Stephen Fry | Cambridge Union

[Music] [Applause] in norfolk we were miles from the nearest lemon and we were miles from the nearest anything and and even television was really kind of banned my father was a scientist and another uh a historian and and uh they didn't think much of the television it was kept in a cupboard and was occasionally taken out to churchill's funeral when i was about six or seven and for the moon landing and the odd uh wedding of a member of the sax coburg family of one kind or another or the windsors as they call themselves now and and um otherwise it was pretty much frowned upon but my father was away one weekend and it was raining so i pulled the television out and uh there was a film on it that it started so i didn't know what it was um i was about 11 perhaps and people were speaking in the most extraordinary way it absolutely absolutely grabbed me i lent for it it wasn't shakespeare but nor was it contemporary and i wasn't sure what it was and i remember this young man saying to this young woman i hope i will not offend you if i say that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection and i just was it was as if i'd been struck i'd never heard anybody speaking like that it was a declaration of love but it was spoken in such extraordinary latino phrases and we're sort of brought up to believe aren't we that if you love someone you speak in anglo-saxon i love you not you are the visible personification of absolute perfection and yet it was somehow beautifully romantic as well as preposterous anyway i carried on watching and i loved it and i skipped touched my mother afterwards mummy mummy would you be in any way offended if i said that you seem to me to be the visible personification of absolute perfection and she said what are you talking about and i explained what i'd seen and i wanted to know what it was and she said well oh that's the importance of being earnest she said and i said well what's that and she explained it was a play by someone called oscar wilde now being as remote as we were um the norfolk county council very kindly once every other thursday sent this gray van deep into the countryside about a mile from the house i could stop at the meeting of two lanes and it was a mobile library so i stopped at the corner and flagged the la the the library down as you had to do and the driver got out and went round to the side and opened a side door and lowered some steps and patted my bottom inside in the way that people did in those days and there was a nice lady in the cardigan with little spectacles on on chains and powdery cheeks and and i said do you have something called the importance of being earnest by oscar wilde and she said yes i think we do my darling and she pointed me to the to the book and it was the four comedies the woman of no importance and the ideal husband and lady fandom here's wind and and the importance of being earnest and um i took them home and i read them and read them and was absolutely overwhelmed by whatever i thought it was so brilliant and i learned the importance of being honest almost off my heart i think i still know it um and then i went following sort of thursday and said do you have anything more bioscale world and she had the complete works so i took those home and some of those were quite difficult for me there were a lot of political the political essays like the soul of man under socialism and so on and the decay of lying a lot of aesthetics and philosophy but there were some short stories and other delightful things and a couple of weeks later i took that back and said do you have anything more she said well you've had the complete work so that's the complete works um and so i looked round and i saw a book called the trials of oscar wilde so i said well i'll take this she gave me a funny look she said how old are you i said oh i'm old enough to read anything i said very earnestly so she stamped it out with a slight sort of slight air of doubt you know and i took it home and i started to read about this extraordinary man this irishman who came to london and had a circle around him of admirers and friends and who changed the way people thought about everything and who was not only a an extraordinary wit but isn't i think of shakespeare is it uh someone says a full staff not just a wit but a cause of wit in others he made everyone around him funnier he changed the colors of things you saw things differently he was wise and he was so kind he was such a good friend and then darkness entered the story terrible darkness and he went on trial there were three trials that's why it was called the trials of oscar world and uh he was sent to prison for two years of hard labor and as i was reading it i knew deep inside me that the sin he had committed in victorian eyes his nature as he called it was something that i shared and i was frightened i was thrilled that i had this in common with such a great man but i was also frightened because i thought that's my future too the future of exile and shame and being shunned and hated and spattered and loathed and felt to be unnatural and that and that really was a terrifying thing for me and it settled in my mind this sense that i'd always had and i'm sure many of you have had that i was different from everybody else and these days we're so good at compartmentalizing it and calling it identity and so on and it's a good thing that we can join communities of identity in many ways but that wasn't available to me and so i had other ways of of responding and the most important one was then to bicycle into norwich which was 12 miles away and and read more and more about wilde in his circle and other people like that and other artists and other writers and accidentally on the way i kind of gave myself a sort of education in in literature just because that's that's what was available to me to to make me feel that i wasn't alone um and so i felt uh the burgeoning sense of not only of difference but also of a kind of rage-filled pride i suppose you could call it i i i felt i felt that i belonged to these people more than to the world around me um now at the same time i was going to school and i was a troubled soul at school i was i'm pretty sure now that i would have been diagnosed as adhd you know attention deficit hyperactivity disorder i was very very disruptive and i was a bad influence so all my reports said he's a bad impulse everywhere else he disrupts the class he's appalling he's disgraceful and and i stole things mad things and screwdrivers from shops and hammers and just weird items and squirreled them away um one of the writers i also admired who as it turned out was an admirer of wild and they met it's a whole other story that would take 10 minutes to tell but that was arthur conan doyle and i always liked sherlock holmes stories and i had done since i was very young and i had the sort of brain that liked to memorize things so i knew all the details of the sherlock holmes cannon you know how many steps there were from the pavement to the to the to the to the rooms that watson and holmes shared 17 steps in case you're interested and uh that sort of thing and the names and genealogies of all the characters so i joined the sherlock holmes society of london and anyway it used to be whenever i told this story about my time at school because it was a private school a public school as they're called um but i used to have to explain the house system um but one of the benefits and advantages of of uh jk rowling is that now everybody knows about the house system in schools because you so so my house my gryffindor as it were the house master um gave me permission to go to london to attend a meeting of the sherlock holmes society i was 14 and a half at the time and i stayed in london i was supposed to come back the next day but i stayed for five days i suddenly discovered cinema so i went in and just watched films and films and films and and found an incredibly cheap hotel room in russell square and i mean it was ridiculously dangerous on me really as a 14 and a half year old wandering around london going into cinemas on my own but it i seemed to i was seemed to get away with it except that the school when i eventually got back decided to get rid of me and then i was expelled from another school and then from another school um and i didn't care i was uh filled with this peculiar sense of difference and of not connecting to the world around me and not liking not liking what kipling called them the flanneled fool of the wicked and the muddied oaths of the goals the the tribe the the loud muddy tribe of uh games playing average people that i was simultaneously afraid of and contemptuous of i knew they were contemptuous of me and and all i could do was be to try and use the lash of my tongue as it were to to get my own back and i had for example if anyone tried to bully me i had a very good response which is no no don't touch me don't touch me i'll get an erection um and i can't tell you how well that works oh bloody hell oh christ hell fry jesus um so but i uh anyway one school after another expelled apologies to people who've read my autobiography they'll know this story but uh i found myself in london and i was getting a bit hard up and it was a cold evening and i was in a pub and uh so i took a coat from the from the rack and there's a coat hanging up on a coat stand or whatever you call them and i took that went down i discovered it had a wallet in it it was very exciting and in the wallet with some credit cards um and what's the word i went ape that's the word i went ancient around britain spending on these credit cards in those days they didn't have magnetic strips and you know you didn't swipe them there was a procure you know how um the the the numbers on the credit card are um stand proud of the card and that's because you used to put them in a little machine and roll it across some carbon paper and it would imprint on the paper and that's how you would pay for things yeah there were there was no contactless there was no swiping that's the way it worked in those days so security was absolutely hopeless so i was i was staying at the ritz hotel and i was just preposterous i mean it was absurd i was going all over the place spending money and buying things and i had four suitcases by the end of it it was ridiculous and i'd agreed with a school friend that i'd go to the reading festival which is not me at all but um he was a good friend and and he said i'd enjoy it and then i could you know put in a bottle and throw it on the stage and all the other things they do they still do i believe at the reading festival and um so i um on my way i can't remember where i'd been in the west country i stopped off at swindon and uh i'd managed to get some very fine suits and shirts and ties and things but not shoes so i have sizes 13 and a half feet and um and and i just hadn't come across a good pair of shoes so i checked in at this hotel in swindon and went out to look for some shoes and i came back wearing a fine pair of shoes that i found feeling very pleased with myself um and i went to my uh room and then i went out again to buy a watch and the clever girl behind the reception desk had seen this young fellow come in by this time 17 by the way had seen see me come in with bad shoes and then see me come back with really good shoes and she thought there was something odd about it so she took the the imprint of the card and called up and so when i came back the second time there were two men in the hotel room and i rather stupidly thought they were cleaning it or something said no it's right i don't need it cleaning and they they said mr gray which was the name of the person whose credit cards are stolen and i said yes they they took out their warrant cards wiltshire cid and i was busted and i took out a very long story a little short i went to went to prison um i wasn't sentenced to prison i went on remand there were so many pieces of paper flying around 12 different counties of the united kingdom in which i had committed crimes so that the police had to assemble all the charges before i could appear in front of the magistrates so for the first week i was a non-con as it was called in this in this prison i i hadn't i was not a convict because you're innocent until proved guilty or until you've pled guilty and i haven't pled but after a week i was sent back up uh and offered the chance to plead uh before the paperwork was and i pled guilty knowing you know that there was no chance of anything else so then i got into the gray conflicts uniform and found myself a prisoner and this was not how i'd imagined my life turning out in some ways but in other ways it was exactly i would imagine my life turning out without any of the romance without any of the martyrdom or the sacrifice i i had turned myself into oscar wilde by being imprisoned but it was a pretty squalid and not very impressive piece of transgression that had got me there um so picture me i'm going to exaggerate but there i am lying on the stone flags of the cell the shadows of the of the cell bars are struck across a thwart my back um a rat scurries over me uh i sob into the straw um and i vow to myself that this is as low as i'm going to get and that i shall i shall go to cambridge uh and now why cambridge what is it about this place that was particularly appealing to me well i was in east anglian so i suppose it was at the nearest fine university with all respect to uea um and um no i never find place yet um but also because i had in this journey i'd fallen in love with a particular strand of literature which nowadays it's i mean it is admired but perhaps it's not as not as respected as it was once and that is the tradition of e.m forster and bertrand russell and the bloomsbury group and so on which was based on a sort of philosophical idea of g moore uh who was a cambridge philosopher and bertrand brussell who was a cambridge philosopher of course and that was the something to do with the sanctity of human relations is the way they put it the glory of connection between friends and how that was more important than anything else iam foster had written a famous line in one of his essays in which it said he was talking uh this was later on he was talking about i think in particular the cambridge spies yeah this was in the 60s you know mclean burgess philby the ones who uh worked for russia um a lot during the second world war and then afterwards and he said if it came to a choice between between betraying my friend or betraying my country i hope i should have the guts to to betray my country and a lot of people thought this was the worst thing they had ever heard that it was a kind of it was a treachery even to write it that i would have the guts to betray my country rather than my friends but they always forget how he carried on that sentence he said i know a lot of people he said will be reaching for the telephone to contact the police when they read this but i would urge them to remember that i have dante and others on my side in the seventh circle of hell in dante's inferno you may remember the absolute central core of the worst of the worst of the worst were judas iscariot and brutus who both betrayed their friend so as he put it that's the tradition we really come from that is ultimately something worth remembering the sanctity of human relations is the phrase used and something in that whole way of thinking and being which you can easily be looked at as kind of mimsy and sentimental and self-indulgent and all kinds of other things it really appealed to me and i loved the idea of the poets who had been here the tennyson and milton and wordsworth and byron and um and i loved bertrand russell and g moore and forster the whole that whole sort of idea struck me as being so lyrical and beautiful and of course at the center of of forster's worldview was tolerance um was was a tolerance of other people's ideas and the tolerance of other people's thinking and the tolerance of other people's natures including of course sexuality he was a gay man who never really came out except to his own friends uh and the gay literature he wrote was only um only published posthumously anyway so there i am as i say on the prison floor and i'm thinking about this place and imagining it and i'm i'm seeing king's chapel and i'm seeing the sun hitting the stones and i'm i mean it's utterly uh utterly sentimental and i'm i'm sort of sobbing to myself how am i going to get that i don't know i'm going to get that but it is a kind of full circle because my sexuality and my um my knowledge of how alien it was to to others had forced me to read and to find solace and friendship in dead writers and writers from all over the world and the characters they created to find vindication as well that was such a powerful thing and i thought well i'm gonna i i i'm gonna see if i can get in so i uh i had to wait for my prison for my magistrate's appearance and and it i was fortunate because i'd been so long on remand this was counted as part of a custodial sentence so i was in fact only given two years probation so i went home my parents had come to pick me up and there was a rather silent and solemn journey from from the west country all the way back to norfolk and they said well you can live with us they said but you know we're not going to we're not going to pay for you to go to any more schools or anything like that i said no no no that's fine i know what i'm going to do i'm going to get a job and i'm going to see if i can get into a college somewhere in norwich and and i went to uh the very next day i got home i mopeded my way to norwich where there was a city college and they it was the registration day it was unbelievable coincidence it was the second registration day and the last and i was at the back of the queue and i i got there and there was this fellow who said what do you want to do and i said well i want to do a levels in english french history and the history of art and he said well you can only do three and i said well they which any english definitely or any of the others as well english is full we've got two english sets and they're both full so i said to him if you let me read english i will get a scholarship to cambridge he said we don't do the cambridge entrance exam it was a separate entrance exam and i said nonetheless i will train myself to do it and i will you will be proud of me and he looked at me his name was peter butler we became friends and gave me a long look i look back at him feeling trembling inside and it seemed to be like a minute and he went yeah i suppose so and he signed a piece of paper and i was in so of course then i had to try and make good um and which was this one-year course in a levels and i i fortunately did them and did get a scholarship to queen's college and um and arrived on probation uh and every now and again i had to get a train to norwich to see my probation officer during my first year and when when when that was over just towards the end of my first year i i went to my director of studies and i said um can i buy you a drink go to holland you said what i said well i want to celebrate with you because i've just come off probation he said what do what do you mean i said well i've been on probation for you know convicted of a crime and and i've been on he said why didn't you tell us i said well i'm telling you now and you never asked it's you fill in a form and one of the questions is not noticeably isn't are you on probation so anyway that was that was my time it and it did it did turn me around i i you know i did all the things that you could do then which were much smaller than what you could do now but i joined the gay society and i was out um and i made friends and those are still the friends i have 40 years later more than 40 oh god it is 40 years here um and um it's uh that's what i think of when i come here i mean it's very self-indulgent to tell you this story but for me it is it is a story about one of the things a place like this can offer it offers not just not just the friendship and the excitement and the joy of youth and self-discovery and making mistakes and being silly and uh and laughing with your friends laughing and laughing and laughing with your friends and finding out new passions and so on but it it's also an idea in your head um and i'm never afraid to be sentimental about the idea of cambridge the reality of it is always of course disappointing that the platonic well the reality of everything is disappointing in the sense that you know the the actual nuts and bolts and the bricks and so on are not not quite as perfect as they are in your dream but there is a platonic form if you like of of cambridge that we carry one can carry in one's head and then there is a cambridge one can improve that you know what by being here one makes it better um and so i suppose the if i had a message for you it is it is don't mold yourself in the form of cambridge mold cambridge in your form make it yours the stones seem to be very hard but actually every time i come back here i realized that it isn't the same cambridge that i was in despite the continuity of the architecture and the portraits and the walls and everything else it is it is yours you have a totally different experience for the one i had but the past one hopes women inform it and make you happy but um i've probably spoken for long enough on my own and i welcome now any questions you may ask on any subject but thank you very much for listening thank you thank you [Applause] are we going [Applause] we're going for the keenest hand possibly of all time over here it's prepared thank you for a most interesting introduction for the evening this is about myths if i may ask you've said in the past that myths arrive from the collective unconscious if so given humanity's precarious circumstances might this collective unconscious give rise to a new myth for us today should we stay open to this possibility or is the matrix the final word well yes i'm it's very kind of you say i've called it the collective unconscious i was i was quoting carl jung who called myths a collective unconscious and joseph campbell i think called them um public dreams and and myths aren't something that interests me uh i'm i'm always fascinated by um by ways you can explain things and and again a university is a perfect example because the departments of university are if you like little packets of explanation so there is a natsuki explanation of the world there's an empirical scientific explanation of how things were where everything came from a big bang and so on and it's a very convincing one and it's one um that differs from theology or myths in the theology of myths don't make machines work you can't you can't build a light bulb a physical light bulb out of an understanding of myth but you can you can out of an understanding of electrons um so you know thanks to faraday and maxwell you can have a light bulb and edison and swan and so on um but with myths what is it you're building it's another way of looking at the truth so for example the greek myths have a big bang as well it was chaos they called it chaos and out of chaos came came these elemental forms light ether as the greeks called it and and so on um and i i think of our ancestors probably very inaccurately in caves and there was a period when thanks to behavioral modernism i think that paleontologists call it um we were building tools and and we were developing language and we were starting to harness the power of nature in our own ways so the agricultural revolution and everything all came together in such a way that we were having enough calories to give ourselves a little bit of leisure and so people were starting to ask questions because in the past like most animals we were too busy running away from from nasty animals and running towards animals we wanted to eat and traveling to places that were safer and warmer we just didn't have time for anything else but suddenly we had this time and we were and so i picture children in caves you know saying mommy daddy why why does why do flowers push out of trees what what makes them do that and when there's a force and you can't explain it it's really a god until you can explain it a force that moves things um and it could be the fire that comes out of mountains or it could be the the roar in the sky when the precedes a rainstorm all these extraordinary things that our ancestors could not possibly explain you had to find a way of explaining it and and that's what myth allows you to do it allows you to say well there's we'll give them a name there's demeter pushes the flowers out of the trees and that's that's what she does and she makes the grass grow up from and then they'll say but why does it sometimes why do the leaves fall off the trees though so then you make up a story of why maybe demeter was unhappy you and so the in the greek case of demeter and persephone a myth is born and it's a beautiful explanation uh it uh it's saying there is a happiness and a joy and growth and then there's a sorrow in the lack of growth and it's a powerful metaphor that makes enormous sense i think and then it gets more sophisticated as we get more sophisticated and suddenly there it's per people and and the world of myth is full of characters who exhibit behaviors that can be very close to our own like flying too close to the sun whatever it might be and that's thrilling but in terms of our own history the moment you consciously try and construct a myth it's not a myth it's a novel or it's a poem or it's a play it's a story it's a parable but it's not a myth a myth is a myth has no author but but some deep race memory that is passed on i think so it's a very dull answer to your question but i don't know that we can have a modern myth in quite that way i think we've replaced myth-making um do you have any questions that were thought of in the last half hour in particular there's one there in the red scarf if you get a microphone um what has been uh the highlight of your life so far oh my goodness um heavens walking into this chamber does it a warm round of applause is clearly what could beat that i mean really that um well i suppose i could be gooey and truthful um again it sounds a bit sort of special pleading and oh narcissistic almost but yeah everything i told you about my early life the idea the idea that six years ago i could marry the man i love and there i am now nearly seven years married i mean that's that's pretty wonderful and i've got to i've got to hold that as probably the highlight um in terms of work well i don't know i mean that oscar wilde character whom i so fell in love with as a youth again the idea that i would ever play him which i did in a film which was a a real thrill extraordinary um that was in 93 for something like that um and we had as a consultant on the film merlin holland who was oscar wilde's grandson so there on the set i would sort of you know give a hug and shake the hand with the dna of oscar in it and um that was that was astonishing and um a little later 95 i guess it must have been um they consecrated a window to oscar in westminster abbey and poet's corner above robert browning and john keats and shelley and all the all the greats who were there shakespeare and so on there was a window to oscar wilde but the thing that was so extraordinary they were all british literary establishment was there and irish naturally because oscar was an irishman so there was seamus heaney there was tom stoppard harold pinter people like that um but most remarkably merlin army in armed with the current marquis of queensberry walking up the aisle that was the marquis of queensberry who destroyed wild because the marks of queensberry's son uh not after douglas was wild's lover and and marcus queens we couldn't bear it and so um uh caused the circumstances that brought about wild's trial so a hundred years almost to the day after uh wild's arrest there was this rapprochement and i felt at that point in 95 that everything was coming together the berlin wall had fallen a few years earlier nelson mandela had walked free from robben island um [Music] these kind of moments of acceptance for gay people i really felt in my in my heart that the world was knitting together and that all the differences and all the enmities and all the tribal resentments and dislikes all the horrors of racism and intolerance and bigotry were melting away and what was going to help it most of all was something that a year before had been invented by tim berners-lee in switzerland that he called the world wide web and that with the world wide web and other elements of the internet email and and all these blogs that were beginning to happen this was going to bring us all closer and closer together and i think of myself in that watching that rapprochement and thinking of how it was all going to be wonderful and i now look at that naive idiot thinking how did he misjudge the human race so badly how did i think that it was all going to work and then another part thinks well why didn't it everything was right everything was pointing in the right direction towards this knitting up this connection and instead of a centrifugal hug we got a century people throwing out and everybody's separating and it still makes me weep to this day but i am an optimist and we will knit together but not yet sadly um we will go um no one upstairs at the hand okay um [Laughter] i shouldn't have said that because i've invited more hands could we go to the person there towards the back um yes that was exciting um you talked a lot about laughing university can you tell us about one of the funniest moments that you had during your time at cambridge well um i in my first sort of remember halfway through my first term i went to see a play at the adc thomas stobart's travesties and it was it was very good it was very well directed i thought but there was one woman in it who was so brilliant i was caught completely by surprise and fell kind of in love with with her talent i just couldn't believe how how extraordinary she was and she was the same age as the rest of us um but she just was in talent beyond belief um and the very next day was the first day of a seminar on the winter's tale that i uh had to go to and i found myself sitting next to this girl so i i introduced myself and i said i am i think you're the most remarkable actress i've seen not just at this university so far but just about anywhere and she said oh thank you her name was emma thompson and um we became extremely close friends and and she liked something about my manner and badgered me to go to auditions and see you know and act myself so i meant my second term i was in seven plays i think um and and then uh i wrote a play for edinburgh and it was a common as it happened and it won this award it was for the mummers and emma came to see it with this friend of hers and she said i think you you two should get on um and uh i uh he's i said hello and he said hello um and uh uh he said his name was hugh and i didn't really think much more about it and then the beginning of of uh the next year um came around to my rooms and she said i'm going to take you around to see you again i said who she said that you remember i introduced you to him in edinburgh i said no i don't remember he said what he's president of footlights now and he needs someone you know to someone else to come in and write with him and there's me and and maybe you might like to join the footlights now as i was saying to someone earlier on it is an absolute rule at cambridge that everybody says apparently footlights are really crap this year i mean just it's absolutely inevitable that people will say that and so of course i'm not being in the footlights i'd sort of heard apparently the footlights are crap this year so i thought do i want to be involved in the footlights i'm an actor i do plays well i did play that the fact is being tall and rather pompous and with a dark deep voice in in a university where everybody's age 20 um i naturally always played the the king or the the ruler sometimes a warty old fool who comes on and blesses the lovers in act five and sometimes quite a good part but i thought that was my mitchel to be an actor and i didn't i liked comedy but i you know i i thought the footlights was you know a bit crap um so so she dragged me over to sellwood in college too and and and knocked on the door and and the door opened and and there was hugh sitting on the bed and his girlfriend was making a cup of coffee and he had a guitar on his that he said hello again and i said no um i didn't really remember him particularly but anyway we he played he said i'm writing a song and he played a verse of the song and i sat down next to him and i said that's brilliant he said yeah when i can't ride anymore i can't think of how it goes so we just started to talk about the lyrics of it and and we finished it and then we took out a pad of a4 and we started to write a sketch and then another one and the and m and and katie hughes girlfriend was sitting there chatting away and staring at us thinking what are you two doing i said well we've just written two sketches and a song he said but well you haven't even had a cup of coffee steam wouldn't you just sat on the bed and it was the most extraordinary thing that happened to me really it was a it's falling in love not in a sexual way but in a comedic way we just bowing like that we're just completely fitted we had the same sense of humor and it was just magical absolutely magical that every day we would see each other we would write things and we would laugh we would we would love it it's not a funny thing to have happened but it's a thing that is around the subject of funniness i suppose um and that was i don't know how it could have happened if i hadn't gone to prison i would have been because i was a year older than everyone else because of my prison time so um i i probably wouldn't have met him and but having met him and it just it ha and funnily enough when we did our footlight show we went to edinburgh and and then the one of the evenings we were taking the bow and the audience went completely nuts and did that you know given us a nice round of applause and the show was you know reasonably successful apparently the footlights are not that crap this year um and so we were sort of doing all right and we noticed suddenly there was someone coming on stage behind us and he was a very famous person he'd just become very famous it was rowan atkinson and he um he was famous because of this tv show called nine o'clock news which he was on and he gave one said i your mob um and announced that uh we'd won this award called the perry award which is and it was a new it was the first time ever been ever been awarded um and uh so he handed it to us and we thought wow that's that's exciting because it involved performing in london at a london theater um and then the next night a bbc producer came to the show and came around afterwards and said um we'd like to put this on bbc2 we said no this is just a student show yes yes but we think we'd like to put it on so we go wow and then the next night bonkers an itv producer came and said we'd like you to do a series it's just extraordinary what's going on and then the next night an australian promoter came and said i'd like to take you around australia and so we did that first we went around australia came back and recorded a show for the bbc and then went off and and the itv show they wanted to combine traditional sketch comedy of the cambridge kind which was me and hugh and emma um and with a new group and so they found this fellow who just graduated from manchester ben elton and someone who graduated from the art college in scotland robbie coltrane so we so we did a series together and it's just extraordinary that this happened i mean there was no explanation for it it was a kind of piece of luck within four nights of doing this show in edinburgh of um of having our lives completely transformed and i'm fully aware telling that story people are going to be very very angry and say you lucky bastard how did that happen and i don't know how it happened i all i can think is that something about the three of us went together gave people a nice feeling because i i honestly don't think that i i we were you know cosmically funnier than anybody else um or um i certainly wasn't better looking than anyone else um it just was an incredible piece of good fortune so when people write letters which they often do and say do you have any advice as to how to get into comedy what can i say i just say well be like me just uh have a good fairy on your shoulder who who opens doors for you i've been extraordinarily lucky but the luck was the connection with other people so if there is a theme this evening it is in connections with other people i don't i you know i don't think i i on my own i i can't imagine having gone forward in in in a in such a happy and lucky way but but by by this these friendships and these connections so that's that's my experience with the footlights which is pretty amazing really do you ever wonder how your life would have panned out if you hadn't met you and him yeah we talked about that he was he wanted to be a member of the hong kong hong kong police force um he it's really weird he had he'd read a story that there was corruption in the hong kong police force and he wanted to go in and clean up the hong kong um and then i pointed out he'd have to wear iron white shorts which the hong kong police force did wear and that slightly put him off it but i i honestly thought i would either stay here and grow tweed quietly in a corner uh and um you know adopt a pipe and to teach or or in a school um because that's what i always imagined i'd do is teach and and yeah i i'd hope to write books in the holidays as all teachers do and very few manage to do because it's a much busier job than than just thinking it's only term time implies but how can one know it is an extraordinary thing and you all of you in in five to ten years time you'll be thinking i never thought i'd end up here and and it's exciting and terrifying at the same time isn't it to you you can never know the contingency of faith is endlessly remarkable i mean i'll give you an example of it i was in new york um a few or 15 years ago so and um i uh a friend of a very good friend of mine we were chatting away and he suddenly said do you know if my mom had better taste in shirts i wouldn't be here i said what are you talking about that's a fascinating way to begin a conversation turned out it was his birthday and his mother gave him a shirt brooke's brother's shirt and he didn't like it he thought it was awful so the next morning on his way to work instead of going straight to work on this train he stopped off to get to 46th street where brooks brothers is and change it because he kept it in his packet and he had to hang around a bit it was a bit of a he was really annoyed i could be late for work eventually got the shirt changed and was just walking out and everybody was behaving strangely and clustering around shop windows looking at television screens and an airplane had charged into the building where his office was and he would have been there had his mother not not had such a terrible taste in shirts now there are thousands of stories like that you know every time you leave the house as it were you might if you'd let five minutes later you might have been driving along and run over a child um you know and people do you know they they're driving along and the child runs out between two cars and all they can think of is if i had taken three minutes longer to say goodbye to the children before getting in the car or if i had left quicker and not been delayed it drives you insane to think how contingent life is and it's a whole other subject and there's a good one for debate if you haven't already done it the question of free will as you probably know there are there are very few philosophers in the world who believe there is such a thing as free will but all of us kind of behave as if there is such a thing as free will but if we think very hard about it there clearly isn't and these contingencies of cause and effect are so we would drive ourselves mad if we if we tried to work out how things happen but it's amazing how often we congratulate ourselves on things that are good as if it is our skill and brilliance i mean like my luck with comedy it is it's incredible good fortune and or tomorrow there may be incredible ill fortune and i don't know what the answer is i think it's it's not it's not worth worrying about whether or not we have free will even though it is the biggest question in the world it's you just have to behave as if we have it don't we anyway so it's another thing that sounds like a good debate mission um right we will go up to the rafters now can we give the person at the back by the blight do we have mike's upstairs oh yes we do okay i'll tell you what just you know what you know amusing things um there are you know perhaps not as many as now as there used to be amusing dons fellows of of of of colleges there was um there was one that i think it's in john's i can't remember anything was crooks i think his name was um and in in those days colleges were locked at i know half past 10 or 11 um and obviously people like to get out of the colleges to drink and see people and you know uh um so you had to find clever ways to get back into the college and in john's one of the ways back in was through the masters lodge window and um uh and this fellow had been out at night it was about two in the morning and he goes in through the window of the master's lodge and he's just creeping along through the study of the uh of the the master study which is what the window is and there's a light suddenly under the door there's a yellow strip of light and so he hides under the desk like that uh thinking of it and the door opens and footsteps and a creek someone sits in the chair at the desk and he sees his feet slippered feet bare shiny old man shins and uh and he's there as quiet as possible and then he hears a page being turned in a book and himself god is reading and then another page and then after an hour and a half of getting total crammed the book is slammed and he hears the master's voice saying well i don't know about you wiggins but i'm going to bed sorry um it was really fascinating and heartwarming to hear you speak about the importance of connection and belonging and also about using being in such a dark space to propel you yourself really into a place of such brilliance um during the lockdown uh after discussion with my best friend charlie we we established a group on facebook um controversially called lads advice and it targets um young men who might find it difficult for various reasons to act to access mental health support um and so the question that i wanted to ask you is if you have a message or what would you say to young men who are finding themselves you know due to those social structures make it difficult to access support what would you say to them uh about what they should do and as a bit of a more self-indulgent second part to the question um you're rather loved within the group so we have a small gift for you and i'm lucky enough to be sat next to some of your scholarship recipients who are going to i believe meet you so if it's okay with you can i send that with them thank you very much that's very sweet of you the mental health question is a very important one and it's fortunately one that is being talked about far more than it ever used to be i had a a rather terrible experience in the early 90s uh when i was in a play in the west end and i had some sort of storm inside me that propelled me away from the play and into a car into europe and i just simply ran away um i i did actually try and end my life i i sort of started the car in a lock-up garage and uh thinking that that was supposed to end your life but after about half an hour it didn't seem to make any difference with the window open and so i drove all to europe and through belgium into holland and germany and i had some strange idea that i would go up north of germany into denmark maybe somewhere top of jutland and buy a big thick white pullover and a pipe and sit on a rock and write poems and you know learn danish and just hide away from the world because i couldn't face the world and i couldn't face myself and i was and i couldn't understand why i was so unhappy i was on the surface a very successful person a very fortunate person i was quite prosperous and i had friends and i was loved and i you know i i couldn't understand it but inside i was utterly utterly desolated with misery and self-hatred there's no other way of pushing it and um it was an awful thing and i eventually came back and and in fact hugh it was the uh that was before the um before he wasn't on email but he knew that i was a loved all this thing and there was something called compuserve that i was a member of and he managed to get a message through to me to tell me to come home and to bring him and so on and he was you know i came back and i i saw people and i got a diagnosis um which was it was called bipolar disorder and i the weird thing is that i'd heard that phrase before and i couldn't quite remember where it used to be called manic depression and and it was called manic depression because it had has two sides mania and depression so an elevated state and a depressed state and you swing between them hence also bipolar two poles um a pole of elevation and a pole of depression um and i was you know put on medication and i also went to see a psychotherapist and a friend that led me a house in in south france and i could be away from the public gaze because it did cause quite a stir um and uh and i slowly recovered my self i think a little at least enough to feel more confident and the producer asked if i would make a program about it said do you want you know it's a program in which you find out more about this condition yourself how prevalent it is how it's dealt with how you know and so on and i thought long and hard about it a part of me didn't want to scratch the scab you know cause it to bleed again another part thought i i don't understand this enough so i um so i agreed to do it so we made this this documentary called the secret life of the manic depressive and i i saw a lot of people and a great many people who have this condition that this this bipolar disorder um and interestingly i asked each of them i did it's a classic sort of philosopher a question you ask in philosophy 101. you know there's there's a button um and and ephesus to use the button the usual question is if you could press the button you'd get rid of all the misery bullying unkindness and horror in the world but you'd also get rid of all the creativity and all the joy and all the love but it would just be bland you know would you press the button and of course there is no right answer but most people wouldn't so i did a bipolar equivalent i said to these people who all suffered terribly from this condition i said here's a button if you press it you will never have a depressed state again you will never have that misery that sense of being closed off that sense of not wanting to come into contact with other people and not believing in any future having no sense of the future except as a black wall um but you will also never experience the elevated mania in which that you planned all your plans for the future incredibly exciting you're exuberant and grandiose and filled with energy and filled with a kind of fire sometimes a very dangerous fire a kind of radiant feeling you kind of have a had states of it where i've felt like joan of arc you know i mean really bizarre feelings like that but anyway they are enriching and thrilling sometimes and i said so you can press that button you don't get either and only one person wanted to press the button out of the dozens that i spoke to and and that was a a woman had taken a drill to our head to try and to try and empty it of the pain she felt and pain is an important word when you're dealing with serious mental illness um uh there was a man wonderful man in the film who had been a naval officer and he had been the captain of the royal yacht britannia for a while and then he started to have really quite severe episodes of mental illness of the bipolar um nature and uh he had to be fired from that job and from the navy and he was in a hospital um and he he was in a locked wall but not a very heavily secure one and he escaped from it because he he wanted to end his life and he ran out in front of a lorry and his legs were smashed and he rolled his trouser legs up on camera and showed me they had been broken and re-broken and re-broken uh by the surgeons you know um in order to straighten them uh and and he he looked over my shoulder into the camera lens and said well i want everyone watching to understand he said is that the pain the unbelievable pain in my legs for for two and a half years as they smashed them with hammers and re reset them and reset them was absolutely nothing compared to the pain in my head from my depression they have to understand that and that was very powerful testimony and and the thing i say when you know i i am honored to be the president of mind the um mental health charity the largest of the mental health charges in britain and and uh you have to hold two things in your head one is that this is a very serious condition it has what doctors call a very high level of morbidity you really can slide out of the human world you you self-medicate if you've not been diagnosed and your moods change the first thing you reach for is alcohol or narcotics or speed or coke or whatever it is just to so that you can somehow control these moods that otherwise are uncontrollable it's called self-medication in the trade and it sounds like you're being oh he's just an excuse for being a lush you know but it's not that it is a a desperate attempt to to not feel like you're feeling and you slide therefore down out of a job and out of your family and you're on the street and then a lot of people get into that terrible position and they have a shorter life than they ever would otherwise and of course there's self-harm and there is the ultimate self-harm of suicide so that is one thing you have to remember that it is a very serious or potentially very serious condition something like that but the other thing to hold in your hand is that there are millions of people who have that condition in one form or another around the world who are capable of living full and fulfilled lives lives full of love and creativity and success and happiness and connection that it can be managed and lived with in the same way that diabetes or asthma can be lived with their chronic conditions sort of with you always but there are ways you learn to cope and it can be a medical intervention or it could be cbt you know cognitive behavioral therapy it can be a number of different things and there are as we know now great um mindfulness techniques and the understanding of exercise and fresh air and walking it sounds kind of like the old oh go and walk it off but it isn't there are real ways of connecting with nature and with other people and with music and all kinds of things that are more available now than used to be and and more understood and so that's a very a very helpful thing now on top of that i'm talking there about very clear conditions that i suspect one day will be very easy to diagnose with fmri scanning or with genetic sequencing um it's a real condition just as a you know so is atrial fibrillation or you know pancreatic cancer you know but then there are other things on the spectrum of mental disorder which we're very much aware of at the moment which seem to be a result of mixtures of things including the pandemic and lockdown and and the pressures of finance and so on particularly amongst the young amongst people like you and these are called mental health conditions they're not quite as diagnosable as something like schizophrenia or effect you know schizoaffective disorder or you know or a mood disorder like bipolar but their anxiety and their stress and their misery and they're an uncontrolled uh sense of of not being right you know what i mean so in the same way that you can have an illness physical illness that really is a cancer or a dangerous heart condition but you can also have a a real pain in your leg that makes it impossible to walk they're both serious but that they're very different kinds of thing aren't they and and i suppose the one we're most aware of at the moment is is this mental health one and there are people who are very cynical about it and think people use it as an excuse so um you know someone is accused of something and they immediately are not available for comment because they have mental health issues you think oh they're just hiding behind it but we don't know that we we can't be sure there are people now who who i think rightly make a good case for saying that the the misery the anxiety the stress the unhappiness the feeling of not belonging that is so common among so many of us is is one of the most urgent crises that we have to think about and yes you can reach out to mindfulness apps you can reach out to your gp you can reach out to um um you know various techniques that you discover and read about but also you can talk to your friends remember if you're a friend and you have another friend who is deeply unhappy if they don't tell you about it it's very upsetting for you we want to be used as friends we want to help others so don't ever be afraid and think you know i call it i call it the genital wart syndrome if if you suddenly notice oh my god what's that doing there it's a weird human psychological thing that we're perfectly happy to show it to a stranger a doctor we've never met before when you look at this is it all right but the idea of showing it to your mother or your or a friend when you look at my old fella and see what this wart is i go off but they wouldn't or at least we think they would but in the case of mental health it's it's really important to overcome that so i suppose i mean it's not a full answer it's impossible to give really full answer but but um again don't use friendship you i mean and not use it in the sense of exploitive but but um the gift of friendship is is something that that that is incredibly important i think in in in helping one with with those conditions that's a good thing i reckon we've probably got time for two more um two more maybe short-ish questions we will go um we'll go to the person there on the end of the road um it's quite a short question do you think um dean smith can save norwich this season [Laughter] well as my jewish grandfather used to say from your lips to god's ears um norwich city are in the cellar but we've just gone up one floor uh above newcastle rather than newcastle arabia um and uh yeah i am i i'm i'm optimistic but cautiously optimistic history has shown that we are the the absolute embodiment of a yo-yo club let's be honest there's someone again very enthusiastic on the front right here i feel we probably have it um yes hello i'll try to be quick um i basically just wanted to thank you because i'm from the middle of nowhere in hungary and i didn't speak english and i didn't belong because i suspected i wasn't straight or a woman and i happened upon your book by complete chance and i found out about this place called cambridge and i taught myself english and said i would make it here and the fact that you're here tonight and i can actually see you as i've already cried so thank you so much [Applause] thank you so much wow we should be paytash i hope i got that right my grandfather used to use that word it means a kissing friend you know hungarians are very demonstrative and affectionate to men or women if they have a friend will kiss them in the street like that so and i'd say to my and the word for someone you know well enough to kiss in the street is paitash and uh at least that's how i remember my grandfather saying it so you'd say to him do you know do you know so and so you go yeah we're not exactly by dash he would say and he used to say your accent is amazing we used to drive through he said things about hungarian jews he used to say a hungarian jew is the only man who can um follow someone into a revolving door and come out first um but he he was he just drive me mad he would drive in the countryside and and uh he'd look around and say what a wonderful village i go granddaddy you can say vault and you can say willage why can't you say what a wonderful village what a wonderful village no what a wonderful village what a wonderful village anyway yours is much better than that yeah and i'm sorry about victor i think we'll still do two more questions i want two real questions um we'll go at the front here and then we'll do one more um what's the biggest difference you've noticed between cambridge when you were a student to now that's an interesting question what is the biggest difference um you're much prettier all of you um um it's hard for me to say i haven't you know penetrated the membrane of real life within cambridge i visit um i'm you're lovely you're charming funny or sweet what you are not is what the press presents young people as puritanical blacklisting cancelling woke maniacs it is it never ceases to amaze me the gap between public perception and reality and it is so depressing that these battle lines are drawn in these narratives that suit newspapers continue to pertain and they are very very distressing and stupid because you know one of my other writing heroes is was pg woodhouse and he used to he claimed that when he was in in london he would write letters and stamp them and put them in an envelope and throw them out of the window because he reasoned that most people were totally decent and if they saw a stamped and a dress envelope in the street they would pick it up and post it and he claimed he never had a letter go astray that way as he said you know if you throw a brick into the middle of leicester square it will it will be a very decent person and and and that is my view i do think most people are not well here are we children lost in a wood is this i'm trying to remember the w.h jordan who tried to be happy and try to be good and of course it's a big philosophical christians can you be good if you aren't happy and can you be happy if you aren't good but most people even if they act appallingly inside are desperate to be happy and good and and and so much in our society stops us being happy and good or stops us having the confidence to be happy and good and and i suppose the great wonder of this island of three years or four years or however long your your undergraduate or your time here might be is that it offers offers an opportunity to experiment with different ways of being happy and good you experiment with alcohol you experiment with friendship you experiment with sex you experiment with identity and with dress with clothing you reinvent yourself you can change your name you can change the way you you think and and act and and you can inspect yourself honestly and that's a marvelous thing to do to inspect oneself and to to wag a finger at oneself and to doubt one's own motives and say oh stephen that's you're just being that's what you greedily want and you're pretending it's it's a moral and ethical thing but it's really greed or whatever just recognize the things in oneself that's that's more important than going to lectures it's more important than getting a good degree it is is the pleasure of that journey of self-examination and fun i suppose and and i hope that will never change yeah um the moral burden of picking the last question is almost too much to bear do you want to do it or should i oh that's very well maybe i will because i don't want to disappoint anyone whose hands is up hands are up by picking someone whose hand isn't up because so i will just finish by saying if you can put your hands down sorry about it um um and and i want to return to oscar again because there are two things about about him that almost made me cry well one of them really did i end with that maybe but the other is is to remember that even if you're not going to witness history vindicating yourself or people you admire it matters to know that history will so oscar when he died in 1900 died in exile in paris um having been in prison having been put to two years hard labor ill unhappy he was he would sit in the hotels and the english couples and families would come to the hotel recognizing their complaint to the manager would throw him out into the street he was publicly humiliated all the time he he he had every reason to believe that his name would be associated with crime and shame and perversion for all time because the victorian morality seemed so permanent and so huge and then something remarkable happened um and it reminds me of if you've ever been to new york city you can travel down fifth avenue which goes downtown this is going to sound like what kind of metaphor is this but it is a strange thing and it's very fun trick to do um once you if you get a good set of green lights in in new york and they go green green green green and you're in the back of a cab or an uber or whatever it might be um and you look out sort of in out of the rear window as you pass 34th street you're passing the empire state building which for many years was the tallest building in the world still one of the tallest buildings in manhattan um and a great site but it's um it's got buildings close to it so it may be very tall but the the little building nearer it your low down it it seems it blocks it so a little thing can block a big thing can't it when you're close to it but if you've got this run of green as you go down down down down down towards union square harold square wherever you you look out the back window and this magical thing happens this almost like an optical illusion except it's in reality is that the empire state building it's like a saturn v rocket just seems to go up and up and up and up and up and up and up and higher and higher and higher and all the smaller buildings shrink and shrink and shrink little because you you now see it and it's a wonderful thing that's what happened throughout the 20th century to oscar having been the most hated and reviled man in in europe all the pygmies who were so so much bigger than him when he died fell away and his reputation went up and up and up and up and he is now to some extent the patron saint of all artists and bohemians not just a gay icon and an irish icon but an icon for all students he's the student prince when i when i first sort of started to be on television things i'd get invited to colleges and and and universities and and i know sometimes you know be asked to drink in the student's room or whatever and in the early days the posters on the wall would be of karl marx and john lennon or jimi hendrix because the world if it was going to be saved would be saved by revolution political revolution or by rock and roll music but after the fall of the berlin wall and the continued crass commercialization of music and the various other things somehow that didn't really play anymore and i noticed that if you went to students from the most likely figures you would see on the walls would be people like you know frida kahlo or um uh einstein with his tongue out or or oscar wilde because if the world was going to be saved it would be saved by the life of the mind it would be saved by people like oscar and that made me so happy and then the thing this is why i always kept very tearful he died in paris as i said in that the great cemetery in paris is per la chez where his tomb is jacob epstein um designed it it's a beautiful art deco masterpiece um of marble and about a few years ago the irish government with the french commune uh or aaron de small whatever it was that it was responsible um pooled some money together to repair it why did it need repairing because the marble had corroded and why had the marble corroded because so many people every day kissed it and that made me so happy there was this man this giant man who had been brought so low and now he had towered up and now people came and they stuck little post-it notes bless you oscar i think of you every day you died for me and a kind of secular messiah almost um and that to me is a journey that humanity makes and despite the hiccups along the way when you stop at different traffic lights and another smaller building obscures the big one the further you go the true proportion of the things that matter shows itself that's how i'd like to end thank you thank you very much thank you so much thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you goodbye thank you thank you goodbye thank you thank you thank you you

Channel: Cambridge Union

Views: 283,485

Keywords: Cambridge Union, Cambridge University, Speech, Stephen Fry, English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director and writer., Writer, Director, Fry and Laurie, Hugh Laurie, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, Fry, Stephen, Speaker, Speaker Event, 2021

Id: bpSIhD7_zz0

Length: 76min 55sec (4615 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021