seemed to fall away.

Presenter27:11

Tell me then about this. We're going to your sixth.

Stephen Fry27:14

Well, also at that Footlights clubroom piano, when Hugh sat there, he didn't just play I Wish I Knew How It Feeled to Be Free. He also played Would You Believe What a Friend We Have in Jesus. But he sang the version for the film O Lucky Man, and it's called Changes, and it's one of my favourite tracks.

Speaker 327:34

Everyone is facing changes.

Speaker 327:42

No one knows what's going on.

Speaker 327:49

Everyone is changing places.

Speaker 327:58

Still

Speaker 328:00

The world keeps moving on

Speaker 328:07

Love must always change to sorrow.

Speaker 328:15

And everyone must play the game.

Speaker 328:23

Cause it's here.

Speaker 328:25

Today and gone tomorrow

Speaker 328:32

Still

Stephen Fry28:32

Deal.

Speaker 328:34

The world goes on the same

Presenter28:42

That was Hugh Laurie with changes. What is it you call each other? My good friend? McColleague. McColleague. McColl. In 2012, you received great praise for your depiction of Malvolio in Twelfth Night opposite Mark Lyons's Olivia. You played first at the Globe, then I think it transferred to the West End, and then you went to Broadway, where you were nominated for a Tony. You did look like a fish in water on that stage at the Globe. Do you want to do more?

Stephen Fry28:45

McColleague, McColl, McColl.

Stephen Fry29:06

I'd love to. I'd really love to. I I enjoyed it as uh as much as anything I've ever done, actually. It's a fantastic feeling. There's a lot of vocal work, uh which we all did, and and and a lot of, you know, playing games with balls and things like that, which seems which I would have found totally pretentious when I was uh um twenty. I even had to dance, which was just horrifying at the end as a sort of jig, and I kind of managed to do it on some nights. And The Globe in particular is a remarkable theatre. Um the the relationship you have with the audience is quite unlike any other that I've ever known.

Presenter29:08

Uh

Presenter29:38

Um was it the first time that you had been on stage since Famously Cellmates, which you you had to you felt you needed to abandon because it wasn't going the right way? Was that the first time you've been back on stage?

Stephen Fry29:45

Yeah.

Stephen Fry29:47

It it was the first time in a play. Yeah. So it was it was possible that some sort of storm would happen in my head just before going on for the first night. And I was aware that there might be trouble in store, but it really was, as much as anything, a fantastic company of players that just gave me such confidence.

Presenter30:06

Am I right in thinking that twenty in twenty twelve there had been, as you well, you just said it, there a storm in your head. What an apt description. You you'd suffered earlier in the year. Was that was that at the thought of this great challenge that lay ahead? Was it in any sense connected?

Stephen Fry30:20

No, it wasn't actually. In fact, I think the the the the the the sort of terrible breakdown I had which was filming in Africa, which was a um and I it was just awful. I had to come back to England in a in a really dire state, but good came out of it. I met my psychiatrist there. Sounds so American, isn't it? Um and uh things just clarified in my head. Um

Presenter30:44

You you more than hinted earlier at the fact that that much of the torment that you've gone through has also meant that you are the person you are who does all the things that you do. If you if you had the choice to live without your bipolar condition, what what choice would you make?

Stephen Fry31:00

Interesting. I wouldn't want anyone to underestimate the seriousness of a condition like that. It can shorten lives, sometimes traumatically and terribly. It can be a terrible effect on families and people around you. But it's so hard to separate it from oneself. W. H. Orden, the poet, perhaps put it best. He said, Don't get rid of my devils, because my angels will go too.

Presenter31:29

Time for your seventh. Tell me about this, and why indeed you have chosen this.

Stephen Fry31:30

Come on.

Stephen Fry31:34

I had to have a song that I could, as it were, dedicate to all that would make me think of the great love of my life, my husband Elliot. And this song is a simple, beautiful expression of love. This is just pure loveliness, sung by the great Elliot Fitzgerald. It's Colporter's Do I Love You?

Speaker 431:53

I love you, do I?

Speaker 432:00

Doesn't one and one make two?

Speaker 432:06

Do I love you, do I?

Speaker 432:12

Does July need a sky of blue? Would I miss you, would I?

Speaker 432:24

If you ever should go away

Speaker 432:30

If the sun should desert the day, what would life be?

Speaker 432:41

Will I leave you never?

Speaker 432:49

Could the ocean leave the shore?

Presenter32:55

Ella Fitzgerald singing Do I Love You? and chosen Stephen Fry for your husband Elliot. And I notice that he now regularly makes the gossip columns for such outrages as scraping the bumper of his car. You've had thirty years to get used to that sort of attention. How's he coping?

Stephen Fry33:07

Thirty

Stephen Fry33:10

He's coping very well and it's one of the things I have to apologise to him for. You know, sometimes I'm walking along the street and people will cluster round me for a photograph or something and they will almost literally elbow him out the way. Not meaning to particularly be rude, but just they've seen someone they've spotted on the television before and they want him, you know, to be all theirs and they don't notice anybody else who's with him. And he copes that extremely well.

Presenter33:40

Would you like to bring up children together?

Stephen Fry33:42

Uh

Presenter33:42

Yeah.

Stephen Fry33:42

You know, we sort of talk about it and um I I I suddenly think, Oh, my goodness, I'm such an age now, but actually maybe that's rather good. Uh but we'd better get on with it if we do.

Presenter33:53

What would you like to have have told your sixteen year old self?

Stephen Fry33:57

Well, of course I I would like him to calm down. I'd like him not to be so miserable and unhappy. But there's much about him that I admire. I admire his

Stephen Fry34:08

kind of emotional engagement with everything and it would be a shame to lose that youthful feeling that the world is sort of almost on fire and maybe that was a part of part of my madness but I think it's a valuable one because the world is on fire. It's everything about it is astonishing, remarkable and to be experienced and enjoyed. And if you have the great privilege of not believing in life after death, it means you value every second so completely because this world is ours for a short, short period and then it'll be other generations who have it and so we might as well make the most of it.

Presenter34:47

It's time for your final disc, Stephen Fry. Tell me about this.

Stephen Fry34:50

Well, there's a British composer called Arthur Wood who wrote a suite of music called My Native Heath and includes a Maypole dance, which I'd very much like to hear. I think on my desert island, if I heard this, it would take me all the way home, and it would be all about the beautiful, wonderful country that I love and come from. It's also known as Barwick Green. It may be familiar to some of your listeners. I'm not sure.

Speaker 436:12

Prime Minister

Presenter36:16

All of the Radio Four listeners are now utterly confused. They think there's been some terrible cock in continuity. That was Arthur Woods Barwick Green also, and of course, as the theme from Radio Four's The Archers, it was the Maypole dance from this week called My Native Heath, played by the Sydney Chorch Orchestra. So, Stephen Fry, the moment has come. I'm going to give you the complete works of Shakespeare. Have you read the complete works of Shakespeare?

Stephen Fry36:21

Uh

Speaker 436:21

That was a

Stephen Fry36:33

I'm gonna get

Stephen Fry36:37

One of the things I did before I took the Cambridge Entrance exam was I wrote out a scenario I've still got them at home uh in Norfolk, a a scenario of every single play in covered inks. It was really kind of sort of anal and weird.

Presenter36:48

Well, we give you that, and we will give you to the Bible. Have you read all of that?

Stephen Fry36:51

Most of it, actually. It's obviously a book you should read and it w it's fascinating. I love it.

Presenter36:56

And I will be fascinated to know what book you're going to take along with them. T. S. Eliot.

Stephen Fry37:00

ES Eliot is a favourite poet, and I particularly love his four quartets.

Presenter37:05

We shall give you that a luxury item too.

Stephen Fry37:08

Well, it's a whole area of endeavour that I admire enormously is art, and yet I can't paint. And so I'm going to have all the time in the world, so I'd like some canvases and easels and watercolours and oils and acrylics, I think, and all the brushes and turpentine and linseed that go with them, and possibly an instruction manual of

Presenter37:26

We can certainly manage that. And which of these eight tracks, if you had to save just one, which one would it be?

Stephen Fry37:32

Well, I couldn't contemplate living I know it sounds so pretentious but I couldn't contemplate living without Beethoven's late quartet, so that's that's the one I'd take.

Presenter37:42

That's yours then. Stephen Fry, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Immond Discs.

Stephen Fry37:46

Thank you, Kirsty.

Presenter38:28

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.