A Little Bit of Stephen Fry Stephen Fry in conversation with Anindita Ghose

[Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] trump [Music] on behalf of festival co-director's number the goalkeeper william dalton and all my colleagues at teamwork arts welcome back to glf's bravery world all 100 earlier sessions featuring the best writers from across the world including aran palm of margaret atwood peter carey his holiness the dalai lama harvard jacobson ian mckeown and so many others these are all available to view on our facebook page jlfredfest and on our youtube channel jaipur lit fest jlf our official radio partner is red fm vajate rahu our session today is a little bit of stephen fry stephen fry in conversation with anandita ghosh stephen fry is one of the world's best known actors and comedians when he arrived in cambridge he was a convicted thief an addict and a failed suicide convinced that he would be expelled instead university life offered him love and the chance to entertain he befriended bright young things like hulari and actress emma thompson here fry talks about his life and work with mint lounge editor anandita kosh as he tells the hilarious and compelling story of how he took his first step in the worlds of theater radio television and film stephen fry is an english actor screenwriter author playwright journalist poet comedian television presenter film director and all-round national treasure fry has written and presented several documentary series contributed columns and articles for newspapers and magazines appears frequently on radio reads for voice-overs and has written four novels and three volumes of autobiography moab is my wash pot the fry chronicles and his latest more fool me for the show festival in niagara on the lake ontario canada during the summer of 2018 fry gave 13 presentations of his trilogy of one-man shows and i hope you all are exhausted just listening to all that he's done anandita ghosh is the editor of mint lounge the award-winning saturday magazine of the indian business daily mint he studied to be a linguist and was previously the features director of vogue india please remember to comment and ask questions by typing it into the comment section and anandita will put these across to stephen at the end of the show in case any of you drop off due to bandwidth issues you can find us on our youtube channel jeff or lit fest and of course if we drop off just hang in there we'll be right back ladies and gentlemen a little bit of stephen fry stephen fry in conversation with adandetago over to you thank you sonjoy and hello stephen it's uh good to be speaking with you four years after your first visit to the jaipur literature festival it was a great session and i hope this one will be as well so firstly because the kovid lockdown is you know top of everybody's minds uh tell us how you've been dealing with the lockdown where and what books have been keeping you company well i've been very fortunate because uh i have a house in the countryside in england in norfolk on the east east side of england and i've been able to spend almost all the lock down there and that has been a magical thing we've had a wonderful spring a beautiful beautiful april and may and so a lot of walking and listening to birdsong and all the things that uh seclusion allows you to do and indeed yes reading and writing and i've also kind of set up a little bit of a sound booth where i can get away with doing audio books and other such uh vocal work which you know is pretty simple to do so it hasn't been too much of a strain for me to be perfectly honest naturally one misses seeing one's friends but my family will live in the same part of england um so i've been able to see my mother once we were allowed to go outside and visit people on the lawns of their houses and so on so really i have very little to complain about you hear the phrase don't you that we're all in the same boat but actually of course we're all on the same sea but we're all in very different vessels on that sea and some people are in very leaky little vessels uh and and are having a pretty hard time with it and other people of course are on super cruisers um and it's uh it's like being you know it's like luxury for them and i'm i'm sorry somewhere in the middle or the higher end of the middle with my good fortune so stephen uh sanjay just uh you know in the introduction read out a list of you know uh partially a list of everything you've done and what you've written so it's not a surprise that uh is stephen fry writing another book is a very top uh google search term as i found out today so you know for the benefit of all those who've sent out that query i'm just going to ask that to you uh what are you working on right now well um the answer is a very greedy three actually i finished um the third of uh of a sequence i'm doing on greek mythology uh and this book is on troy the trojan war uh the lead up to it all the excitements you know the the judgment of paris and the uh the abduction of helen and the birth of achilles and all these uh remarkable stories and then the war itself including of course the part of the war that is covered the only it's really only about 10 days that is covered by homer in his um masterpiece the the epic poem the iliad um and my next book then will be the return home the the odyssey and the the oristiae as it's called of you know agamemnon's death and his children and all the extraordinary stories that kind of bid farewell to the world of greek myth so that was very exciting and i've just literally finished doing the audio book for that but also when the knock down started i was this is so childish and silly really but i was i was sorting out uh drawers in my house where clothes were which i hadn't seen for ages and i came across two huge drawers full of ties neckties bow ties and cravats uh and i sorted through there hundreds and hundreds of them and so i thought i'd post uh a new tie each day on instagram and talk about it because ties have extra like anything if you put your mind to it there is a cultural history that can be drawn out from an object and a tie is a very personal object literally of course it goes close around someone's neck but there are also remarkable histories of ties and how they developed and where they came from and and also stories behind the great fashion houses for some reason i found i had ties by valentino and you know uh i've been following the hashtag you have you have some very interesting ones it is strange so anyway uh the publishing world being what it is as you well know uh i got a request from my publishers saying do you think there's a book in this because it became very popular this daily fry's ties as i was calling it on instagram so i'll be putting together a book of that they're obviously involved in some photo photographic sessions we haven't started and a third uh book that i'm produced next year um is i did a podcast series called stephen fry's seven deadly sins um and it's a obviously a it's like a hubristic thing to suggest that i have the the weight to be able to pronounce on something as grave and interesting as philosophically uh beguiling and as complex as as sins uh i'm certainly not a religious person as as many people might know so it seems an odd choice perhaps but it really comes from my thinking which i'm sure is shared by most people watching that the the the venomous atmosphere of the so-called culture wars uh that develops and has been developing over the past few years and intensifying and becoming more venomous um uh it was really beginning to distress me and i thought well almost anything people write about is is sort of a missile hurled at the enemy across the ravine the ever widening grand canyon that is opened up between all the different whether you you know somewhere inside there's a kernel of what we used to call left and right nationalism and internationalism uh holism and atomism you know there are all kinds of different ways of trying to explain it but we're all dimly aware that there are there is a kind of an opposing point of view from ours and um but what very few people do is look inwards uh towards the soul partly because if they do they're likely to be religious and you have to cleave to their beliefs in order to make sense of what they're saying but it struck me that almost everybody and this was a point the the in the enlightenment philosopher emmanuel kant made is that everybody has a an inner sense you know like jiminy cricket in the disney pinocchio film a little conscience perched on your shoulder that tells you that what you're doing is wrong that you're guilty that this you've fallen short in some way and there's a lot of self-dissatisfaction underneath all of it again i'm no psychologist but i think we all know that aggression is often the result of self-doubt and self-loathing um and self-aggress self-oppression and all the other self-self self things and so i i wanted to just explore these seven deadly sins which are pride and uh avarice lust envy gluttony uh uh anger and sloth uh roth and sloth but if you say anger and sloth and it makes a handy acronym pale gas so um so i did i did this um series and it seemed to go very well it got an enormous number of followers and viewers uh are not viewers listeners it's a podcast so again i'm i'm doing a book on that so those are my plans long answers sorry okay no i know um you know i'm sure the listeners are waiting to kind of get into your cambridge days and we'll get to that but since you mentioned you know this kind of online you know the troll culture and cancel culture and i think it's very relevant right now especially because you are presently on a twitter break and you were one of the you know very early adopters of twitter you were one of the very first kind of twitter personalities as such as in a personality in real life but also a twitter personality and you've taken frequent breaks i think there was a big one around 10 years ago when you said that you were really frustrated with public group think and i think and i'm sure you'd agree in these 10 years that's become far worse uh you know people have become far more vicious in fact just last week i wrote about this san francisco-based ux designer who's proposed kindness tools on twitter so he suggests that twitter has you know i made a mistake button and a forgive button to get to get users to start using tools to kind of think and be more empathetic so um you know quickly before we kind of move on to the more pleasant what are your thoughts on cancel culture you know the whole troll culture and how can one deal with it surely just taking twitter breaks periodically isn't enough so how do you really deal with it it's an extraordinarily good question and a teacher and i wish i i could provide a simple answer or a clear one but again i'm turning in on myself uh i am as filled with fear as anybody else in not wanting to do the wrong thing i have a dread of offending people in fact it's probably too strong a dread but it is a strong dread so i try not to lose my temper because i fear that i might say something that upsets people but i also have a have a fury at things that strike me as being absurd and wrong and i feel i feel do you know there was a great film i mean this is going to sound so completely irrelevant called uh war games john badham film with matthew broderick you may remember it about a computer that takes over the thermonuclear work of the american government and starts to prepare for a war because it thinks it's playing a game anyway in order to stop it they realize it doesn't understand one thing futility so it's a wonderful ai movie actually um and so they teach it to play what americans call tic-tac-toe naughts and crosses which as you know from a very early age as a child you can never lose you know you can as long as you're being smart you can you never lose a game of knots and crosses so it teaches it to the computer that plays and plays and plays and then it stops and thinks for a while and then stops playing the thermal nuclear game because it realizes it's a similar game and it comes up with this wonderful phrase on the screen strange game the only winning move is not to play and and that is my feeling about the council culture and social media was part of me i hear jk rowling who's a friend um do i want to come to a aid and speak for her do i want to speak for my community of lgbtq people without offending them there's only one way to win this game and that's not to play it and that is cowardice i completely appreciate it scoured is that maybe if i was made of stronger stuff i would hurl myself into the fray and to hell with what people thought of me but i'm not made of that stuff and so my move is not to play and that's part of why i took a twitter holiday was a fear of saying something or reacting maybe one evening i'd have a drink and just type something foolish uh who knows um and also uh just looking at the trends and so on was making me feel sick you know literally physically sick and so and so i i thought and i can understand why people might say well if you're in a public position you've got 13 million followers and you believe in things and you stand for things and you represent groups of people whether it's people with mental health problems or people from the lgbt community you have a duty to get in there and just you know you are doing the equivalent of going off into a montaigne ivory tower or into some seclusion into some rich person's paradise where you don't get involved in the dirt and thrust of this and i can understand why some people might say that but i hope they can understand that i have to have to live a life and try and be cheerful and and that i i do my best to time it and maybe things like you know taking a break and occasionally doing something silly like the ties and then something more serious like the seven deadly sins is the best way i can both contribute to some sort of talk about the way we behave and who we are and entertain which is the thing i most want to do in the world and also keep my insanity i think that's my answer not just you know your 13 million followers you have a duty to yourself as well i guess self presence yes exactly um right but you know it sounds particularly tragic um you know i i feel i feel really bad for comedians or you know stand-up comments emerging in this time because so much of comedy and uh you know you started off doing comedy is is that thin line between offense and entertainment uh so i want to ask you know and it's a good seg to kind of go to the past um um how do you think you know how do you think things would have been different if you were starting off you emma thompson and you laurie in today's day and age could you even do comedy could you really push the buttons blackadder a little bit of fry and lorry how do you be a comedian how can you uh you know in this kind of age of virtue signaling and people kind of taking offense as a sign of showing how engaged they are uh how would it happen it's a really good question that i i find it very difficult to answer i mean funnily enough someone on twitter a few weeks ago had uh had posted a a sort of clip or it was longer than a gif it was a a a clip from blackadder and i just sort of noticed it in the stream it gameplay it had some relevance to something going on it was not particularly political but there were a number of a number of of comments underneath from tweets from people basically saying okay boomer you know ie your old men and what's what are these white privileged men doing that's not comedy what was that about and and i can see yes fair enough i mean it was it was it was a comedy about men mostly um and it was about a kind of history uh that was is locked into a certain view of our country with kings and queens and hierarchies but i think the point about that is that is so interesting and it's a it's a very difficult one to to get into in any real depth but essentially um i grew up in a high the remains of a hierarchical world and if if we imagine that the opposite of hierarchical is a networked world so that instead of there being levels there are nodes like as in you know as in the information kind of uh the language of claude shannon and of networking and um and this is something that i i funny enough i did i did a a a long extended uh university essay on this very subject in terms of dickens charles dickens in in that he showed how the world of victorian london was a network rather than a hierarchy and a perfect proof of that which is what we're living in at the moment of course is a disease which which works in a network way not in the hierarchical way and the diseases break hierarchies anyway the the the point really i'm making is that a comedy like black adder utterly depends on your believing in a hierarchy because that's where the comedy comes from those below mocking those above right and indeed sometimes making fun of those below so in in black edit there's a character baldrick who's at the bottom of the heap and represents the peasant at the bottom and there's a king or a general or someone who who literally has power over life and death and that's important in blackout he at any moment he could actually have his head chopped off or be sent to be shot and and um and so there's this threat and there's this childish enjoyment that people like me who grew up in a hierarchical world feel which is mocking your teachers which is doing impressions of the people of so-called above you and refusing to accept that they're above you so being a rebel but you can't be a rebel in a network you can only be a rebel in a hierarchy so part of the problem that my generation faces is that we attempt to be we think of ourselves as rebellious maverick you know progressive and so on but we don't realize that all the levels that we were rebelling against have melted away and that there's a different kind of world of privilege and a hierarchy that's not expressed as a hierarchy but within the network and we don't really we're not really tuned to it so we're a bit shocked when when we're made to feel that our language or our approach is somehow not just old-fashioned but almost offensive because we've always thought we were on the side of the angels and it doesn't make sense you know i mean when i was a boy although i don't remember it lenny bruce was in london doing comedy and he was in new york with police in his gig because he was using certain words and he dared use them and he was arrested he was imprisoned because he used words like or whatever it might be and on one famous show he did he said i'm not going to say that anymore i'm going to say blah blah have you had your blah blah lately and he did the whole thing using uh little nonsense words or euphemisms instead of the swear words he wasn't allowed to use and as he ended it he said that's the filthiest show i've ever done and he was making a point about language and now we all those words that tom larry used we can i can use in this conversation i mean i probably won't because some people still might just think it's a bit bit strong but generally speaking there's you know there isn't one of those they're no longer taboo um and something else has replaced and if you're cheap you can say it's just no different people are puritans they're just puritans about different things and what you you know the victorians used to find this offensive and then in the 60s this was offensive and now something else is offensive it's just young people being puritans as young people always will be they want to command the cultural landscape and the they want to to define the terms by which we're allowed to live and to hell with them and and no i can understand why some old people will feel that they just think you know how dare you accuse me of being racist or sexist or transphobic or this that or the other i keep my own counsel i know what i feel don't tell me what i am and what language i'm allowed to use and i can understand that but i can also understand that um there is a there has been an academic since the french the much derided so-called crypto marxist infiltration of the campuses but you know it was around the time i was at cambridge that we were you know uh the the roland bart and deridar and lacan uh and foucault and all these great french thinkers were absolutely the height of fashion there was indeed a famous debating cambridge about well you know which was the old school against the new school and amongst that intellectuals like judith butler and so on who were writing about gendering uh this has slowly crept through into public consciousness and we are aware now far more different things about it you know and phrases that used to be um uh completely unmisunderstood like cisgender or heteronormative and so on and now out there in the general language and uh you can't put that genie back in the bottle it it it can't be done anywhere stephen since now you've mentioned campus it's uh it's good to move to you know your happy early days before twitter was in the horizon uh you know in in your book in the second of your three autobiographies and the fry chronicles you've written in depth about your first meeting with hugh how emma combs introduced you and it quite reads like the stuff of a great lifelong romance you know how you met and kind of worked for the next few hours without having said hello so could you speak a little bit about i mean in a way both of you were really fortunate for meeting each other that early and forming that kind of creative partnership so could you tell us a little bit about that and also um the fact that emma thompson was part it was a trial she introduced you and she was part of the in the beginning but then it became a duel do you regret that or or how did how kind of that happen no it's it's an interesting uh point actually yes when i first arrived at cambridge um on probation uh legally i had just by the skin of my teeth avoided prison we may or may not have time to go into that but uh uh at least i i was free and i got into gambling i got this scholarship to cambridge and i i thought i'm going to be good for the rest of my time i i've sowed my wild oats and now is the time to grow sage as the old uh churchill quote has it so i um i i wasn't planning to do much outside study but there was this world of drama and and i saw a production in my first or second week virtually uh of tom stoppard's travesties and there was this girl in it who was so perfect that i thought she must be a professional actress who had been helicoptered in and then i i got to know because we were on the same course of reading english and we were doing the same seminars and it was emma thompson and she just was like athena the goddess he was just born fully armed with talent and we became friends and we were you know in a play together and i was doing serious plays but i then wrote a play which was a comedy and it was based on my experience as an assistant teacher at a prep school in england in the in my gap year before going to university and it was it was a comedy a sort of dark naughty comedy really called latin um and emma told you about it and he went to see it and he it was the end of our second year by this time and i didn't know you but uh he had he'd been an awesome and rowing in road against oxford and that had been his whole purpose in coming together kind of a person you wouldn't ordinarily like an accident no exactly as an athlete exactly um but he had this gift and in his second year he uh he couldn't row because he had he'd had um mononucleosis and so you know glandular fever and so so he'd been off and so he started to do comedy and in his third year he had the choice of being president of this comedy club called the footlights or or captain of the university boat club and he claims he spun a coin and it came down in favor of the comedy club so emma came to me at the beginning of our third year she came to my rooms and she said i want to introduce you to someone so she dragged me off from my college queens to seoul in college um and knocked on the door and there was a shout of come in and i opened it and there sitting on a bed with a guitar on his lap was hugh laurie and his girlfriend katie was in the corner making some tea or coffee or pouring some wine or whatever it was and he went hello and i said hello he said i'm just writing a song and he started playing this song that he was writing which was a kind of mock protest song was very funny so he said but that's as far as i've got and so i said well you could try this so we started working on lyrics for a second verse then we did the third verse and he said well what about this we got we got to do this this turn has got to be a pantomime a footlights pantomime he started doing it and we started writing and right and emma and his girlfriend katie were just watching us and thinking this is very strange they haven't actually introduced each other they didn't they just they've just sat down and started writing and that's sort of how it happened it was bizarre and i do describe it as light love at first sight and non a non-erotic love at first sight you don't get more straight than you laurie but but but it was like a what would now be called the bromance of course but um but it was particularly centered around comedy around a sense of humor around and a sense of humor especially at a late adolescent early manhood age i say manhood advisory i think it involves something very deep about one's apprehension of the world it's a kind of in or out you you either see the world out the way i do or you don't if you don't you're not the enemy it's just we're not keyed into each other we don't map on to each other but you know adolescents are like that aren't they we you know they share the same sources they find the same things pretentious it's a very strong streak in the in in the young is to is to be outraged by things that they regard as pretentious when you get older you you don't mind so much but when you're young you think girl that's so potential you get really upset by it but it means you do lots of parodies of it as well anyway so we just ended up we said we started writing and um with emma i mean we stayed closest to friends and i wrote with emma and and for emma we wrote some sketches for her but the thing with hugh was so close and so particular and on stage together as well that um and m was also more interested still in doing other acting besides comedy so we we we did it and we you know that we then did our our show that traditionally from cambridge goes to edinburgh every year and that year at edinburgh it so happened they had this new prize called the perrier award for the best comedy which is still going and it's still considered very important and we won it amazing we were astonished uh to have won it because this was around the time of the birth of the stand-up and we were old-fashioned sketch comedy kind of like a two-man show was it a two-man sketch no no it was me hugh emma tony slattery is a funny and brilliant performer who was a year below us and two others as well and uh so and it was sketch comedy so it was little scenes that we would do uh you know someone knocking at the door come in you know and then there'd be a shot sketch rather than standing in front of a microphone saying you know isn't life awful or isn't quite funny so we weren't stand-ups at all there was always a fictional world that we were creating but anyway we won the award and the bbc asked if they could put it on television and then we were asked if we would tour australia and when we came back we were asked to do a television series and suddenly hugh claims he planned to join the hong kong police force because he'd heard that there was corruption there and he wanted to go in and clean it out like a kind of like serpico you know the al pacino movie serbia just being be the one clean cop you know it was a fantasy but a very typical hugh one um otherwise he would have joined the secret service i think because he was a natural james bond did you study at all with all of this going on was there any studying at cambridge not really one of the huge advantages that we both had is we were both doing uh an arts degree or at least i mean he was doing archaeology and anthropology and i was doing english literature and they don't involve having to go to lectures and they don't involve having to know particular things you just have to go into an examination room at the end of your last year and answer lots of questions with long long essays and i've always been very good at that um you know it's just like cheating i mean i have a you know a facile mind rather than a scholastic one so if if if asked to do an essay i can just write them right and write so i was very fortunate hugh he went to one lecture in his entire three years yeah exactly and he turned that into a sketch because the lecture was about someone doing was showing slides about the bantu people of africa so he managed to make a sketch out of this uh uh um anthropologian so so yeah the that's the advantage of cambridge is once they let you in they assume that you're gonna you know you can look after yourself you you you know it's very much a student-run place cambridge i mean yeah you know the academics and the the graduates and the the fellows of the colleges and the professors whatever get on with their world and they do some teaching and all the rest of it but the undergraduates run their drama clubs and they run every other aspect of it and it means you get experience so at cambridge i was in well over 30 plays in front of paying audiences uh in the various drama clubs and things which far more than anyone who went to drama school so in that sense it was a huge but it was so lucky um and by coincidence that we didn't know we'd won this perry award we were on stage just finishing at one of the shows when suddenly the audience went a bit crazy and they'd already applauded us so we thought why what's matter we were literally checking our flies and one and then we saw this figure coming from behind the stage um uh excuse me and it was rowan atkinson who was already famous for his television series and he was in a show called not the nine o'clock news and he was carrying this award he said i would um just like to um um congratulate the cambridge footlights for winning and we were like oh my god it was just and little did we know we would go on to be such friends and i was best man at rowan's wedding and uh he's you know one of my closest and dearest friends really and it's just a bizarre how lucky we were and to get all this you know and i mean you and i were saying the other day we're in touch all the time and you know what if we if we had been at cambridge you know everything had been you asked that that's how you ask the question if i'd been born later how would i have managed well suppose uh suppose i've been about to graduate in 2020 let me think of all the students in all over britain all over the world who have a similar exciting group of friends with whom they're about to burst their talent into the world only a pandemic arrives which means that they they can't even graduate together um and they certainly can't go to edinburgh and they can't be seen by others except by doing youtubey type stuff that is just isn't the same and i my i mean we all weep for the for the young of today in terms of their ability to step out and stride into the world in the way that we were able to and they must look at our generation and want to slit our throats when they realize how lucky there's yeah i think for the students who can't you know uh probably for the next few years can't enjoy that kind of campus experience listening to you right now if they are can be particularly you know torturous no comedy club none of that right now okay so we have our first few questions uh uh stephen since we are now 10 minutes to the end are we all ready my goodness uh yes i mean there's so much more to talk about tried i have such a high range of interest that i feel a 35 minute session doesn't uh do this justice but uh yes i talk so much okay i think no stephen but before we get into the questions i think it would be inhuman and cruel to kind of not talk about your prison episode i think there are people waiting to uh hear about that because it isn't the kind of description of this talk so speak about that briefly and then we'll get into the question so well we all know yeah we all know um we all know we either were ourselves or we had friends or enemies at school who were difficult adolescents who who would just couldn't conform couldn't concentrate and focus in the classroom or in terms of behavior uh and these days they're often uh diagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that that diagnosis wasn't open when i was young it's probably what i had i was a nightmare as a as a teenager as a young boy and then as a teenager and that is another lesson from a couple of schools i got expelled from schools for uh for breaking bands as they call the iphone escaping going to london um or stealing all kinds of terrible things i was i'd fallen in love and that had messed with me completely of course i hadn't expected it to be to hit me the way it did and um so uh after about the third fourth educational establishment uh i eventually left that escape to london um and one day was in a pub and i was running out of money and thought i was going to have to sleep in the park which i'd done before or i was going to check on one of my school friends but of course in those days before mobile phones that was a pretty difficult thing to do you just have to try and remember where they lived and go to their street you know but so i and it was a chilly night so i stole a coat that was hanging in the pub and i went out and started to sleep in the park and then there was a lump in the jacket and it was a wallet and in the wallet were credit cards so i went eight with these credit cards i had it in my head this is no excuse but i had it in my head that it would be the bank that suffered from this not the individual whose coat i'd taken that he would report the coat stolen in the bank really you hadn't set off to kind of take the one i hadn't no but nonetheless nonetheless it was an insane spree that i went on staying in hotels including the ritz hotel and just going mad buying suits being absurd um smoking big cigars i mean i'm 17 fans saying um was it before you were kind of intercepted i was intercepted in a town called swindon in in wheelchair and when and i didn't want to give my name away so i i refused to say who i was because i didn't want my parents to suffer any more than they have but eventually through a clever trick they found out my name because they saw the various names scrawled on books that were in my luggage and one of the names was stephen fry and they one of them came into the room while i was talking just said stephen fry very quietly in the voice and i turned around and said yes he said ah so then they discovered that i was on a missing person's list and oh my parents got involved but once i first went to court they said i had to go on remand i refused to have bail because i thought i didn't want my parents to pay bail i thought i deserved to go to prison but they had to wait because they needed the paperwork from nine different counties in england to catch up with so that they could make a list of charges against maybe because they're oh yeah i've been to so many oh it was absurd the whole thing honestly i i it's weird looking back it feels like someone else so i went to this prison with um which was a young person's uh institution and for most of the time there uh before i had pleaded i was because i hadn't pleaded you're counted as not guilty because you haven't yet pleaded and so didn't have to do much but then eventually once the paperwork had been sorted i went pleaded guilty had to go back for to get at the court date uh and then i was a convict and when i was a convict i had to work and so on and i found it very you know i determined then i said this is absurd i will when i get out whatever happens if i if from prison or after prison i will somehow get myself together and i should still be young enough to get to cambridge which is the university i'd always wanted to go to and i will work myself i have to work in any job just to get enough money to to to get private tuition if that's what i need to get in or or just go to a library and study on my own i absolutely made that vow to myself partly because one of the things i did was teaching reading to a cell mate who was illiterate and i was so shocked by the idea of someone in my age literally not being able to read and i thought what kind of ass am i i've thrown away all these extraordinary opportunities i've had and my love of language and learning was so profound and so so much a part of me and i was throwing that away i thought i cannot do that you know this is my turning point if i you know i might get sentenced to prison but i mustn't allow myself to get sucked into a life of crime or feeling like an outsider so fortunately i was put on probation and i did go and study and i got a scholarship to cambridge and and everything seemed to turn around after that moment it was very lucky thanks thanks for the story so um one of the questions we have here stephen is from sachdev ramakrishna and the references are lost to me but i'm sure you know what it's about he asked what would you be more proud of the bird laos named after you or being the last pipe smoker of the year it's a very good question uh well as long as that burglars which i was very honored when the uh whoever discovered it and was registering the taxonomical name for it asked my permission i didn't think they had to ask my permission or perhaps you do i don't know um but uh i thought well you know as long as that bird lies doesn't become extinct that that is a guarantee of some form of immortality whereas i suppose like being last pipe smoker it's a weird thing it's an old tradition in britain that uh it was really the tobacco industry that started it to encourage people to keep smoking pipes the prominent figures who smoked a pipe would be nominated so harry wilson the prime minister in the 1960s was pipes america the the comedian eric morkum who smoked to pipe someone's and i was and as it happened i was the last because during the time i was holding this exalted position they they made illegal all forms of tobacco advertising and sponsorship including the pipe smoker of the year so i was the last but yeah in answer to the question i think i'm proudest of the pipe smoker oh good thanks for an honest answer you know i mean people are so diplomatic now that thank you for that um ria asks um it's harry potter's birthday today and um doesn't think uh there there have been um she doesn't think there's been anything more iconic than your readings of the potter universe so would there be any chance of you doing a little bit of reading from that or any other text you may have had at hand i feel i'm afraid riya we might not have time uh for that right now but i'm sure i will i will i will tell a story though about i'll tell a story about the reading to make up for it um i when i started reading them literally there was only one book i i had no knowledge that were going to be seven uh i was just asked to do this children's book that was called harry potter and the the sorceress the philosopher's stone and um i read it and thought it was rather good and uh so i went to the studio and i met this guy this young woman joanne rowling jk rowling and uh i started reading and she and she had despite the fact she'd only written one book she was very convinced of one thing she did not want to allow it to be in any way abridged or condensed it had to be the whole text word for word because she felt some children might follow it on cassette as it then was um and you know they'd be confused if it was different so that that's just put behind the story anyway i think it was on the second one the chamber of secrets i hit a phrase sometimes i couldn't read pages without making a mistake and it can all go well but i hit this phrase three-word phrase harry potter did it it pocketed harry but harry pocket did it for some reason i always put it in the next syllable so the engineer and producer and i were laughing away as i was trying to get this phrase out joe rowling wasn't there um but at lunchtime i said to her joe do you mind if i um uh i can't get this phrase out we've had to abandon it i'll do it at the end of the day harry potter did it do you mind if i say instead harry put it in his pocket and she said no you can't with a grin in her voice that i could hear so i eventually managed to say harry pocketed it and then in every single one of the next five books joe made sure the phrase harry potter appeared just as a little booby trap for me okay uh stephen there's there's a lovely question and i think that might be one of our last but it's a great question from varsity um it has been proven that people who read books are more empathetic however these days both empathy and the habit of reading are in decline how do we tackle this that's such a good question i'm i think it is a natural corollary of reading empathy because you are entering the mind of another person and i think part of the problem in our culture now is a misunderstanding of the word imagination i think it gets confused with the word fantasy now i'm not an enemy of fantasy fiction and fantasy cinema but it is the prevailing cultural mode of the moment as we know the mcu the marvel cinematic universe dominates hollywood and much of the world um but imagination is when you enter someone else's mind it's not when you make up silly new kingdoms or superpowers imagination is when you enter the mind of someone else you imagine being someone else so you and a writer can be going through the paddy fields and look at someone stooping and imagine being them or like shakespeare they can see a king or read about a king and imagine being that king it doesn't matter what estate someone is in or how high or low but it's just a facility an ability to imagine being someone else and with that imagination of course because it is sympathy fellow feeling the sympathy is the greek for feeling together or compassion it's the latin for the same same phrase fellow feeling and empathy is when you feel inside something you actually feel what they feel and that's a trick that fiction allows and you can do it in good cinema too i i don't feel it in fantasy cinema at all i mean you're sorry when someone gets hit and you think ow that must have hurt but that's about as far as it goes but when you actually feel what others feel and what the answer is is how to how to bring about a revolution in helping people feel for others i i can't answer but i would i would urge you to think there is and we don't have time to go into it there is an argument against empathy which is quite surprising because we all take it as a ma absolutely as a guiding rule but um uh rutger bregman uh the the dutch writer i don't know if you're familiar with his work he's he's just written a new book called humankind and uh it's quite a famous uh thing he does in which he demonstrates that the william golding view of civilization is completely wrong that actually empirically you can prove because it has happened before where school children have been left on a desert island and far from going feral they actually looked after each other beautifully so his whole book is about countering this idea that humans are a base hobbesian you know like thomas hobbes idea of nasty brutish and short the life of man being but that actually we we are together very very naturally kindly but he includes in it a chapter called against empathy and i don't have time to go into the arguments of it but they're very interesting they um and maybe he's a good guest for you to think about because he's a he's a fascinating man and it's a very interesting book because it's a deeply optimistic book about the human nature hence the title which is the kind of pun human kind um but but it's also there's a lot of counter-intuitive things in it okay okay stephen i have a last question which i think you might enjoy answering it's um you know there's there's a big raging uh kind of debate about nepotism going on in india right now and i'm being nepotistic and picking my husband's question and we saw the hippopotamus together just last week in in preparation for the session so his question is uh nearly 30 years after defining jeeves and wooster on screen is a time you and laurie went to blanding's castle to play galahad tripwood and lord emsworth oh it's an interesting thought i love that idea for those not familiar pg woodhouse who created jeeves the immaculate gentleman's gentleman and his master bertie worcester whom hugh laurie played in the series i did with hugh uh he also created another world the world of this fantastic castle in shropshire blanding's castle run by a dreamy vacant absent-minded peer uh an earl called lord emsworth whose brother gallahan was a tremendous fan and they are magnificent books they were tried on television a few years ago with all honesty in all honesty it didn't quite work and i think they tried to be too silly i don't i think people misunderstand woodhouse and think he's all just silly asses going oh i say what but actually it's the good-heartedness of the people it's the it's the kind of golden sunshine he pours over his world that makes him so immortal and um it is a very tempting and interesting thought your husband um and thank him for uh next time i'm chatting to you i said what about it what do you think and well because hugh loves the blanding's books absolutely adores them so it's a very interesting idea all right okay um so we're time out i mean time's up now i've been said that's been told to me in capital letters in the chat or incidentally i should just say i was very amused when sanjoy introduced and said to on if you happen to drop off and then left a bit of a pause i thought he's just suspecting that people are going to fall asleep and of course i realized that drop-off has taken a new meaning in the world of zoom and he meant that their connection drops i hope no one dropped off anyway we're both here for sure so enjoy um it would be great if you could join us and kind of wrap up the session and none of us dropped off so that's great thank you so much thank you so much steven and and yes we keep dropping off but not even and to be cheeky you know every time we stumble and pick the pocket perhaps your psychologist could well take you back to the time you could have done something mischievous and i hope you paid that whoever the bloke whose pocket you and i suppose it'll become fashionable because you've done it so you have to be super careful i hope not but thank you so much and as anandita said you know it's impossible to sort of try and fit this into this new digital mode of you have to do it short and sweet and we'd love to have this carry on forever i was going to send you all a message saying time is stretchable don't get stuck in this house i wish i knew but i would have got smacked by my colleagues so like you are i'm only a performer i only have a job to do so i don't have any any any power so to be the power is behind the zoom so thank you both that was absolutely amazing and thank you all for as usual those wonderful wonderful questions that you all research and really they're so considered and that really keeps the excitement of this series going um thank you to our radio partners red fm bajateruho and i do hope you're going to log back on at 8 30 pm for our next session papsi siddwa between the silences in conversation with urbashi bhutalia celebrated novelist bhabsi siddva speaks to writer and feminist publisher urbushi bhutalia about her creative journey across cultures continents and chronicles and what she calls a punjabi pakistani parsi roots a novels ice candy man and water were adapted by deeper method for the acclaimed films earth and water this is at 8 30 pm see you soon [Music] oh [Music] you

Channel: Jaipur Literature Festival

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Id: 5GS5bE_vt2g

Length: 55min 25sec (3325 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020