{"id":89886,"date":"2025-08-24T16:40:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T16:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/89886\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T16:40:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T16:40:09","slug":"sir-stephen-fry-court-jester-for-the-cultural-elite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/89886\/","title":{"rendered":"Sir Stephen Fry: court jester for the cultural elite"},"content":{"rendered":"

At 68, Stephen Fry is finally the age he was meant to be. Even though he subscribes to the argument Cyril Connolly advances in Enemies of Promise, that privately educated schoolboys remain locked in a permanent adolescence, he has always been old. At least that\u2019s how it strikes those of us now in our sixties, who have aged with him. As dispassionate observers, we have watched him achieve \u2018national treasure\u2019 status, an honour bestowed on such disparate figures as Joanna Lumley and the Windrush generation, by those who decide such things. To them, Fry is as much an institution as the literary giants and characters that formed him: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes and PG Wodehouse. Of the latter, Fry wrote, \u2018in my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language\u2019.<\/p>\n

This year, Fry received a knighthood. It was inevitable but perhaps later than he, and the rest of us, expected, given he has been acquainted with the current monarch longer than his tenure as a national treasure. In the 1990s, a joke did the rounds at the BBC: Stephen Fry\u2019s head is so far up Prince Charles\u2019s arse he can see Jonathan Dimbleby\u2019s shoes.<\/p>\n

The king and Fry are similar: learned, erudite men to some, yet superior, even arrogant, to others. \u2018You have to have arrogance as a comedian in the same way you do as a writer\u2019, Fry said earlier this year<\/a>. \u2018One of the primary arrogances of any writer is to assume that their experience is general and worth sharing.\u2019 In the decades since he came to prominence as Wodehouse\u2019s Jeeves with Hugh Laurie, his comedy partner from Cambridge Footlights days, as Bertie Wooster, there have been many experiences he deemed worthy of sharing on page and screen. <\/p>\n

So we know him, and we know so much about him: his teenage kleptomania that led to a stint in prison, his manic depression, his erudition, his celibacy, his homosexuality, his marriage to a spouse 30 years younger who, to us dispassionate observers, could have been his son from a previous marriage. Oscar Wilde, who he portrayed on film in 1997, alerted him to his sexuality during his formative years \u2013 \u2018his nature was the same as mine\u2019, Fry later reflected<\/a>. It\u2019s Wilde with whom he\u2019s been compared by those who decide on our national treasures and knighthoods. A comparison Fry rightly dismissed in an interview with the New York Times<\/a>: \u2018To combine Wilde\u2019s insight, acuity, kindness, breadth of reading, wisdom, human folly and divine talent is asking too much of anyone in our culture.\u2019<\/p>\n

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We know him. Even those of us with no desire to read Stephen Fry\u2019s six novels, 10 works of non-fiction and three autobiographies, or tune in to the abundant BBC projects that helped him amass his millions. This is more from disinterest than dislike. There were other performers that struck us as funnier than Fry and those of a similar pedigree, who came to prominence with the generation of \u2018alternative\u2019 comedians who rode a wave in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

Speaking of those with a similar pedigree, French and Saunders were provincial middle-class trainee teachers in the right place at the right time, who built a career on camp parody that tickled gay execs in the BBC\u2019s comedy department. Despite the mockney inflection, Ben Elton was the well-connected nephew of historian Sir Geoffrey Elton. As a stand-up comedian he was locked in his own state of arrested development \u2013 the hectoring student clinging to the causes and the catchphrases that saw him through his twenties, even though he too is now in his sixties, and old. <\/p>\n

It was class that separated this new breed of comedy act and the purveyors of the outmoded humour they replaced. Those of us reared on ITV in the 1970s remember Benny Hill in the background as our mothers flicked through Avon brochures and our fathers licked Green Shield stamps. On weekends, from Granada\u2019s fictional Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, Bernard Manning\u2019s blue jokes sent us off to bed on a Saturday night. As a puerile, passive viewer, I felt little affection for the northern comics and the saucy slapstick then popular, but none at all for the student politics and RAG-week-style routines that were seeing the old guard off.<\/p>\n

The working-class comedians who commandeered light entertainment at the time had honed their craft at northern social and working men\u2019s clubs. The emerging generation of comics were graduates who rose rapidly from London\u2019s Comedy Store or Cambridge Footlights to front series for the BBC and a nascent Channel 4, where their peers at university had taken up roles as producers and commissioning editors. Despite the \u2018alternative\u2019 tag, they were very much a product of the establishment. This was particularly true of Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson<\/a> \u2013 the latter undoubtedly being the most entitled of this new order, with her mother an actress, her father a BBC veteran (he adapted and narrated The Magic Roundabout), and the obligatory high-end Hampstead upbringing before Cambridge called.<\/p>\n

Fry and Thompson are inextricably linked by elite schools, Hampstead (Fry\u2019s place of birth, too), Cambridge, the BBC and an affiliation with the man who would be king. Now Fry is a Sir, Thompson is a Dame and the views they proffer on issues of the day have become more noteworthy than the work they produce.<\/p>\n

This is true of their fellow travellers from that distant age who, in any other industry, would be retired and receiving their pension. Dawn French can be found giving her take on Hamas and Israel<\/a> on Instagram. Jennifer Saunders will be airing her views on Nigel Farage and Reform UK on Channel 4\u2019s Gogglebox.<\/p>\n

In a slow week for Armageddon earlier this summer, Dame Emma Thompson took a break from climate-change activism<\/a> to suggest that sex should be available on the NHS<\/a>. She even adopted that fretful Lady Bountiful look that\u2019s as evident in her roles as Forster\u2019s Margaret Schlegel, Austen\u2019s Elinor Dashwood, as it was when acting in a Marks & Spencer ad alongside Doreen Lawrence. At roughly the same time, Stephen Fry accused JK Rowling<\/a> of being radicalised by \u2018TERFs\u2019 for challenging the motives of the transgender lobby. <\/p>\n

His use of the ugly \u2018TERF\u2019 was an odd choice for one so enthralled by the beauty of the English language (he examined etymology in the BBC series, Fry\u2019s Planet Word in 2011). I guess it\u2019s in keeping with the fluffy phrases he falls back on during chat-show interviews, when referring to sex or genitalia.<\/p>\n

Like the BBC, Rowling helped Sir Stephen top up his millions. He narrates the Harry Potter audiobooks and previously commended her on her Potter fable, as it taps into the stories and ancient myths that captivated him as a child. Fry has written about these in Mythos (2017) and in several books since, the most recent being Odyssey (2024). He maintains that by understanding ancient myths, we appreciate the eternal truths central to human behaviour. \u2018Morals are not eternal verities\u2019, he says. \u2018They are what we think of as right now.\u2019 This could explain his reaction to critics of transgenderism, hinting that they are simply following contemporary conventions and morals. But surely biological sex is an eternal verity and gender identity isn\u2019t?<\/p>\n

The ancient past and near future are each an obsession for Fry. He was early to the World Wide Web, and first among his friends to embrace email. He jettisoned Twitter after Elon Musk took the helm and transformed it into X. While Fry is a vocal champion of free speech, it\u2019s a courtesy he doesn\u2019t extend to everyone. As he put it in an interview<\/a> last year, social media are responsible for \u2018all kinds of beastly and horrific things that coloured this utopian dream of an internet connecting people and gave it nothing but horror and despair\u2019. <\/p>\n

But beyond the trolls and the conspiracy theorists, it provides a platform for the voices of a marginalised majority who interpret major events differently from the establishment Fry is loyal to: the BBC, the monarchy, the Labour Party. For the latter\u2019s leaders, from Neil Kinnock to Gordon Brown, he wrote speeches. These institutions belittle or ignore the issues central to the lives of a disgruntled public heading towards the Howard Beale moment in Network: \u2018I\u2019m mad as hell, and I\u2019m not taking it any more.\u2019 And who knows, something like a revolution will not be televised, but it might be forged on social media and on the streets of London and Essex<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The English language Stephen Fry loves is being doctored. The illegal immigration that is proving catastrophic is now \u2018irregular immigration\u2019. Those murdered by Islamists<\/a> have \u2018lost their lives\u2019. The ideology behind the murders is secondary to the need for our multi-faith community to heal, and not be divided by hate. Seldom has this been more offensive and overt than with the feeble commemorative notices marking the 20th anniversary of the London bombings<\/a> in 2005 this July, from the prime minister, the king and the London mayor. The language we use, and which Fry gestured towards with his attack on Rowling, is also under threat with Labour\u2019s planned \u2018banter ban<\/a>\u2019, intended for pubs and offices, as well as its proposed Islamophobia definition<\/a>, which aims to silence criticism of Islam.<\/p>\n

\u2018I am a lover of truth\u2019, Fry tells us, \u2018a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance\u2019. Yet, we have heard little of his reaction to these developments, despite his willingness to speak out on other issues of the day.<\/p>\n

He did provide Jordan Peterson with some brilliant back up at Toronto\u2019s Munk Debate<\/a> in 2018, when they argued against \u2018political correctness\u2019 \u2013 a term that doesn\u2019t sufficiently sum up the moronic mindset it addresses, and the lethal moment it has led us to. When Fry takes time away from the past and the future to comment on the present, is it an attempt at relevance or simply part of the performance, part of the public persona that will persist even if the projects dry up? \u2018I am always for an audience\u2019, Fry said not so long ago<\/a>. \u2018Every time I write a phrase \u2013 even when I\u2019m speaking now, I\u2019m thinking of people at home listening\u2026 I\u2019m so aware of it.\u2019 <\/p>\n

To his audience he, like the current king, remains a quaint character from another age \u2013 the crusty don, the confirmed bachelor, or the eccentric uncle, funny to some, unfunny to others. Fry maintains, modestly, that he has never had the capacity to be an intellectual or an academic. When The Times described him as an \u2018avuncular public intellectual\u2019 in 2021, he responded with: \u2018Oh my lordy lord. Avuncular gives me great pleasure. But I disavow \u201cintellectual\u201d, just as I disavow \u201cartist\u201d. I am, I think, an entertainer, impure and simple.\u2019<\/p>\n

This has enabled him to write, act, and front series and documentaries on travel (Stephen Fry In America), depression (Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive), homosexuality (Stephen Fry: Out There) and maybe one day Stephen Fry on \u2018hats\u2019, a project that has been a work-in-progress for a while, and an ambition for longer. Whatever the whim, a prominent publisher or our public broadcaster will be willing to finance it as a book, radio series or television programme. He has, in marketing speak, \u2018reach\u2019. Before Fry made his excuses and left Twitter, he had 13million followers. <\/p>\n

He had flounced off Twitter on several occasions because he was frequently criticised and challenged by the public. But it was that pesky democracy that irked him over Brexit. In 2023, he referred to it as \u2018a clown car crash and you can\u2019t help being amused by it\u2019. Prior to the EU referendum, Emma Thompson said we should be opening borders rather than closing them, an issue that concerned her as much as the prospect of Tesco Metro opening in her Hampstead village, which, naturally, she campaigned against. Thompson informed us that Britain was \u2018a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island\u2019, as she bought a home in Venice. Yet like Fry, she is a product and a champion of a certain type of England, one in which the BBC, Oxbridge and \u2013 despite her paternalistic, leftish leanings \u2013 the monarchy holds sway. Such an England appealed to the young Stephen Fry when he was a proud old school, one nation Tory, attending Conservative f\u00eates and whist drives. This was before the wind changed \u2013 \u2018The wind\u2019s name was Margaret Thatcher\u2019, he says. After Thatcher, supporting the Labour Party became obligatory, expedient and a career move for the comic performers of Fry\u2019s generation. <\/p>\n

Class is therefore central to the England that appeals to Sir Stephen and Dame Emma. One far more immersed in nostalgia than the Britain of Brexit supporters, who are responding to very contemporary challenges. For many Leave voters, England has become \u2018misery-laden\u2019 because of the migration crisis, among other things. For many natives it remains the only home they have known, and the only home they may ever know. Which is why they are angry at those intent on destroying it, and their relation to it.<\/p>\n

A home in Albion\u2019s pastoral idyll features in the fantasy that Fry has often allowed himself, when musing on the life he might have led in a house, a very big house in the country \u2013 \u2018not necessarily a grand house, certainly not Downton Abbey or anything, but enough to have hens who laid eggs and that every year I would make pickles and jams and that my only career would be a writer\u2019. It\u2019s the society he longed to join when he first encountered the worlds Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse were writing about. Fry never became the lord of the manor, but having arrived at the age he was always meant to be, two years away from 70, consolation has come by way of a knighthood. An honour that wasn\u2019t conferred on Wodehouse until the month before his death, aged 93, and one that Waugh expected but never received. <\/p>\n

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