The Fry Chronicles (44 page)

I believed from the earliest age that I would be quite content to work in radio all my life. If I could just be a continuity announcer or regular broadcaster of some kind, how happy I would be. My dislike of my facial features and physical form contributed to this ambition. I had, as the tired old joke goes, a good face for radio. Announcers and broadcasters have no need of make-up or costume. For one who believed that any attempt at prettification on my part would only draw attention to my cursed deficiencies, a life in front of the microphone seemed like the perfect career. How much more realistic for me a national radio station than irrational venustation.

My first visits to Broadcasting House, the home of BBC Radio in Portland Place, had been as early as 1982, when I played a fictional news reporter for a Radio 1 programme called, I
think
,
B15
. The basement studios in Broadcasting House were all B
x
, and I honestly cannot remember the value of the
x
which gave this programme its name. In its short run
B14
or
B12
or whatever it may have called itself was presented by David ‘Kid’ Jensen, an amiable Canadian disc jockey best known, according to a friend of mine who is very keen on this kind of thing, for being the least objectionable presenter of
Top of the Pops
in all its long history. My character on
Bwhatever
, Bevis Marchant, had his own little slot called
Beatnews
, a rather obvious parody of Radio 1’s ludicrously urgent, trivial and self-important
Newsbeat
. Within two weeks of me contributing to this programme Margaret Thatcher had dispatched a task force to recapture the Falkland Islands, and a week later I was taken off the
air. My parody of Brian Hanrahan and others was deemed insensitive. I shouted over an electric egg beater in a bucket to recreate the sound of reporting live from a helicopter. I was in fact mocking the grandiose, faux-butch reporting style, not making light of the danger that the military were in, but that has always been too complicated a distinction for stupid people to understand. There was a war on, I was trying to be funny, therefore I had contempt for the sacrifice and bravery of the troops. My levity was tantamount to treason and must be stopped. I think I am angrier about that now than I ever was at the time. Pomposity and indignation grow in old age, like nostril hairs and earlobes.

Not long after
Beatnews
a BBC producer called Ian Gardhouse was in touch with me about contributing to a Radio 4 programme of his called
Late Night Sherrin
. Ned Sherrin was a well-known broadcaster who had started life as a television producer, first at Val Parnell’s ATV and then at the BBC. His most famous achievement in that phase of his life had been
That Was The Week That Was
, usually referred to as
TW3
, the live comedy show that had launched the satire boom and David Frost. Since then Nedwin, as I liked to call him, had given the world
Up Pompeii!
,
Side by Side by Sondheim
and a slew of collaborations with Caryl Brahms and others. Trained as a lawyer, he was known for his love of Tin Pan Alley, rich gossip and comely young men. He received his education at Exeter College, Oxford, where he read law, but before that he had been a boy at the most excellently named educational establishment in the history of the world – Sexey’s School in Somerset.

I took to Ned straight away. He was like a stern aunt who twinkled and giggled after a little too much gin.
The idea behind
Late Night Sherrin
was to have a hero or heroine guest of the week who would be twitted and teased by Ned and an assortment of young witty types of which I was to be one. Ned called us his ‘young turks’.
Late Night Sherrin
morphed, for reasons neither I nor Ian Gardhouse can remember, into
And So to Ned
. They were both live, late-night shows. The routine was for us all to meet for supper high up in the St George’s Hotel just by Broadcasting House. The motive behind this, according to Ian, was so that he and Ned could keep an eye on the guests of the week and make sure they stayed relatively sober, a stratagem that failed riotously in the cases of Daniel Farson and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

After
And So to Ned
’s short life came
Extra Dry Sherrin
, whose format I cannot remember as being any different from the others: possibly it had live music or no live music or three guests instead of two.
Extra Dry Sherrin
lasted one series before Ian welcomed me into a new Sherrin-free, live 100-minute programme called
The Colour Supplement
– as the name suggests this was a Sunday ‘magazine’ show comprising a variety of features, one of which would be a section I could create and shape for myself in any way I chose. Each week I performed a kind of monologue as a different character: an estate agent, an architect, a journalist – I cannot remember the whole gallery. Their surnames usually came from Norfolk villages, so I do recall a Simon Mulbarton, a Sandy Crimplesham and a Gerald Clenchwarton.

It was unfortunate that the pay packets offered proved that the rest of the world held radio in no real esteem. I had grown up hearing Kenneth Williams and others bemoaning in quavering comic tones the insultingly
nugatory fees they had been offered for their services and I soon found out that, compared to her brash younger brother, Television, Dame Wireless did indeed live the most frugal and threadbare existence. This never worried me: I would have done it for free, but it was sometimes hard to persuade Richard Armitage that hours composing broadcast monologues, taking parts in comedies and dramas and guesting on panel games were not a waste of time or beneath – as he seemed to think – my dignity. Radio is the poor relation of television insofar as monetary considerations go, but a rich one where it matters – in terms of depth and intimacy.

The writer Tony Sarchet and producer Paul Mayhew-Archer asked me to play an earnest investigative reporter called David Lander in
Delve Special
, a new comedy series they were creating. It was essentially a parody of
Checkpoint
, the very popular Radio 4 programme which featured doughty New Zealander Roger Cook inquiring into a different con, scam or swindle each week. The first part of the programme would catalogue the miseries of the unfortunates who had been exploited and ripped off: they might have had their house destroyed by expensive but incompetent pebble-dashing, been duped into buying a non-existent time-share villa, invested their savings in a – there were any number of ways that innocent lambs could be fleeced by rascally villains, the door-stepping confrontations with whom formed the second and most compulsively enjoyable part of the programme. Cook was famous for getting chi-iked, insulted, jostled, roughed up and even seriously assaulted by the angry subjects of his exposés.
Delve Special
barely had to exaggerate the stories that
Checkpoint
and its successor, John Waite’s
Face
the Facts
, already provided. Over the next three years we made four series and then, when Roger Cook jumped to television, we jumped with him, being screened for a run of six programmes on Channel 4 as
This Is David Lander
, for which I wore a quite monstrous blond wig. When my workload was simply too heavy to allow me to do a second series, Tony Slattery stepped in, and the show was retitled
This Is David Harper
.

David Lander, earnest investigative reporter in a badly behaved blond wig.

One of the pleasures of making
Delve
for radio, aside from not having to wear a wig or care how I looked at all, was working with the guest performers who came along to play the victims and perpetrators. Brenda Blethyn, Harry Enfield, Dawn French, Andrew Sachs, Felicity Montagu, Jack Klaff, Janine Duvitski and many others came into the studio and gave of their brilliant best. Actually, ‘into the studio’ is not quite accurate. In order to achieve aural verisimilitude Paul Mayhew-Archer would often place us in the street, on the roof of Broadcasting House, in broom cupboards, catering areas, offices, corridors and hallways so that he and his engineer could capture the authentic tone and atmosphere of the scene. Location radio drama is not common, and the ‘Sir, sir! It’s a lovely day, can we have our lessons outside?’ sort of mood that it engendered made the recordings about as larky as such sessions can ever be.

Meanwhile, still with radio,
The Colour Supplement
soon folded. Ian invited me to participate in yet another piece of Sherrinry, this time a live Saturday-morning show called
Loose Ends
, or ‘Loose Neds’ as the regular contributors preferred to call it. Over the years these included Victoria Mather, Carol Thatcher, Emma Freud, Graham Norton, Arthur Smith, Brian Sewell, Robert Elms and Victor Lewis-Smith. The format was always the same. Around
the table, whose top was laid with green baize cloth, sat the regular contributors and a couple of guest authors, actors or musicians who had some new release to plug. Ned would open with a monologue in which the week’s news was jokily reviewed. He was always very good at crediting the monologue’s author; in the early years this was usually Neil Shand or Alistair Beaton, his collaborator on a pair of satirical Gilbert and Sullivan adaptations,
The Ratepayer’s Iolanthe
and
The Metropolitan Mikado
, romping satires on the Ken Livingstone–Margaret Thatcher face-off which played to great applause in the mid-eighties. After the monologue, Ned introduced some feature which would have been pre-recorded by a regular contributor.

‘Carol, I believe you went off to investigate this phenomenon?’

‘Well, Ned …’ Carol would say and give a little preamble to her recorded passage.

‘Emma, you braved the dawn on Beachy Head to get a first-hand view, is that right?’

‘Well, Ned …’

I christened Emma, Carol and Victoria the WellNeds, and they stayed with the programme for as long as anyone.

For my first few contributions to
Loose Ends
I presented a range of characters much as I had on
The Colour Supplement
. One week there was a news story about an academic who had been made to watch hours and hours of television in order to compile a report on whether or not the programming was injurious to the British public, especially its youth. There was much talk in those days about the evils of scenes of violence in cop shows and their deleterious influence on the impressionable minds of the young. For reasons which now seem difficult to reconstruct imaginatively,
Starsky and
Hutch
of all programmes was singled out as a major culprit, a symbol of all that was wrong. ‘The Nice Mr Gardhouse’, as Ned called Ian, suggested that I do a piece as an academic forced to watch television, so I tapped away that Friday afternoon and came in the next day with a piece written in the persona of a Professor Donald Trefusis, extraordinary Fellow of St Matthew’s College, Cambridge, philologist and holder of the Regius Chair of Comparative Linguistics. Trefusis, it turned out, was indeed horrified at the violence of British television. The violence done to his sensibilities and the sensibilities of a young and vulnerable generation by Noel Edmonds and Terry Wogan and others made him shudder and shake. Thank goodness, he concluded, for the jolly car-chases and fight scenes where actors dressed as policemen pretend to shoot each other – without innocent merriment of that kind television would be insupportably damaging to the young.

Heavy steamroller irony, I suppose, but issuing from the querulous mouth of a gabbling tweedy don too old to care whom he might offend, it seemed to work well, well enough at any rate to encourage me to keep the character and try something similar the following week. Soon Trefusis became my sole weekly contributor. A paragraph of introduction would suggest the fiction that I, Stephen Fry, had gone round to his rooms at St Matthew’s to interview him. The Professor started to get a trickle of fan mail. One piece, in which he savagely tore into the fad for Parent Power in education, turned the trickle into a flood of hundreds of letters, most of them asking for a transcript of the talk, or ‘wireless essay’ as he preferred to call them. Trefusis’s age and perceived wisdom and authority allowed me to be ruder and more savagely satirical than I could
ever have been in my own vocal persona. The British are like that, especially the middle-class Radio 4 audience: a young snappy, angry person annoys them, and they shout at the radio for him to show some respect and get the spiritual and intellectual equivalent of a haircut. But let the same sentiments exactly, word for word, be uttered in high academic tones, as if by a compound of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Anthony Quinton, and they will roll on to their tummies and purr.