Fry & Laurie - Reunited - Part 1/5

tonight a rare and sumptuous treat TB megastars Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie are reunited back together on screen for the first time in 15 years a bit jittery apprehensive I'm looking forward to it I'm looking for to see the old codger you know someone really really well it means you never actually talk about things so it's perfectly possible that my colleague will tell me something that he was never told me before it'll make me go oh wait did you say that 30 years ago you imbecille it's 30 years since the boys first met and they came to recount their shared history a lot of times I want to go back and slap myself well I would also slap me you could have done plenty sell together man you're getting hysterical and to revel in each other's company there were noses like ladies and gentlemen pipe cookies every day comedy colleagues for years best mates and both now national treasures in their own right we present 90 minutes in the company of Stephen Fry a few Laurie reunited you I understand the choice is yours sword or pistol sold as you wish does the only weapon for a gentleman just so that means mr. maan oil that you have to are both Grace and ready I shall drop minute wait a minute who doesn't love Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in fact in the surveys I've done exactly 50% of people in Britain would like to have Stephen living at sort of them and the other 50% of them would quite like to have Hugh a colossus destroyed earth um the great industry of beers that we call show highly intelligent and completely ridiculous down double down the next refined your dad for the weekend as a double act they've formed at the Cambridge Footlights blossomed in TV classics Jeeves and Wooster and Blackadder and flourished an arrow highly influential TV series a bit of fry & Laurie ladies and gentlemen Michael Jackson they're so brilliant alright so other men have got larger plums they're so kind of untouchable lazy they didn't inspire us at all Stephen and Hugh may no longer be comedy partners but they remain the very best of friends yes we do we love each other and did really pretty much for them from the beginning I think one of the most fortunate things really is that 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 but fortunately some for some reason that that switch was never on with me and you and it would have been embarrassing if it had been if you think about it was the last time you could use the word homosexual in its proper contraction and it's such a lovely word which one of the big words I my one Jane I used to say to my wife the gardens looking very homosexual i I just delight in the way his brain works since they last appeared on TV together they've each gone on to become international TV Titans in their own right Steven is Renaissance man power excellence if he's not writing bestsellers or acting or directing he's making documentaries or even finding time to indulge in more simple pleasures like watching darts well that's it is the trouble twenty double for Joe succeeds yes I'm like a pig in Chardonnay they said it couldn't be happier he is a national treasure we all love leave some steam we should stuff him and put him in the National Museum he's brilliant stever's but since 2003 he's probably best known as the world's most erudite quiz master I think Stephen has that gift he makes everyone who watches his program thing that they're just you know that little bit brighter for having having heard what he had to say I think he's like a sort of Victorian benign philanthropic uncle well obviously you know someone had to lose out she Laurie what happened to him well amazingly enough he's gone from spoofing global icons to becoming one himself as the most watched TV star in the world dr. Gregory House I think he really did want to be you know Clint Eastwood you know and now he kind of is please mr. music will you play but for all their phenomenal solo success it's when they're together and bounce off each other that the fun really starts you know I'd really just like in a really sad sort of nostalgic sort of way I would just like to see them on telly together but just like to see them next to each other get order on their seat on this one tie yes you certainly will chatting laughing and generally mucking about fry and Laurie reunited always not lost reunion day is upon us and Steven and Hugh are up with the dawn chorus to be whisked off to a mysterious but fittingly magnificent location well first of all you very sweetly said sorry it's so early at seven o'clock world serve o'clock for Americans and early they work so ridiculously hard so that's it I go to work at 5:00 in the morning and they're sort of windowless hangar for about 15 hours and then I go home that's the budget so much of a story really is it I need to embellish that somehow need to jazz that one up ask me that again in ten minutes thank you oh it's crazy one of the problems of being in television is that you have the evidence before your eyes that you were once younger and that you are now older and one minute passes in than the other minute and if it keeps up at that rate which it tends to do suddenly thirty years have gone by and it's affected the wildering and a little bit upsetting but rather charming to UM I know it would be interesting to see and this stage of that lips as we chatter I have one big umbrella question and that is what the hell were you thinking that'll set me on the right track to unearthing the real Stephen Fry I just want to make it clear though to the readers netizens of the Daily Telegraph that I don't normally go to work in a chauffeur-driven BMW and colleague welcome their journeys may have ended but ours have just begun as Stephen and Hugh prepare to lift the lid on their personal stories so how do we need them Matt as you well know in a brothel and I think I made a girl laugh in a bar so many stories start that way build the energy that emotional remembering it but it is and because everything depended on it I wouldn't have met you I wouldn't have had that wouldn't be sitting here now I'm pretty sure welcome back to fry and Laurie reunited Gold's exclusive get-together of two of TV's brightest and bigger stars as you've never seen them before why isn't that someone around saying don't do that we never had that window have you ever had that person I'm angry the tale of fry & Laurie begins in instead with the birth of baby Stephen in 1957 followed two years later by the arrival of baby Hugh in Oxford both boys attended boarding schools Stephen went to Uppingham where he was cited as being an asthmatic near genius and Hugh attended Eton where as a teenager he developed a passion for motorbikes and Monty Python the pythons were just immense yes young meant to see a new Python show that was a pretty great pleasure but in a strange kind of way and even greater pleasure was to buy the records to sit around with a group of friends and just play those sketches over and over and over again and he knew every breath you know whenever they would end a sketch with them I'm terribly sorry but I'm gonna have to shoot you you could actually hear if you listened carefully which I did you can hear the fuse burning on the cracker they used to make the gunshot sound you hear as a bang that's how well I got to know it and very stormy and deranged childhood and adolescence which involved the expulsion from a number of schools some of them expensive and decreasing in expense as despair increased eventually I kind of ran away I suppose is the only way I can put it I was 17 and got myself into Gerald fix with credit cards and ended up in prison so the idea of me going to university at that point was as remote as could be but it is darkest just before the dawn as they like to say and I suppose hitting rock bottom was probably what I needed to do it was 1975 when Stephen aged 18 served three months in prison for credit-card fraud meanwhile a 16-year old Hugh was considering a career on the right side of the law on the other side of the world as a policeman the Hong Kong police they were looking for a good man and true to go and serve in the colony and I suddenly fixed on this romantic idea of myself in a duffle coat and maybe short trousers and I'd smoke a pipe and I'd be rather acerbic but ultimately I'd have a heart of gold and I'd unite young lovers on the bridge or whatever it might be and I got the brochures and sure enough the uniform was very smart his all look it was all shaping up well in an actual fact now I slightly regret not taking that course I'll tell you why 2001 was it all those blokes who would have been in my position in the Hong Kong returned full pension at 35 Stephen emerge from jail after three months a reformed man and enrolled in Sixth Form College determined to gain a place at Cambridge I took the the Cambridge entrance exam and then there's the terrible period of waiting and of course live deep in the country and the post didn't come till about papas ten in the morning which in those days was rare nowadays cause he lucky to be opposed to 3:00 in the afternoon but after a week of waiting I just couldn't take it anymore so I said to my mother I said I'm going to go to Norwich at lunchtime I will be in mrs. coffee shop no longer exists in Norwich he rejoices in the name just John's delicate eek so I went in at lunchtime and was you know sitting my frothy coffee and just John himself came down and said does felt for him and it was my mother and she said darling I said I was opposed supposed to oh god what what have you have you opened it she said no there's no post I said come on call me I won there's no post and the whole pottage is no no no the telegram said telegram yes I waited you congratulations awarded scholarship Queens College Senior Tutor I said what Rita was crying remembering it so ridiculous but it was such a turnaround from you know this appalling thing and my mother of course was bursting into tears because she was so proud and relieved after being such a nightmare child was a good moment anyway rdid that motion for remembering it but it is and because everything depended on it I wouldn't have met here I wouldn't have and I wouldn't be sitting here now I'm pretty sure hemorrhage is in remarkably beautiful town in its own right it's it's got these incredible meddling colleges and on the river it's just one of the most lyrical ravishing sights architectural e in the world and it's eight hundred years old and many people who are heroes have passed through its Wordsworth Milton Isaac Newton Darwin the list goes on and on along Hugh had already been at Cambridge for a year by the time Stephen arrived in 1979 and while Stephen was determined to follow a dry life of books and learning Hugh was dreaming of making a big splash in the world of rowing my father who I admired hugely and tried to emulate in all kinds of ways was a very remarkable athlete he'd won a gold medal in the 1948 Olympics as an oarsman and he'd gone to Cambridge in that world in the world of rowing he was a bit of a superstar when I actually imagined myself going on too-too-roo to run the Olympics would have been my goal but Hugh had to forego his Olympic dreams of the tender age of 20 after a debilitating bout of glandular fever instead he decided to join the Cambridge Footlights for all its scientists and poets the most famous Cambridge graduates of recent times have been the alumni of the footlights revue a veritable who's who of British comedy including Python's goody

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Views: 1,801,450

Keywords: hugh laurie, stephen fry, reunited, gold

Id: IgS6YSGvFCw

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2010