Stephen Fry | Cambridge Union

[Music] gentlemen good evening and welcome to the Cambridge Union for our first event of Easter term 2017 my name is Harry I'm president of the Society and I hope you are very very excited about the speaker that we have joining us this evening not just excited about him but excited about the really quite stellar lineup we have for the entire term I hope to see the chamber this full every single day for the next two weeks so we have a speaker event which is 10 of the next 14 days we're really packing it in before people's exams and we hope you're going to enjoy your time in Cambridge in stir and in Nicholas earth and in Easter time as much as you possibly can so before we introduce our speaker this evening just a couple of brief housekeeping notices them first and most important of which is that if you crane from taking any photos during the course of stephen's talk that would be fantastic we have our own very skilled professional photographers who will become and will be putting all the pictures on facebook really quite quickly after the event so you won't miss any of the action from that by taking our own photos and secondly if you could remain seated at the end of the talk to allow Steven and the rest of committee to leave that would be fantastic you'll be directed by the individuals in the rather fetchingly on jackets as to when it is appropriate for you to leave - those of you if you are sat in the library thank you so much for coming and we're sorry that the chamber wasn't big enough to hold you all if you want to get involved in the events by asking Steven questions if you could tweet to the Cambridge Union that's at Cambridge Union with the hashtag see us outflow that would be fantastic and we'll ship make sure that some of your questions are read out but now on to the two individuals I'm about to introduce Gerry circs is our speakers officer for Eastern and is the reason that an awful lot of these stellar speakers that you'll be seeing here in the Union this term are coming to speak here we're incredibly delighted that you'll be interviewing the next man a man who needs absolutely no introduction author broadcaster and bona fide national treasure ladies and gentlemen mr. Stephen Fry [Applause] thank you very much hi lovely so so good evening everyone and thank you for coming we're very lucky to have Stephen here this evening he will be here we are he'll be giving a short speech about English in students and after that we'll have a few questions and then we'll take questions in the audience one thing and this is especially if you're in an overflow room or watching from home if you're not here you can still ask questions by tweeting advocated union or by using hashtag see us fry or hashtag see us fry overflow if you want to select you let us know you're actually in the building but you know and I will ask you a question but without further ado even oh thank you very much gala should I stand up or yeah that's probably should tonight yeah L oh yeah well we're going to be talking a little about mental health so if I say don't jump off I'm hardly because mental health is too important to subject to take entirely seriously like all human subjects it should be something we can laugh about because unless we laugh about it we won't understand it now it seems to me rather pointless for me to talk to you about mental health in abstract terms because I'm nobody really understands mental health in abstract and they only understand it in terms of its some qualities can be in terms of its instantiation its verification oh it's Cambridge in the 21st century when they were little yeah it's embodiment it says examples of it so in that sense me I can only talk about my own experience with my read my mental health or lack of its M it's very hard to say where anything begins in it but you have to decide when telling a story where where to snip the piece of string at each end to make a beginning and an end so I'll start with myself as young I in the countryside in East Anglia not not very close to comb it but in East Anglia and far far from the nearest as Sydney Smith put it far from the nearest lemon it was the nearest shop was or four or five miles away no it was a dream it was a it was a three-hour bicycle ride and so I just grew up in a larger not Downton Abbey but a large house there were no more than three or four servants and I so it looks like when I see pictures of the house it looks very idyllic there were problems there were people to come and do things and cook and whatever but it's you know everyone's childrenís about how they respond to all the parents their siblings their friends and I was young I was always aware from from the very first that I was different not just in I suppose the obvious wave we had growing up in the 60s which is a way to do with one sexuality I would say that I went say when did you know you were gay and I think being born you know I look back up and said that's the last time I'm going up on events and there's really nothing but aside from that although maybe partly my parents didn't believe in television they happen so you can imagine what a shattering disappointment my life career choices have being to them but um they had one it was about this big and it lived in a in a cupboard and a closed cupboard and it was only opened and taken out for important things like I can remember who the funeral of Winston Churchill we took the television out in what someone American got assassinated so we would look at that and and then the moon landing I remember we what's that on its own otherwise I wasn't really allowed to watch it unless my father who worked at home he was an inventor he worked in the stable block of the house which was his laboratory and if I knew he was locked there I would occasionally what's a television one rainy Sunday afternoon I took it out in their film had just started I watched this film in great puzzlement it was it was like nothing I'd ever seen people were talking to each other in the most remarkable way and you know we we take language for granted as children and mostly these days as adults as well we're aware that there are things humans do which are very special in particular athletic things musical things things to do with painting and rendering objects in sculpture or paint and we say what a talent that we forget that what we're doing now what we are doing not just me I'm speaking but you're listening and in listening you are language processing to a remarkable degree and we take that for granted we think of the way we speak as being fairly ordinary system of exchange of information and ideas rather than the beautiful thing that it truly is mysterious and an incredible thing that allowed us to leap up or across rather I suppose one could say the the evolutionary web and become the creatures that we are we use it to order pizza on the phone or to tell people we no longer love them all to ask the way to the nearest lavatory or whatever it might be but this thing I saw was the first example where I was aware that you could use language to seduce and delight and beguile and amuse and pickle in a way that I had not been aware of and and I remember this young man saying to this young woman and would you be in any way offended if I said that you seemed to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection and I could almost hear my drool hitting the carpet it was so extraordinary and I watched him watts and there was moral speech like this it's good credible I've never heard anything like it I didn't know language could do that I was asking no 10 years old and so it was over I skipped over to fight mother I said mom I am is against what I said I said would you be in any way offended if I said that you seemed to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection and she said what you're talking about I said that's obtained was on television someone said that she said I said all of these people and it wasn't Shakespearean it wasn't it was it was old-timers but not very old and I can't quite work out when it was and how they were all these amazing clothes and she 50 worked it out you know that was the importance of being honest she said I said what is it it's a to play and I'm sure we've got a copy but we've had a fire in there and a lot of the books had been lost and so big country there was this portable library every other Thursday wood lumber along his old van and I remember waiting you had to walk about half a mile waiting for this band lumbered interview and the driver got out let put up these steps to open the door patted my bottom into the that you could do that in those days and and there was a little lady inside with cardigans and beads and she said how can I help you my dear and I said have you heard of a play called The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde said yes my darling have you got it she looked and there indeed was a comedies of Oscar Wilde in the paperbacks I took it you stamped it out and I went ran away home went upstairs now my bed my read it and I'm ready to read it and I read it and then next other Thursday I went never got anything else by Oscar Wilde and she said oh I don't sure let's have a look and there was a book and it was called the trials of Oscar Wilde and that and she said I don't know what that is you can have that so she stamped that out I took it home and it was by someone called montgomery hide and it was as the title it makes obviously for us because he was about to ask the wilds the scandal of Oscar Wilde's love affair with Lord Alfred Douglass and he lawsuit with the Marquis of Queensbury and his subsequent imprisonment for two years at hard labor and and I read this with a growing bewilderment and astonishment and horror partly because the man Wilde was being represented is such a marvelous man so warm and kind too large in spirits generous intellectually he made you know that somebody I think was Disraeli said that them brilliant people can item make you feel four foot tall because they're so brilliant you feel small or they make they can make you feel eight foot tall because they bring you up to their level and Oscar was someone like that he made everybody feel you know as Shakespeare's there's a Falstaff not just a wit but a cause of which in others it's a great thing to be and he was a monumental and extraordinary man and was brought down lower than any human being really in public life had ever been brought down in the age of newspapers and recognition he was perhaps the first scandal of that kind it was awful and I read it to tear blurred eyes really Parker because I also recognized the sin that had brought him down was a sin that was stirring incorrectly inside me but also it did give me this incredible sense of the power of language and and I began to read at a furious rate and all these things are very positive and we now sort of go to my school days where I am this rather freakish figure because I'm uninterested in all the things that school boys are supposed to be interested in like sport which now is different I mean the fact that I'm here tonight on a night when Ronnie Sullivan is at the table at the crucible you've no idea what a sacrifice that is really but as a child sports in all its forms was absolute and after I couldn't abide it it frightened me and I thought it was horrible and similarly rock music which everybody listened to I found that a barbarous assault and made me feel inadequate and small the only things I found any solid in were these very things like Greek mythology and works of Oscar Wilde and also Conan Doyle I'd love Charl combs from and I used to read the books in there very nerdy way and I joined the shallow cone Society of London and I got permission from my house master at school and I did know how many of you went to a private school fortunately he no longer don't have to explain what the house master is because amongst the many services she has done to the world JK Rowling has made it very clear to a whole generation how private schools work and so and i my my Snape signed me out and allowed me to leave and so so I went to London for a meeting in the Sherlock Holmes society and I had permission to stay for two days and it took out a very very long and complicated story short I stayed for five days and got bitten by the cinema bargain and I was expelled from that school and I had then I was then expelled from another school and then another one and then and then I went to prison so we have to picture me now lying a thought flag stone I like to say a thought lying of what flagstones straw on my back my heaving sobbing frame wracked with convulsive gulping weeping moans the rat calling him over my neck and the bars of the prison cell thrust I thought my back so that that's the picture that I'm at the lowest ebb you can imagine and this is very odd because I come from a stable family of very kind parents indeed wonderful brother and wonderful sister both of whom were as normal as as rice pudding and completely completely you know law-abiding and kind and decent people and I had always had this furious weird inability to connect with anybody I suppose had I been earlier diagnosed probably ADHD would have been would have been the diagnosis attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in as much as these diagnoses are any good because I couldn't concentrate and I was flying all over the place but there I was in prison and and I knew it wasn't normal to be 17 years old and in prison having had a good education and being curious about the world and excited about the world having an extraordinary greed about the world I was always very puzzled by my coevals my peers who were in curious about things about the world about history about reading and I couldn't understand it and and I still can't understand it I still can't understand why people aren't all curious I suppose as you can see I'm quite Tuppy and the reason I'm cubby is because I eat I because I'm greedy and in the same way I'm greedy for input of things and it's this manic burning energy that I've always had inside me that I think it's a very good thing but I was always aware there was a countervailing force something black dark in me that would take over from this excitable and exciting grandiose hyper feeling and that would the mixture of the two and the unpredictability of the tomb when I would be feeling which I think contributed to this position of me lying on the floor and so if you are in the lowest possible state in prison with no future then obviously the only institution that will accept you is Cambridge University so that what I've set my sights on Oh fortunately I did at that point decide that I was either going to go entirely to the bad and there was very possible that it was too late to rescue I haven't seen her done in the a-levels anything but I so I I turned myself around and I applied to this variable in an venerable institution and and and forty they didn't ask my the admissions tutor of Queens my college never had the question overdue by the way do you have a serious criminal are you by any chance on probation the question was never identity was ever asked you who's never asked me so it was only my second year when I came off probation that I told the senior to to the college I said I've got some rather good news I said I've just got a perfect a good Evans anything I don't know what to say about that I I suppose a bit of iron drink he did he for me he brought me a bottle of gin to celebrate my coming off probation but inside I was always aware of this peculiarity and I knew it's a peculiarity because if you read and you talk to your friends you know that not everybody is quite like that and I was aware that from the very felt that I was different and different sexuality is one thing but there were plenty of other gay people at Cambridge you'll be astonished to know and so that was never really an issue even even back in the in the late 70s and early 80's it wasn't really an issue but this dark inner thing was something clearly I was going to have to keep private with my life and it never occurred to me that it was either a good thing or a bad thing or a curse or a blessing and I don't know if it is any of those things and I don't know if any of you who have because you probably recognize that what I've described very vague terms of the symptoms of what is often called bipolar disorder and a mood disorder well whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing and what I discovered over the over the 20 30 years after leaving this place was that there is something very important to say about these mental health conditions and they are they pull in opposite directions just as the symptoms of bipolar disorder pull in opposite directions and the one thing that is in very very crucial to understand is just how serious mental health disorders can be what medical students amongst you will recognise the word morbidity the morbidity level that is to say the tendency towards disease and death is very much greater for those with a mental health disorder especially those of course who are not from prosperous stable accepting loving families and relationships because unpredictable behavior and particularly the problems well let's put it this way if you have a mood disorder which I often liken to the to the weather the in terms of weather now we all are aware that the weather is a real thing if you go outside and it's raining you can't pretend it isn't raining you can't make it unring on the other hand it's also important to realize that it's not your fault that it's raining only a very primitive person would imagine that it's raining because they've done something bad that's how good mankind used to believe but no longer do we think that so it's not your fault but it is real and most importantly it's not permanent it's not going to rain every day just it's raining now doesn't mean it's going to rain tomorrow in the next name for the rest of your life oh damn it's raining that's it my life is going to be wet from now on but that's how one feels about the internal weather of a mood disorder you either say or it's not really rainy I'm not really feeling this but you are you can't deny it it's true it's real you feel this bad this black this terrible don't pretend you don't you can't unthink it on the other hand it isn't your fault you haven't caused it by some moral failing some to do some laps in your deontic duty it's not that either and nor does it mean that you're going to be like this for the rest of your life it will change it will be sunny some day you don't know when because it's not in your control it's not your fault and you can't necessarily change it but you can adapt to it and prepare for it so if you have that kind of mood disorder one of the most obvious ways to change your mood in our culture especially if you don't know that what you've got is an illness you just feel it you just feel down or you feel up well I'm afraid you can call it a weakness but it's a very I think forgiveable one perhaps if you're kind you reach out for drugs and alcohol because they can change your mood they can make you feel up when you're done or they can make you they can bring you down if you're two up and it seems so easy all this noise in my head I can quite bitter just another vodka just another lime just another tablet just another whatever and of course we all know intellectually we all know the truth of it the more you do that the worse the worse it becomes when you go often them you know the greater the blackness that the greater the mood changes the more violent the swings when you stop using them and if you don't stop using them the more you descend the more your friends start to reject you or to you know to lose pity and that's how people slide down especially those who don't have accepting loving families as I said earlier those they slide down their jobs they start to lose their homes they become street people they become a nuisance to become embarrassing and smelly and you just want to forget them and piling away across the street if you see them screaming crying making noises being drunk whatever it's horrible that's the worst side of it and that is something that mental health can bring about you you ask any doctor in the mental health doctor working at the sharp end in an inner city somewhere and it's a story that told every night on the streets and it's a terrible story so on that side I'm very keen to explain how serious mental health the outcomes near the consequences of unattended and untreated or in some way and examined and scrutinized mental health issues how cause serious that can be but on the other hand I want to make it absolutely plain that it is possible to lead it immensely fulfilled fulfilling creatively exciting thrilling rewarding loving enriched and enriching life with those diagnoses it's been done by extraordinary heroic people in history ones we've all heard of and ones you may not have heard of my particular hero in this field is a song called Kay Redfield Jamison she's an American demmick double academic in the most extraordinary way she's to the professor of psychiatry Johns Hopkins University in America which is the best teaching hospital in America but she's also visiting professor of English Literature at sind Andrews University and she's written some of the best books on mental health you could ever read an unquiet mind and touched by fire to the history of retrospective diagnosis of artists warriors creators historical figures politicians hamon poets and so on in the past like Robert Schumann and you know very obvious examples of people who were very clearly affected by this disorder and how it can be traced in their work and the Diaries and so on and she had the highest possible dose of lithium you could have without your kidneys exploding and has had since she was young and it's a very seriously ill person indeed but I can't think of many people who have had a more creative and extraordinary effect on both the illness because she's one of the most respected scientific and academic voices who understands it she writes for the diagnostic Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in America on that something to bipolar disorder but also on on literature so you know that and in between there are artists and writers and yeah we can all choose our hero like Churchill or someone you know his famous black dog and and there are musicians and painters and artists too as a sake can be an inspiration to show and just not necessarily well-known people but people you may know who are well known to you who show that it is not a death sentence so on the one hand you have to balance this incredible seriousness it can lead to disaster and you have to understand it immense potential you know to do you know to be lived with and sometimes even I believe to enhance life I made a film about bipolar disorder and I spoke to people some of whom were really had had desperately on this and had tried suicide so many times it was astonishing there Elisha was one one man I I spoke to had walked out in front of a lorry and his leg the Mint's body had been smashed he'd been in a hospital there but he'd managed to escape and walk out and try and kill himself and I said to him I said how many times your bones reset and he said all over about 42 times different operations to straighten either were hammered out and it's a bone by shoved in here and there the pain must be Northey said know what your viewers must understand is the pain in my legs was nothing compared to the pain that made me walk out in front of that knife that's the pain that really really I could not bear the pain in my legs was enough that was pretty astonishing but I asked all of these people including him I asked them I said the other super there's a button here you compress the button I was talking about this is about bipolar disorder or manic depression as it used to be known I said you can press the button and you will no longer have bipolar disorder taken away from you will be all the depressive episodes the episodes of horrible black self-hatred and despair and lack of energy and lack of motivation like a belief in the future all the things that depression brings I mean you'll never have them again but no would normal you have the highs normal you have the buzz of the grandiosity and the exuberance and the hope and the self belief and creativity and the kind of joyful madness that sometimes comes with mania that they'll both go would you press the button and only one of the 42 I think people I interviewed would press the button it's a very extraordinary thing so somehow WH Auden said it's them very well don't take away my Devils because my Angel's will flee too and I think it's a deep sense we all have as humans that that the bad things we have are a price we don't want to pay but we understand has to be paid for the really good things we have and that is a bargain most of us are prepared to make we are aware of the ethics professor and there you know I press this button and Hitler is never born but then neither is Mozart or whoever your choice would be if someone who brought an equal measure of joy to the equal measure of despair that Hitler brought and most people gave a thing now you come you can't do that we don't want to zombify history and we don't as zombify the gene pool of that species and we don't doze Amba fie our own lives in there that will bring me and then I coming to the end of ounce said I'd speak for 20 minutes everybody's by so sorry I do go on um yeah we might come under the subject of medication if someone's out that it's a question because what I'm going to do now I feel like sure did sit down that Jenna ask me a few questions which II I know wants to do and no Jen I'm I'm married so no but yeah a few years ago maybe yeah not having me not a few years getting your take of you be - no oh God oh whoa whoa you know what I mean so I say I'm oh how what have I said so and then he will ask you questions in there maybe maybe any one of you would like to add some guys who don't deed tweet some questions too but for them for the time being thanks for listening [Applause] thank you very much and thank you for the endless lovely and unexpected first question I have it just because it's come to mind because you just said it and I'll forget it otherwise you mentioned about the fact that you asked the question about pressing the button hmm and if everybody could turn off their bipolar disorder and get rid of it from their lives would day would you well I would say that I would not press the button but I haven't I haven't dwelt on this I still find it difficult to do so but there have been a few occasions in the last 20 years one in particular when I had very very seriously attempted to take my life to it you know to the point of being discovered unconscious and having to be rescued from the brink of it and the distress and worry that that caused my family and those who love me or tell me they do obviously was so horrific and and the possibility that I might have succeeded in ending my life so so terrible to me now that life you know is something that I'd value so highly there's anything that would jeopardize living seems to me something that is intolerable so it's very hard to say precisely as all good ethical questions about pressing buttons are you know and but but I generally speaking I understand why most people say no and I would probably say no now I'd say now but I would reserve the right to have a different view at the right time I think that's the point and so do you think that those sort of Mania periods their periods where you say you feel the buzz lingzi words that the colour of life you think those have sort of made you who you are as much as the Downs and the black it would be impertinent to me to deny that I suppose they must be part of who I am I mean there is this sort of get out clause that people with bipolar disorder have which is that it is known officially whatever that means there's a mood disorder not a personality disorder you know there and that that sort of rather like it's it's the weather inside me it's not who I am it's what what happens to my moves you know that the ship that is trying to plow ahead it's just the seas are the illness whether they're incredibly calm or incredibly violent is not the fault of the ship but you know that's a that's a weaselly get out and I suppose it is a part of who I am and I you know which of us would dare take out any element of ourselves and be sure that the whole Jenga tower of our identity wouldn't collapse that's a ridiculous thing to say but you know it's a very good investor it's a good image and you talked about your childhood and your adolescence we are in prison do you think I said it's a slightly scientific answer to this but how much of sort of disorders of this type and generally depression clinical depression comes from your circumstances and how much comes sort of genetic well of course it is an enormous ly important question and one that is exercised people's minds about human identity and characteristic characteristics since the dawn of writing and probably obviously before that you know how much are we this um I was my little joke my little philosophical joke is you know used to call the nature-nurture argument and there is easy to part one nature is about one's nurture but maybe it's about one's willpower so I was called it the nature nurture nature the half II I don't know that one of the things I was talking about this earlier to someone and you know how lots of Statistics statistics are apparently reveal that the number of diagnoses showing mental health disorders amongst young people at universities for example and but all over at school children and and and younger adults and and the whole population I've just gone up and up and so we were saying well this is this is just over diagnosis we're now aware of this and some of them like general anxiety disorder of such vague terms that they have no real medical meaning no epidemiological way of understanding them but there is one thing that is as real as as can be and I I'm president of a charity my no didn't take my own here you see yeah a little bit of madness for you there just a show it's real they're imposed into this charity called mind which is a member of charity obviously a major one in England Wales and I'm also and this is very grand I'm a fellow of the Royal College on on research I should say of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and and one of the things I have discovered and you will probably know your generation will know when I was young this phrase did not exist or if it did it only existed in very brochure chez textbooks and I knew of no one who would performed this act if one calls it that Ord thought of performing it and it's two little words self-harm it didn't exist now I go to schools and I mentioned the subjects and people come up to me and say yeah as an academic here absolutely epidemic now at first I thought I'd read about this people cutting themselves and hurting themselves and and I thought well maybe these are people from disadvantaged families with abusive parents or parents with drug addicts or alcoholics or single parents and them the more well you whatever you know sort of life chances are very grim and so there's a reason there you can kind your be dales and there is the same issue of self harm as there is in the comprehensive in a in a in a poor area of a city it seems to be and that you cannot say it's just a question of oh because you can diagnose it these are real cuts these are real physical you know the evidence is there it's written into people's bodies that there is this terrible problem of pain because all the people I've spoken to hurt themselves say they do it because because they hurt so much inside they do this to to take the pain away from from inside themselves and that's that's something you can't you can't just wish away and and in a sort of Daily Mail leader just say it's all to do with you know stupid liberal people talking about you know talking about diagnosis or Americans going about because it's real and it's physical so that's an interesting isn't it and whether that is I mean that doesn't and the reason I mentioned that is because you said it back Randall you know because there doesn't seem to be there doesn't seem to be a clues to the kind of background you have that makes you hurt yourself so I don't know Jonah okay okay I was heavy you know it's heavy sorry we'll get lighter there's nobody named report one one more sort of heavy I suppose people often ask me when I'm talking about mental health why it is then that you have very high figures of suicide depression general anxiety in Western countries and yet in war-torn countries like Syria and Iraq you don't really get that diagnosis that leaves that level of depression suicide anxiety whatever does that mean it's not there does it mean I'm diagnosed so it's really and it is of course it is Dubai because we're banned to think that it seems to be a first world problem somehow that the you know the the yes the water on may be war is of just an extravagant collective unconscious form of self up in a strange way maybe maybe that's what more is it does a huge a huge example of people is a kind of madness and it's a correct but more interesting perhaps than that is you know developing countries all completely undeveloped countries you know the Animus cultures in in the rainforests of South South America or Indonesia or everywhere there are people more or less untouched by our so-called civilization do they have these issues well the fact is they do interestingly and and Antep religions have shown that there is an enormous amount of it and they just have obviously a different different language for it it's often expressed in animist forms as a kinds of kinds of demonic possession as it used to be in our culture I mean even Malthus University still stood their belief in demonic possession very strong amongst professors professor professorial staff of the colleges to which we you will belong so you know within the memory the memory of this town human beings believed that others could be possessed by spirits and we now use a different language but the behaviors seem to be the same and you can read from the earliest sources of humans behaving in ways that exhibit symptoms that we would now use our language of diagnosis for but which earlier people use in a possession and other such language and that still exists in the third world and I've been I've seen initiation rites and I've seen sort of doctoring rites you know what we would call witch doctoring in the old days but sort of you know primitive medicine is hard to find the right phrase for it but that's sounding patronizing but in Madagascar I saw and then curing inverted commas and maybe they didn't know a child of some deep unhappiness my worry was that it was something physical that could be perhaps held like epilepsy but I don't think it was ever that's seeing a child and maybe just affect the whole village made an effort and put this child in the center and chanted and stroked and and and went through this ritual maybe that had some help because it's certainly an act of corporate love that you don't get much in this in this culture certainly I suppose touching on medication mmm I suppose now are something me you take your your bipolar yes rather than what is known in the trade is self medication which is what again doctors very kindly call people who take too much alcohol or non prescription drugs yeah um I don't do that anymore what I had the option that I didn't don't do anything naughty anymore but it took me a very long time to consent to medication I think like any of you who may have had them as usual that may have brought you to a doctor because of mental health the idea of stepping across piercing the membrane that separates you from those people who take you know medication because we think of a medicated almost is a congruent with zombified and we worry about that as I was saying earlier we we're very afraid of having this edge taking offers especially if you're in a what is loosely called a creative industry you know where you live by your wits and your language and your ideas and your thoughts your ability to string a sentence together or to come up with an idea for something the the prospect of that being taken away being blunted the edge being being eroded by a pill of some kind is a very terrifying one and it was partly being a dad and also the knowledge that it's always said I'm reliable I mean you think you put a pill and you put a pill in your mouth to get rid of a headache more there seems to work we're all the same when we have a headache unless we're allergic to aspirin something you can take it it will usually work unless it's a migraine but when it comes to something to choose to do with your mood your behavior your effect as a psychiatrist we call it you know the way you sort of give off to other people then we're very very different from each other in a way that isn't the same as taking a pill and I would reduce to prove this alcohol we all know people we can all sit down with friends and have the same number of drinks and one of the friends will get drunk very quickly while then we'll get rather aggressive and unpleasant and mean and rude while then we'll start taking their clothes awful rather will start slobbering over you one will get very very maudlin and affectionate and sentimental another one will just forth up just leave and go home and not want to be at the party anymore and they've all had the same chemical identical a very simple chemical alcohol essentially you know you have compared to other compounds and things and organic chemicals that we ingest all the time it's a pretty simple one and yet the effect is so different well imagine how much more varied than are the effects of the psychotropic and antipsychotic and and calming drugs and and you know these these these these various drugs antidepressants and things imagine how varied they are from person to person because they're more complex than alcohol by a long way so it takes it's a bit of an asset to go on medication because you've you've got to sit with the doctor and the doctors they will try you on these and we'll try this dose of this one and this one they usually go together well there's not too much contact indication and all the other phrases they use and we'll try that for four weeks and trying to sort oh by the way they'll affect your libido and you'll put on weight you know great I think I'll get back to cocaine thank you very much but no just no wrong muscles add no because so you don't you don't say that fortune but the little demon that said it inside you you silent and you were consent to try this particular regime for five and then that hasn't quite worked or it's worked a bit but you feel this and you report it so he tweets or she tweets this amount of that one and then a complete change and then another complete change and eventually by about the fourth go in my case and I know people who still still battling to find the right cocktail but I've settled on a mixture for those who are interested and chemical names of all one is very simple it's lithium lithium salts lithium carbonate which is a strong it's an element as you all know goes into your into your exploding Samsung's and their batteries and so on it and and and the other one is I think all the lands of pain which is to bring me down if I get too hyper and those two seem to work together for me and so far I've been alright so much maybe not how long have you had taken impulse and this particular for about two years now that two and a half three years it's the book that I've been on other things are you longer yeah yeah so that's that's my thing I'm sure someone in the room will also be on listen you have to have your blood testing area because of the effect on the kidneys in Syria Wow I have a couple of questions I'd like to topic and then we'll go to this ok the first one you read out all the Harry Potter books I read them out I did it I didn't leave them to myself I bring him out now I read that loud to a microphone to a microphone there which also taken a while my question is which was your favorite oh my goodness yeah well you have to remember not remember but I've had to tell you this this was 20 years ago almost exactly and that my agent said Oh stealing their inquiry about doing a children's book for an audiobook now I like doing audiobooks or as you can probably tell I love the sound of my own voice and so I'm quite happy to sit in a studio and tell stories read read them and I'd done quite a bit of his'n and I thought our children's story and I said is it too good and my I said well I'm told the publishers say they're really excited by it and they think they're bloom free and they think it's very good and they'd love you to read you the author would like you to read it you know half a morning and dog ran up them it was a adult novel length it was 80,000 words or so I started reading I thought it was fun bad this boy who turns out to be a wizard he didn't know that buddy he had wanted anyway so I went along to this voiceover studio and there was this nice lady called Joe rolling who had written it and she was pleased as punch that it was going to be a husband working now but in case he does keep going after this I love it so I can take this as well in case you got it she was very nice and I read read the book out of ready boxes you see and enjoyed it very much and over lunch on the second or third day when it was finished she said well I went the second one I said good for you excellent I said I hope that wins the Smarty Award for fiction - because that's why one of the Smarties award agent Riggs um and she she had said from the beginning that she was very pleased that they were being read and she liked the fact that I was really love she was big but she liked programs are doing with you Lori and she sort of quotes the lines at me which is very pleasing but she wanted it to be unabridged because she argued that children you know read these books to themselves while the audiobook is being read as well and they follow it with their fingers along the pages and so if I say that instead of which or should instead of wood or whatever you know they'll notice and it should be accurate and that's you know that's part of the bargain a book heads unabridged as you do exactly as it's written anyway in the I think was in the third one which is called Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban there was a phrase very simple three words for some reason I couldn't get it out without adding about two extra syllables and it was just hairy pocketed they did it I still concert I genuinely cannot say Harry pocket diddly did Harry pocket I can take harry pocketed it good not IRA pocketed did you I was sitting there going how a pocket did you get off and lunchtime came Joe wasn't that to you in town at the time so I called her up I said Joe I mean that's stupid thing what I I can't say Harry pocketed the video would it be alright if I if I just changed it just just this sentence to Harry put it in his pocket which I can take and she said no and not only that every subsequent book had the phrase Harry pocket it was marvelous to watch the growth of this from being a popular book that was liked by parents and became famous for being a book that parents read their children and then as their children fell asleep the parents you know saturd stayed sitting at the edge of the bed or on top of the stairs reading it for themselves because they couldn't wait to get to the end of it and by the fourth and fifth it had become a remarkable phenomenon and towards the end across the greatest publishing phenomenon of this or other any age really and and I remember she came back from from the fourth one I think it was she had her first author tour of America and scholastic was the name of the publishers who published her over there and it was as becoming as big in America and it's not bigger in some respects and in Britain even and so she had this signing in New York in a Barnes and Noble Doubleday we know one of those large book shops and she was looking down from the stock room as authors you always do before and saw the line of people just going round and round the block and up and up the Avenue and just the most enormous and people were coming up excitedly and saying there are there are 25 Harry Potter's in the queue with with the glasses and lightning flashes on their foreheads and there are two women with gold frames around them fat ladies in the portrait and you know the all these people dressed up and she was very excited and anyway she started designing hundreds of people and you have a table and there's someone from your agents someone from the publishers someone from the book shop just to make sure the books are put in front of you nicely and that people don't spend too long doing selfies you know because you can't see everybody if everyone comes behind for selfie my work so you have to you know just sign it quickly and be as friendly as possible now about the seventeenth person in the queue get handed an envelope to Joe Sir Thomas Rowley was it get a name wrong um it's rallying I'd love to give you this and and the person from the bookshop snatch it away so thank you thank you and Joe said bless you I'm sorry you carried on signing in it every now again this what happened people give her an ember though and some one of them are agents or the book shop or the publishers would snatch it away like that before she could even look at it she thought through some really odd by the time she got to the end signed the last one and sort of shook her hand and to how the cramp of it and sipped some wine and thought phew that was a heck of a an achievement she turned to by the way all these nice people had things to give me snatched them away why did you do that said Oh Joe these people will have written their own storylines for a Harry Potter novel in which Hermione marries Harry or you know Snape murders Ron or something like and and you will accidentally put this in your next novel and they will try and sue you yeah but we will be able to depose that in front of witnesses you never touch the envelope it does not have your fingerprints on it there's been placed in a safe and we can depose that so when they write and try and Sue we can say [ __ ] off out of my face you mad [ __ ] and Joe thought I have entered it this doesn't happen to children's writers Ned and sure enough of course over the next few months in the next few years of Schubert new books people said I really I gave you that story idea in an airline that I signed and and they were able to say [ __ ] off and on my face you mad [ __ ] and then that was it anyway that's that story but it was wonderful yeah do you have a favorite Oh God I am so busted that struck me as night I'm so sorry and yes prob I'll gut and probably the cobble of the fire I think yeah okay thank you right there there's one last question before I went to the floor our president Harry is a very big fan of your Melchett in Blackadder [Applause] you've altered the end of the question I was so good what is going to ask her to do so it's okay and I've now loved to open questions up to the audience we've got about 15-20 minutes so super whoever would like to start off starting on this side there's a hand over there okay we'll go into fuels at the front yes just here yeah so I wanted to ask the face everyone just before of it if anybody else starts their question with the word so I will refuse to answer it please that's right carry on yeah you said you had this you said so inside yourself carry on you said you had this thirst for knowledge when you were younger and hope even now you wanted to know things all the time and you've got a lot of enjoyment out of that so I wonder how you feel about you know the rise of social media nowadays do you feel like that actually kind of a curse in some ways because I think you know a lot of us get rewards out of checking your emails all the time you want to know what that person is doing what that person's saying we want to have this knowledge and influx you know coming in to us do you feel like you get your life is overtaken by that in some ways now that it's all available and you only had that it's a very interesting question and one that I've puzzled over I haven't my life still coincided with the rise of the digital age and then the networking age because you might say in my first year of university virtually I bought bought my first computer and then January 1984 the second person in Europe to buy an Apple Mac the first being my friend Douglas Adams who at the Hitchhiker's Guide to go as we went into the shop together he bought the first one and I bought the second and then 10 years after that Tim berners-lee invented the world wide web and and I've been on the internet for some years before then and sort of watched it all happen and with great excitement in there was an early adopter of things like Twitter and and but part of me it's just terribly depressed by but that's my own fault because I was so optimistic I really believed when when the networking of the internet began to be real possibility particularly with the emotional the world wide web because email had been there all along but there's the speed of connections in the inputs and outputs were was so increased and and software and memory became so much cheaper and and I just thought the world was going to be connected and people would understand each other to talk to each other in ways that had never happened before and this was going to be a new dawn a new a new paradise of human society in which we would genuinely come to terms with all the things that distinguished us and made us different we would accept them and embrace them and we would go forward into sunlit uplands of glory and happiness and and I became aware that almost the opposite seems to have happened we have withdrawn into tribalism and nativism and separate bubbles of misunderstanding and hatred and contempt for each other refusal to accept other opinions a violent antipathy calling rudeness and unkindness the early days of what was called netiquette in which you know politeness was part of getting online as much as writing a modem script was part of getting online in the 1980s all that's gone and she I was very easy to get very upset about that but on the other hand there was also my optimism about knowledge and the way knowledge would spread things like Wikipedia when they first appeared I was very excited by the possibility of that it seemed to me to chime with the great Diderot project you know the seeker piggy which was the great enlightenment idea in which all the great achievers and understandings of the world would pull together to create this great national encyclopedia and this was it this was it and then what people began to worry and say to me well don't you see that it's shortening people's memories and it's their attention spans and you know it's because it's it's raised to the bottom in terms of triviality and stupidity and and intolerance and and I I look back at 1450 which was the year Gutenberg and produced the first Bible using moving typing at that time they were reckoned to be 40 or 50 thousand books in all of Europe by the year 1500 fifty years later there were reckoned to be fifty million and that's a fast printing that moved throughout and in Northern Europe unbelievable speed of transmission of knowledge and which is similar to what happened in the 1990s through to the present day and and that the people who were the guardians of knowledge in the 15th century were the priests of the the monks in the scriptorium Zurich who did the writing and the copying before printing existed and they said well now that there are books people will no longer need to know things they will just pull them down and look at them up in a book there would be no knowledge anymore and in fact the reverse was true this was the beginning of the birth of a huge huge transmission of knowledge around the globe and the rise of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution and everything else and political freedoms and so on of the 18th century being articulated and what seemed to be a good progress and and but that had a dark side too and and and books of course were burned and people were in prison for writing them and tortured for doing so and and yet you can't regret you can't regret anything that came out of the writing even wicked books man camp you know because my camp was written you don't curse the printing press and because there are bribe art news exists or whatever you choose to be your enemy online you don't blame the internet you don't blame you know it's human-shaped in the end it's humans are going to solve the problem because we've created it and if every good thing that comes out of it something monstrous seems to happened as well but what I don't think this is very long answer again I'm really sorry because I'm trying to articulate what I think and I'm not quite sure and I think one thing I have absolute faith it and that's the human brain don't ever think that we are evolutionarily incapable of coping with the amount of knowledge that is being yelled at us and stream debtor's a picture this you can stand in a field in the countryside and it's a beautiful sunny day and there's no traffic you're not near a road so even the turning over of a leaf a hundred yards away in the wind catches your eye the silvery underside of it suddenly appears or a bird suddenly shifts in the undergrowth and you you look towards it your senses are so keen so able to detect the smallest movement out there in this landscape because that's how you imagine that's how we've evolved to live because we're either looking for lunch or someone is looking at us as pretend for lunch and so are us our senses are very very keen but you can get on a train and two hours later you can be in the middle of Oxford Street and there are thousands of people all around you in different colors coming at you at enormous speeds cars going past voices in your ear on the phone people other talking music coming out of shops you're walking you're on the phone as you're walking and you can you can process it all you can cope with it all there is no problem the human brain is so extraordinary that it can detect a turning of a leaf and then two hours later it can it can choose not to focus in on this extraordinary blaring noise of colors and visions and sounds that are all around you we are amazingly adept and we haven't even begun to test the boundaries of what we're capable of so I wouldn't say that our minds going to be softened or ruined or in some way destroyed we you know it's perfectly possible to say that everything that's true the Internet will any make us richer because we now we've got books and we've got the countryside and we've got physical exercise and we've got the Internet and we can dickin all trainers to make us better in my view sorry that was long on us I'll try and be quicker lots of other people have right actually get from this side the back just shy of a student you know gammite fern over there thank you water yes hello oh hi uh perhaps cheekily I just want to preface the question by saying that you're the most amazingly eloquent man I've ever had the pleasure oh thank you and yeah I just I just wanted to ask you because you've played so many fantastic characters and you've given us so much through them which instantiation of your personality I was the funnest to play gosh that's a really interesting thing I I mean I've been very fortunate over the years to to be an interesting I played interesting characters and I'm fully aware that my genetic the genetic hand that I've been dealt is not such that I'm likely to be offered parts that you know had just been turned down by by Tom Hiddleston or the rock so so you know I have to accept what comes along with good grace and so a lead role in a movie is unlikely so when when the part of Oscar Wilde was was was you know canvassed for me that was something I left out because I had always admired Oscar as I said earlier he'd been instrumental in changing my view of language and looking at the world and myself so that was something but um I love playing grotesque characters I mean I loved playing Lord melted in Black Adder that you break only Harry mentioned because I suppose because it's like those days when you were at school and you were doing imitations of school teachers you know that we'd love to mock our old elders and betters and it's rather depressing that being the age of an actual Melchett whereas if I was in my twenties when I played him so it was kind of fun whereas now I have to be I have to be more grown-up about things I suppose but I mean you know acting is such an extraordinarily odd thing to do it's it's um you know if you're a musician you can you can keep your flute or your cello your piano you can keep it separate from yourself it's not you it's that your in a fluke case and you're down at an exact case and you pick it up and you blow down it and you you know you practice with it as much as possible when you're an actor you are your own instrument so this idea that you have to transform yourself is obviously kind nonsense what you really do it's a bit like you know they said of Michelangelo that he had remarked when someone complimented him on the David how did you find out and he said oh it was in the marble I just had to know which bits to take away because he did it was the David was in the marble every sculpture is in a block of marble you just take away the bits that aren't it and that's what you do when you're acting you take away you know you see there's a character you think that's nothing like me that I'm not like that but actually we're all of us like every human that's ever existed we just have to take away the bits that aren't that character and what's left is that character so it's always you and I think that's why most actors are a bit mad is because they're playing with themselves all the time in the front stop it really honestly that reminds me I came across this great quote by by Kinsey you know and you know Alfred Kinsey was a doctor in the 1950s who shocked America it was a seismic moment when he produced that box known as the Kinsey Report it was the Kinsey Report on the sexuality of the human male and he had done a very simple thing as he'd gone unquestioned as thousands and thousands of American men a few years later he did this actually the human female so there is two books but this was 50s you know cookies and milk America Crewcuts and decency and and so on and they were shocked by the Kinsey Report because he held nothing back he asked people about all their sexual experiences and there was a journalist who said dr. Kinsey says we believe your report it says that 92% of American males masturbate more than five times a week what does that say about American males and Kinsey said I guess it tells us that 8% of liars yeah yeah I think it's really good yeah but thank you I don't know what my favorite role is to be on this demo I'm hope that answering questions on take so there but thank you anyway okay got it yeah any more and boring yes the fun thank you you're a student here 20 years before me I was a student here 20 years before you guys and I now have children who are undergraduates or viewer sort of age and I'm very interested in the change in the pressures that you know that we are all under and I wanted to question you what you just said about we can we know we can take it we can make the stimulation everywhere all the time partly because I run a mental health website and you know if we know the statistics say that so many of the young people in this room and in this country are exhibiting you know more and more disappearing back to mental health you know anxiety disorder and depression and the stress stress stress do you really think it is right that our brain this amazing human brain that we have you know in a world where it never stops you guys God knows how many windows you've got open and things you've got pinging I know you have all the time and as a mother I go through it off you can't take it we had peace and we had quiet we could switch it off and I genuinely do worry maybe that young you know people can't switch off now and maybe if the incidence of mental health problems really are rising so much maybe we do have to question whether we can handle it well my being am I being an overprotective mother yeah well though maybe you are it was I don't know I can't say the drop it was a very different time I mean Brett Ike was a student there was a powerful power crazed you might say Tory woman in charge of the country there was a maniac called Kim running North Korea it was there was a basically educationally subnormal president in the United States it's a very different world I don't know I mean yes you can sell would say objectively things look more difficult and um obviously I could blow smoke up all your bodies and say you're very brave to live in this world in which your prospect seemed to be bleaker than young people's prospects were 30 40 50 years ago that we were all used my generation was used to be more prosperous than the generation before us and the generation after me was more prosperous than my and so then suddenly that seems to have stopped and your chances of I know definitely don't make you feel very depressed but I I I'm not from a staggeringly rich family but the first flat I had in London was in Chelsea and for after university just like oh yeah we've been a rented flat there's nice fun in Chelsea and I did think that's likely now for under ten thousand pounds a week so that seems really bad and you right to hate me for that and I don't know I was that I was so fortunate to be born when I was and if I was fortunate because I have to say a lot of my friends didn't make it a lot of my friends died through neglect drug addiction aids holes I left Cambridge in 1981 at exactly the time the virus manifested itself in in the West in America and in Europe lost a lot of people to that I lost people to suicide you know a lot of people don't make it they actually don't even in our mollycoddled West Lynn a Cambridge graduate so having said we have people to make our beds in our rooms with what are we complaining about really it seems absurd yet when I was there actually when I first arrived Cambridge as I'm sure it did to you boast of yeah we got the highest suicide rate of any university in the world you know things I every University says it by the way I have not been to university well they don't say apparently we've got as if it's a terrific boast but it's part of that belief you live in a particularly intense environment and the university should be intense and it should exercise your intellectual muscles and also your emotional muscles you're finding out how to make friends how to lose them and you're having roused with people you having feuds with people you're getting excited about it and that is magnified under the extraordinary searching lens of social media which is not only a lens that magnifies that like other lenses it burns you can be bullied and burnt by that lens in horrible ways that were unimaginable to our generation that I absolutely admit but I do think you can cope I mean there are certain things that a university must stand for and against and I've always felt that beguiling and enticing as their works are cambridge is something that is a fortress that stands for square against disney for example now disney made some very nice films you know Lion King Charlie Goodson Baloo nasty Oh scar Oh nasty and but its motto is the biggest lie in our culture when you wish upon the star your dreams come true are they [ __ ] don't they absolutely do not and if you think they do you are in for a life of crushing disappointment crushing I mean if you work your ass off your dreams might come true or not your dreams I dreamt I had a row with Donald Trump in the supermarket oh they want that movie you come true that would be a ridiculous dream do know you've man's aspirations your ambitions how are the ambitions any of you have in this room how are they going to come true we've all lain in our beds at night closing our eyes tight wishing oh I'm fluent in Spanish and I open the patting bring the dog or whatever I'm on a stage and I'm bigger than Prince I'm I'm a rock star I'm at you know we've all done we will fantasize but we all understand what see is it's it's not real and it cannot come true by closing your eyes and wishing it wishes whatever fools I think Cleopatra says so when you wish upon a star you are wasting your time you really are I mean it's even admire stars and you can think about them but look what Newton did when he wished upon a star as it were he looked at a star and he thought about it the fact is the secret to life is so simple that no one wants to know it you can't write a book about it and make money out of it and that is that you don't chase your dream you don't wish upon a star you you work you work and if you are lucky work is more fun than fun you discover the joy of work the terrible lesson to learn but it's one of the university teaches because it's the only way you really get on you study which is a kind of work and you think which is the hardest kind of work there is but there aren't any shortcuts and and that's that's really important that you stand up to a world that is selling shortcuts all the time either in the form of the snake-oil of self-help books you know ten things they don't teach you at Harvard Business School and all that sort of rubbish all those awful life coaching things you have to stand up in front of it where you stand up in front of religion that tells you can shortcut you to bliss or any other thing that has an answer that isn't the much more difficult but at the same time much easier answer is that you stand up for what this institution stands for research thought insight inspiration yes leaps of faith and thought intellectually and spiritually and in all kinds of directions but you don't cheat you know it it's fun to be young it's fun to be silly but in the end the absolute fundamental seriousness of a great education is you don't cheat you find out you work you discover and you do it not by going to lectures although they're often very good but by sitting up and talking to your friends about what you read and what you thought and what you argue about and so on and and it sounds very utopian to say that but you are in a place where that utopian dream is realized for three years four years depending what subjects are taking or how long you're going to be here and what an opportunity to stretch all those muscles and I would only say when talking about the internet for example in social media although I you know I have whatever it is ridiculous number of twelve and half million whatever it is Twitter followers and that's very useful in some ways and charming I know that if I was young if I was your age and certainly younger if I was 15 and I was at school I would look at friends standing in the playground snapchatting and I would think how lame how pathetic and I would with my friends and say right we are going off the grid right we are not going to have mobile phones and so the teacher says right I'm I want your essays emailed to me by 6:00 this evening observe what's your address you go well it's teacher at school calm no no no your physical address what I tell him I do well how do I where do I deliver the essay to I've just told you you email it no I don't have an email address what no no I'm not an Internet Oh your parents are very poor are they well we do have a scheme no no I'm there on the internet I'm not I don't do it whatever ridiculous wouldn't it be fun you know be just to contrast your teacher with their spare you've got to be on the Alita you don't have to I don't have to be on the Internet it's not a law that says I have to be on it you wonder now say I'll write you an essay and I'll take it well into your house and I'll put it to your letterbox if you're [ __ ] read it on FIFA and you'll read my handlers you are typing on typewriter this is it and if you want me you phone me and has a read time I might be there but I don't have a mobile phone so there wouldn't that be great and I'm you you could write a magazine with your friends and you've used one of those old stencil duplicators you know with a hand that would make about 30 copies and that's it and you do it on very fuzzy on sort of blue pink paper so it couldn't be photocopied and so the number of copies you printed with a number of copies there were in the world and there couldn't be any more you wouldn't let anybody clone it because everything we have is cloned every picture every sound every moving image is cloned and it's identical no differences now I love the digital world and I love everything these offices but not just in that sort of hipster you know hand batch artisanal way do I like analog things but I just think because this so few of them now and because I'm very contrary sort of person and I'm sure the best of you have got an imp inside you that is contrary to it says sod it I'm not interested in that I'm going to go off the grid and I think that'd be very exciting so that's anybody who's on to that email now meet me by the old tree that was hit by lightning on the 3rd of October we'll all meet there yeah okay right I think we are going to have to end there but firstly can I say thank you very much to Steven for being here for speaking and for answering questions and I'm so sorry that we didn't get to answer all of them I wish we could but it would be here until tomorrow which reminds me tomorrow tomorrow we have Michael Howard the ex leader of the Conservative Party who will be speaking in this chamber with the same lovely chairs lovely water and me and that will be good fun so then almost come along and grill him that would be lovely it's gonna be drinking the same water I've got to piss in this bottle [Music] I will watch out yes but that's about that's tomorrow so if you if you're free please do come down we're also collecting money for the mental health charity mind which you've mentioned there will be buckets on the way out as we leave and all this left to say is if you wouldn't mind remaining seated until left the chamber just so they can make the flow easier but otherwise thank you very much for coming and once again round of applause [Applause] you

Channel: Cambridge Union

Views: 137,114

Rating: 4.7484622 out of 5

Keywords: The, Cambridge, Union, Stephen Fry

Id: b-FS0ZDXdso

Length: 80min 5sec (4805 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/IdleRhymer]

"They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is..."

[u/svampstek]

44:34 in the video

[u/[deleted]]

I’m sure she talked about this on Twitter recently and said it was bullshit.

Edit: here’s a link http://amp.timeinc.net/nme/news/j-k-rowling-responds-to-stephen-fry-harry-potter-feud-rumours-2081848?source=dam

[u/camden_cope]

She sounds like an asshole

[u/ForkFace2]

The term 'pocketed it' was in book 1 and 2 as well - which Stephen Fry also recorded the audiobooks for.