The Fry Chronicles (31 page)

As much as anything it was to be dismissed without being known that prickled so fiercely. Without labouring the point, it was behaviour that I thought not far from racism, sexism or any other kind of prejudice or snobbery. ‘Because you are not cute I do not want to know you’ was to me hardly different from suggesting, ‘Because you are gay I dislike
you’ or ‘Because you are Jewish, I dislike you’ or, come to that, ‘Because you went to Cambridge I dislike you.’ Of course, anyone who believes themselves to be a victim of such discrimination ought to be sure. We first have to dismiss the worrying possibility that a true interpretation of another’s antipathy might be ‘Because you are a boring arsehole I dislike you’, a judgement from which there is little hope of comfortable escape.

Kim enjoyed the gay world more than I did. He was not, of course, fooled by it, but I think he was more at ease in it than I could ever be. He also had more opportunity to experience it, for I was beginning to be so consumed by work that such things as clubs and pubs were receding into the background for me. This new Granada comedy series was going to take me away from London for long periods of time.

It was hard not to like Manchester. Being called ‘love’, ‘chuck’ or a ‘daft barmcake’ can only delight a southerner used to the lonely and unsmiling lovelessness of London and the south-east. Granada lodged us at the grand and luxurious Midland Hotel and doled out to us the most unbelievably handsome
per diem
cash payments in little brown packets. I had never had so much ready money in my life. We had had three months to write material and now we were here to sift, select and record.

Hugh and I had been – what is the word? Horror-struck? Staggered? Mortified? Shamed? Some mixture of all those perhaps – to discover that our slow, mournful and insecure rate of writing had been trumped and trampled on by the one-man whirlwind of industry, creativity and
prodigality that was Benjamin Charles Elton. For every one page of uncertain and unfinished sketch comedy that we held apologetically up for judgement, Ben produced fifty. That is no exaggeration. Where our comedy was etiolated, buttoned-up and embarrassed, his was wild, energetic, colourful and confident to the point of cockiness. While we would read ours out with a sorrowful cough and somehow framed in self-deprecating inverted commas, Ben would perform his, playing every part, with undisguised pleasure and demented relish. Despite our complete sense of humiliation and defeat we did laugh and we did unreservedly admire his astonishing talent and the unabashed zest with which he threw himself into performance.

Ben had instantly spotted the performing genius of Emma Thompson and warmed to the big-eyed hopelessness that Hugh could project in characters as well as his authority and range. In me he saw a crusty relict of Empire and created a character called Colonel Sodom, who might, I suppose, be regarded as a rather coarsely sketched forerunner of
Blackadder Goes Forth
’s General Melchett. Another aspect of my limited performance scope that appealed to him resulted in Doctor de Quincey, a casually peremptory and callous doctor who reappeared some years later in Ben’s comedy drama series
Happy Families.

Single-handedly Ben seemed to have written every episode of the series, which was called, after much disputation,
There’s Nothing to Worry About
. We shot it in and around Manchester, the director, Stuart Orme, using state of the art Electronic News Gathering equipment, which is to say new lightweight video cameras whose flexibility allowed the production to save money on set building, but at the price of a substandard look and
soundtrack. Hugh and I managed to write a few sketches that made it through to performance, as a sop to our pride we suspected, one being a long sequence that involved a pair of characters called Alan and Bernard, who had featured in the Footlights Charades sketch and who would pop up again as Gordon and Stewart in
A Bit of Fry and Laurie
. But all in all it was Ben’s show, for good or ill.

It is no unfair criticism of anyone to say that the results were uneven. Richard Armitage, the agent who had taken me, Hugh and Emma under his wing, was loud in his dismay, disgust and disapproval. He was particularly revolted by Colonel Sodom’s exploding bottom. The Colonel ate strong curries and in a series of shots I was seen striding through the streets of Didsbury all but propelled along the pavement by pyrotechnic special-effect farts. I think there was even a close-up of the seat of my pinstripe trousers bursting open with a smoking star-shaped bang. Richard muttered about this for weeks. He felt that the stylish, intelligent brand of graduate comedy for which he hoped we would be known, and on which he planned to build our careers, was being crippled at birth by a foul-mouthed Cockney street urchin with a sewer for a mind and he wanted none of it. Who knows what grumbling behind-the-scenes machinations took place. Richard may even have tried to get us out of our contract. Steve Morrison, the executive producer, and Sandy Ross stayed loyal to Ben, quite rightly recognizing his ferocious and fertile talent. They were aware nonetheless that
There’s Nothing to Worry About
had flaws, and their solution was to bring in a new cast member. Paul Shearer, through no fault of his own, left the show. As one who wrote less material even than Hugh and me he was, I suppose, considered
dispensable. Paul’s place was taken by a Glasgow Art School graduate called Anthony McMillan, who had just changed his name to Robbie Coltrane.

Big, loud and hilarious, Robbie combined the style and manners of a Brooklyn bus-driver, a fifties rock and roller, a motor mechanic and a Gorbals gangster. Somehow they all fitted together perfectly into one consistent character. He terrified the life out of me, and the only way I could compensate for that was to pretend to find him impossibly attractive and to rub my legs up against him and moan with ecstasy.

‘You cheeky wee fucker,’ he would say and somehow tolerate me.

The only time in my life I ever wore a donkey jacket.
Alfresco.

A twat in tweed and cravat: inexcusably slappable.
Alfresco.

Robbie has since said in an interview that he found Hugh and me to be arrogant, off-puttingly over-confident Establishment figures who looked down our well-bred noses at his blowsy, vulgar intrusion like thoroughbred racehorses shivering their fastidious flanks at the presence in their stables of an unwelcome donkey. I am not quoting him exactly, but that is certainly the gist of what he said. Whether he made this up to pad out a boring interview session or whether he truly believes it and remembers it that way, I cannot say. I always get on amicably, indeed affectionately, with Robbie on the rare occasions that I see him these days, but I have never dared raise the subject of that interview. They bring us back to the endless, and perhaps arid, problem of affect and appearance, the question of the figures we cut with others despite what we may feel inside. We see everyone else socially armed with great clubs while all we have hidden behind our backs is a pitiful cotton bud. I know how much Hugh and I were suffering a tormented sense of inadequacy, how much we
felt out of place and how much we were embarrassed by our damnable public-school and Cambridge backgrounds. I also know that we were too proud and too well-brought-up, or I was certainly, to go around slouching and mooching with hang-dog expressions that begged for petting and pity. It is, at some sort of stretch, possible that we hid our feelings of hopelessness so well that Robbie could, in all conscience, claim that we came over as poncey, preening pricks, but I honestly cannot believe it likely. Perhaps it suited Robbie to imagine himself as a lowborn grease-monkey endowed with natural, home-grown street talent, forced into a world of pale snobbery and mincing middle-class privilege. In fact, of course, Robbie is the son of a doctor and went to school at Glenalmond College, perhaps Scotland’s most elite private seat of learning and subject of the excellent 2008 documentary
Pride and Privilege
. The 13th Duke of Argyll, the Marquess of Lothian, Prince Georg Friedrich of Prussia and the 9th Earl of Elgin, Viceroy of India, are numbered amongst its eximious alumni. That he managed to enter Glasgow School of Art as Anthony Robert McMillan with an accent like Prince Charles’s and emerge the other end as Robbie Coltrane with an accent like Jimmy Boyle’s is a fine achievement. I sometimes think I should have tried to do something similar.

There’s Nothing to Worry About
had emerged on screen, exploding bottoms and all, in June of 1982 in the Granada region only. We went back down to London to write in July, August and September for the new series which was to be called
Alfresco
.

Hugh, Emma, Ben, self, Siobhan and Paul:
There’s Nothing to Worry About,
Granada TV, 1982. Oh, but there was…

One free afternoon in Manchester I had walked to the Arndale Centre and drifted from shop to shop. In a branch of Lasky’s I found myself staring in perplexity at a group of teenagers clustered around a display stand. I approached and looked over their shoulders …

Half an hour later I was fiddling with the back of the television in my Midland Hotel bedroom. After ten frustrating and confused minutes Ceefax-style text appeared on the screen.

It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair, the details of which will bore you dreadfully. I shall try not to linger on the subject too long, but the relationship was and is too important to me for it to be consigned to a quick sentence. Most of my spare hours were now spent in front of this transcendently lovely (to me) machine, an Acorn BBC Micro B computer. At that time microcomputers relied on two household appliances to work properly: a television for display and a cassette tape-recorder for recording and loading programs. The Lasky’s salesman had persuaded me to buy a program called Wordwise, which came on a ROM chip that you plugged into one of four slots on the circuit board. The other spaces were for the operating system and the BASIC programming language. With Wordwise plugged into the first slot the computer magically started up as a word-processor. I could attach it by a wide-ribboned parallel connector to a Brother electric typewriter which now became a slave printer. I cannot explain my fascination and delight. With exultation I would show my friends the computer, the programs I had written and the printer printing out. Everybody cooed and wowed obediently, but I could tell they were not moved in the same way that I was. It puzzled me that I should be so captivated by this new world when others were so relatively unengaged. Certainly the system was clever, one could do remarkable things with it, and most people were impressed – in the standard ‘Tch, whatever will they think of next?’ way – but for me the excitement was about so much more than function. I have long since given up trying to understand this undying obsession, which rapidly took on all the form, manner and behaviour of a classic addiction. I passed most of what spare time I had with my head buried in dedicated microcomputer magazines or haunting the Tottenham Court Road on the look-out for new peripherals. I would stay up at the keyboard until three, four or five in the morning writing pointless programs or attempting to master useless techniques. Within a very short time I had filled my corner of the Chelsea flat with a daisy-wheel printer, a plotter, a dedicated RGB monitor and an add-on for an extra processor and floppy disks. My lifelong battle to control cabling began at this time. All the cables I have ever owned would stretch to the moon and back. Except they would not be able to because they would fail to connect up with each other. Anyone can write a credible story in which humans can teleport, travel in time and make themselves invisible. A future in which there are cable compatibility standards, that would be real science fiction.