The True History of the Blackadder (23 page)

To this day neither Hugh nor Stephen can agree on how the two would make meaningful personal contact beyond mumbled post-gig congratulations – whether it was Thompson dragging Fry to Hugh’s home where they instantly began working on a song for the Footlights pantomime together, or perhaps Hugh rolling up at Stephen’s rooms for tea, crumpets and chess – but as Fry was to affirm in his second volume of autobiography in 2010, ‘The moment Hugh Laurie and I started to exchange ideas it was starkly and most wonderfully clear that we shared absolutely the same sense of what was funny and the same scruples, tastes and sensitivities as to what we found derivative, cheap, obvious or stylistically unacceptable.’

STEPHEN JOHN FRY B ORN : 24 August 1957, Hampstead, London

‘One of the interesting things about being English is that people who are said to be exemplars are often curiously hybrid, as I am,’ Fry offers of his genealogy. ‘My father’s family, the Frys, are as
English as you can get. As my great-uncle George wrote in a not highly successful book entitled
The Saxon Origins of the Fry Family
, “unlike so many so-called English families, the Frys did not come over with the Conqueror, they were there to meet him when he arrived”. But my mother’s family is entirely East European Jewish.’

Fry was the middle child of three born to physicist and inventor Alan and his wife Marianne, and from a very young age it was clear that he was more of a handful than his older brother Roger and little sister Jo put together. A relatively idyllic infancy in Norfolk was interrupted at the age of seven when the time came to decamp to prep school at Stout’s Hill in the West Country, where he was acknowledged to be notably gifted, but equally averse to school rules and discipline – a trait which was only exacerbated when he progressed to Uppingham School in Rutland. Between a tendency towards kleptomania, which funded his hard-core addiction to sweets, and the heartbreak which came from coming to terms with his own sexuality (having fallen head over heels in love with a fellow pupil), Fry’s regular rebellion led to expulsion from the school at fifteen for going AWOL in London, supposedly addressing the Sherlock Holmes Society, but indulging his love for cinema by watching
Cabaret
and
The Godfather
on a loop.

He spent even less time at his next school before being shown the door, and at the age of sixteen tried to take his own life. The failure of this attempt did not lead to any turning over of new leaves, and one year later he reached a nadir when he stole the credit card of a family friend and led police on a cross-country chase, until the law finally caught up with him in a hotel in Swindon, and the teenager was placed on remand for three months at the misleadingly cuddly-sounding Pucklechurch prison in Gloucestershire.

Whether due to the suffering of his family, or the experience of playing the ‘Professor’ role for his fellow inmates, who had far
fewer opportunities in life than the public-school boy, Stephen left prison and marched confidently towards rehabilitation, gaining a place at City College Norwich by assuring administrators that his A-level grades would earn him a place at Cambridge – and being proved right. A short period of teaching (and mastering smoking a pipe) in Yorkshire presaged his entrance into Queens’ College on an English scholarship in 1977. A sensible return to teaching after gaining his degree was his only ambition, but as his two decades of existence had already shown, nothing in Fry’s life ran along conventional lines.

JAMES HUGH CALUM LAURIE B ORN : 11 June 1959, Oxford

The Lauries are an ancient Scottish family, but Hugh’s father, Olympic rowing hero and colonial doctor William Laurie (known as ‘Ran’, from his middle name Ranald), was born in Cambridgeshire and settled in Oxford with his family after serving in World War II. By the late fifties, William and his wife Patricia already had a son and two daughters, and one more addition to the family, several years on, came as something of a surprise.

Their youngest son would have his work cut out earning the respect of his parents, and the pressure of having to follow in the footsteps of his gold-medallist father, coupled with a stern Presbyterian upbringing, would not allow the baby of the family any of the swagger which prejudice would suggest comes from being the product of a privileged background. Like his father and brother before him, Hugh would be sent to the world’s most elitist school, Eton College, but this exclusive environment, which had churned out world leaders for centuries, failed to instil the
school’s traditional sense of superiority in the youngster. In fact, his parents struggled to put Hugh through the college, and he admits, ‘I went to a very posh school with some very posh people, but I’m not especially posh myself.’ He was a gifted child with an innate musical ability, plus a deep love of the blues, passed down to him by his brother. Crucially, he also excelled on the sports field, which at Eton was more important than any academic achievement.

For all his gifts, Laurie describes himself, particularly in adolescence, as a ‘horrible’ child: lazy, discourteous and difficult, and he has underlined in the past a particularly fraught relationship with his mother, for whom he never felt any achievement was good enough. However, he credits his teenage redemption to the discovery of the works of P. G. Wodehouse, almost single-handedly converting the stroppy adolescent into a bringer of sweetness and light. Winning a scholarship to Selwyn College, Cambridge, also just like his father, Laurie may not have been academically minded, but remained determined to make Ran proud with his rowing career, before making himself useful in some far-flung corner of the Empire.

Having arrived at Queens’ College after a year of teaching and a period at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Stephen Fry was committed to immersing himself in the world of academe, and despite a rich love of comedy from Wilde, Wodehouse and Coward to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Cook & Moore and Morecambe & Wise, he had no thoughts of the Footlights until he and Laurie clicked in that second year. Tall, thin and saturnine, with meticulously fluffy verbiage on tap and prone to tweed and pipe-sucking, the sudden manifestation of young Fry within the Footlights coterie like the bastard son of Graham Chapman was so smooth it’s a wonder that his comic powers weren’t unearthed earlier, but even after a thirty-year friendship, the Footlighter who
rubber-stamped his entry only offers, ‘I just delight in the way his brain works.’ Both well over six feet, the goggle-eyed Hugh and bent-nosed Stephen stood out together in any crowd, and over the tops of their contemporaries’ heads, the duo made a connection which has survived decades of fame, crises of depression and transatlantic career moves, to become one of Britain’s most loved double acts. ‘We were very traditional,’ Fry says, ‘he was the straight man, I was the homosexual man, which is the way it always works.’

When a comedy partnership is forged out of a deep friendship rather than showbiz accident or financial expediency, the love they have for each other tends to be returned by the public a hundredfold, although Fry has noted, ‘One of the most fortunate things really for me, as a gay man, is that I never fancied him. Although he’s extremely good-looking – which he is, and a lot of women could faint at the sight of him – fortunately, for some reason, that switch was never on with me and Hugh. And it would have been embarrassing if it had been, if you think about it.’ Although Stephen and Hugh have flourished apart for longer than they were a partnership, for many fans, no amount of solo success can overshadow the blessed twinning of Fry & Laurie (the ampersand is significant), a partnership which began in the Michaelmas term of 1979.

The new colleagues were only credited sketch writers for the following summer’s revue (Footlights’ first all-female show), but by their last year, they and Thompson had formed a strong comic group, with Emma repeating her final terms for theatrical reasons, despite having already been enthusiastically signed up to the Noel Gay organisation by Richard Armitage. Cambridge comedy was not just about the annual Footlights shows at the Arts Theatre and the Fringe, and the show that was to become
The Cellar Tapes
emerged from months of charity balls, private parties and smokers.
^fn2

With his allegiance now shifted from the rowing team to his new comedy chums, Laurie could be terrifying in the face of barracking and heckling, dragging one ‘bijou revolutionary’ out from an Emmanuel College May Ball entertainment and shaking him by the throat until the whole marquee quaked, yelling, ‘Don’t you dare insult my friends!’ ‘I used to have a lot of confidence,’ he admitted on
Desert Island Discs
in 1996, ‘I used to think: “I know I can do this; I can stand on a stage with virtually nothing and no idea of what I’m going to say or do, and know that it will be all right, I can make it work.” And as soon as I started doing it for a living, it all changed, I don’t know why. One of the strange things that happened was that hitherto I had always thought of audiences as being female in character, and when I started to do it professionally for some reason they became male. They became competitive, an adversary that had to be conquered, and I imagined rows of men with their arms folded saying, “Go on then!” I have to confess I’d get very aggressive. Stephen and I would absolutely seethe with rage if we hadn’t triumphed.’

Laurie had been such a team player since his first year at Cambridge that it seemed natural for him to inherit the presidency in 1981, with Jan Ravens remaining to direct the revue he and Stephen were poised to stitch together. Fry had indoctrinated multitalented and dirty-minded fresher Tony Slattery into the troupe, although the acknowledged thespian star of their generation, Simon Russell Beale, turned down a similar offer, to concentrate on his serious craft. With Paul Shearer (who was fated to remain an unknown in British Comedy until his roles in
The Fast Show
more than a decade later) and Penny Dwyer (who relinquished comedy for a career in metallurgy before her tragic death in 2003),
The Cellar Tapes
team became without a doubt the first Footlights gang to rival the success of Cleese’s generation seventeen years previously. As they rehearsed, Fry & Laurie would gaze up at the imposing monochrome icons of Footlights Past – Cook, Cleese, Garden et al. – and confirm to each other that the good times were gone. Nevertheless,
The Cellar Tapes
would trace the same path as every previous May Week revue, plopping into the Edinburgh Fringe melting pot in August 1981. Hugh was adamant, that if nothing else, the new show would be different. ‘I was absolutely determined that it should be very grown-up, in that very pompous sort of twenty-year-old way. Some of the previous revues had been very sprightly, with young undergraduates nipping around the stage, and that had rather nauseated me, so I wanted to do something … rather sick, in fact. And I chose Stephen. Not for the sickness reason, but because he appeared then to be about sixty.’