Stephen Fry on Love, Trump and Learning Not to Care

Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. I'm trying to resurface some of the greatest gems in the uncomfortable conversations archive. This one is from only two years ago, but it's one of my heroes and it's one of the most enjoyable conversations I've had on the show. So if you heard it then you will want to hear it again and if you've joined the show in the past two years, I didn't want you to miss it. Stephen Fry is one of the greatest comic minds in the UK and perhaps the world. I grew up idolizing him from his sketch comedy show, a little bit of fry and lorry to the British classic black adder. He's an Emmy winner, he's got six bafters, he's got two Olivier Awards, he has a Tony nomination for his performance in the 12th night, which was a Globe Theatre production on Broadway. He's been nominated for Golden Globe, he's appeared in Gosford Park, the movie, a fish called Wanda, V for Vendetta, the Hobbit, he is the narrator of all the Harry Potter and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, audio books, and he has a fabulous memoir called Moab is my washpot, which will become relevant in the conversation that you're about to hear. It was a tremendously reassuring book for me to read as a teenager sort of sketching out that sense of teenage listlessness and lostness and the sense that the whole world is a bunch of phony adults doing their stupid phony things, caring about their mortgages and their dumb jobs when the real visceral kind of meat of life is available only to someone who sees the world as it truly is and that person is invariably a 15 year old. Stephen Fry was visiting Sydney in November of 2024 when he was kind enough to swing by the uncomfortable conversations studio. I hope you enjoy either for the first time or the second or the third, fourth, fifth or sixth. The one, the only, Stephen Fry. The week that Donald Trump first won his first election in 2016, I was on stage in Philadelphia with Richard Dawkins moderating an event and it was the first public thing. Then here I had done since Trump won the first time and we came out into this auditorium and sat down and you could feel a sort of tension in the air and the first thing I said to him was what the fuck just happened? Everyone sort of laughed. What the fuck just happened this time? Well as I said to the audience and the Australians were understand this and the Americans listening weren't nor with anyone else but it was an astonishing result that a lad bet the other way and incomes night's choice at 90 to one quite extraordinary I'm talking of course about the really important race that went on which was the Melbourne Cup. But what goes on in America? I have this desperate need to believe that I can opt out of knowing what's going on in the world. Knowledge is a powerful thing and people talk about it is a great thing but it's also an immensely destructive thing. There are a lot of phrases like what the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over but I've traveled enough in the world to know that if you're in I don't know the deciduous forest of Madagascar they don't know who the President of the United States is and they don't care they get on with their life it matters nothing to them. Does it actually matter to us? I mean it's an interesting question. Well presumably I mean the whether or not those forests in Madagascar continue to exist or I can't exist in a world of climate chaos depends a little bit on who the President of the United States is. Yeah I mean in a very long chain of course in effect it's very very long if you really believe that the world would last longer with Kamala Harris as President then with Trump I think you're totally misguided. No one is solving the problem. No, not in the least. No, it's because I'm trying not to care because it's so destructive it's like giving yourself cancer to worry about this preposterous credit at the White House. He's going to have an apoplexy before his things over and it's not he who's the problem now. It's his legatees. It's the muskrat. It's Robert Kennedy. It's the Vice President and all the people he's enabled and the Supreme Court and the entire structure of the United States Constitution and it's you know articles and instruments of government. It's civil service and everything else all the agencies. They'll be corrupted and contaminated. And it's yeah it's depressing but I'm 67 and I want not to care. It's that simple. Of course inside I had a sleepless night and I thought fuck them all. I was angry and upset then I thought that's what they want me to be. There's nothing they like more than liberals ringing their hands and they like to mock them. They said they were going to leave the country why they still there as if they expected everyone to leave within 24 hours. You know it's a tricky one Josh. Yes it's miserable but we have to find a way to live life and to be happy and fulfill human beings and to do what we can that's good in our perception of what's good not virtue, signaling or anything like that but just believing that the circle of once kiss which is not a word we use very often the neighborhoods the communities in which we live as well as the kin and the family are where we can survive and that if we keep worrying about these enormous apparently enormous and important people and their actions it will drive us crazy and I'm fully aware that if I'd say that in 1933 I'd be in real trouble now because you know sometimes you have to take action man the barricades shout scream try and change what's going on but at the moment at least I just want to ignore it I want to I want to get on with life and live life here now in the vertical moment not in the great horizontal stream of history because it's two it's almost too much to think about and you have to believe at some point you have to have a faint sense that the wicked will be punished by by the nature of the cosmos and and I'm always reminded of a great line in the imports of being earnest where Sicily is talking to her governess Miss Prism Miss Prism says do not speak slightly of the three volume novels Sicily I myself wrote one unhappy at times and Sicily says did it end happily Miss Prism says the good ended happily the bad ended unhappily that is what fiction means and I fear it's true it's only in fiction the good end happily and the bad end unhappily I mean at some kind of vast cosmic come up for people who do bad hmm sounds quite religious which is something you're not I know I'm not a member of a church or a temple or any organized religion but that doesn't mean the one doesn't have a sense of right and wrong and the could do you think the cosmos does no no no but it's the language we use to describe the you know the balance of good and evil and when things happen and what the consequences are it mean really it's logical chains of action and reaction that happened more or less within the space we live though we know that that doesn't work but you do think that immoral acts will lead to a chain that will end in no I hope I hope that's why I quoted Oscar while we feel it probably doesn't happen at all I mean that's what's so shocking isn't it about modernism I remember reading when I first read even more I could not believe how shocking it was not not because it was morally shocking because of you know loose ethical behavior or anything like that but because there was no justice in the books and and I was so used to that wilding idea that he marks that the good end happily and the bad end unhappily which they did in the kind of books I'd read as a boy you know whether it was Sherlock Holmes or school stories you know the bully gets punished and the the hero wins the day and suddenly to read novels like decline and fall and so on where people just randomly it seems get end up in prison for doing nothing wrong and I suppose you'd call it the malice of time and chance shocked me and I think it should shock all of us yeah because inside us for some reason we are given this sense we you know you can call it cosmic or you can call it internal and personal we're given I mean philosophers called it deontology or the deontic sense a sense of what is right and what is wrong it's beyond religion religion it far preceded certainly Christian religion and it's there in animist religions and anything else that there that things should balance and that behavior that is cruel and rapacious which destroys society and hurts people and destroys families is wrong and should be punished and if it's not punished by the cosmos by nature by some sort of accident or you know a bad person you know getting ill which doesn't It doesn't really happen as we know decent, wonderful kids get cancer. I mean, it's funny, it's so bizarre that we meended into this fatalistic territory because this is a week where I've just lost three people who were very close to me randomly. One of whom was young, one of whom was old, and one of whom was in between. And I was just talking to my brother on the phone coming in here. And he was asking me how I'm feeling. And I said, it's a little bit like I'm I'm numb, like I'm not grieving, but I do feel like I'm walking through a multiplayer video game. And I'm just like, well, okay, so the universe is just random or predetermined or something. And it decided to throw a Trump victory. And then one person dying, another person dying, another person dying at me. And it's sort of like, well, let's just see what the ants, how the ants respond. And I just sort of feel a bit like an ant. Yes, I know just what you mean. And it is, I suppose, it's why I value it, not religion, but myth. Because the myths I love best, the Greek myths, let me just spend the last two, I don't know, six years of my life, retelling in different forms. Understand that if there are gods, if you know, in other words, if there are agencies and forces in the cosmos, then they must be sort of by definition, because of the nature of the cosmos, they must be yes, beautiful, magisterial, fantastically, powerful, but also capricious and mean and cruel. Because that is what the world is. And you know, children die of bone cancer. There's no getting away from it. Special diseases that nature has has invented that are so cruel. There is, you know, Tricoma, African children have their eye and it's growing inwards scratching. So is there agony and they go blind? Is the New Testament and his Christianity a bit fatuous in that context? It's, I mean, you can discover this is all kinds of things. It's an interesting story, obviously, pretty much historical in its linium, but once and Paul gets in, in the acts of the apostles, once he gets on the road to Damascus and turns from being a persecutor of this tiny little sect that is growing up after the death of Jesus and decides to create a religion out of it, what we call a church, ecclesiastical. Then it then it does become, if not fatuous, it becomes about power and control. I mean, there's some Paul writes letters to all the people who've heard about Jesus and think it's interesting telling them how to behave and telling them how to organize. It becomes political. It becomes literally about power and organization with a few spiritual things thrown in. And in terms of detaching yourself from the flotsam and jetsam of daily life and finding that kind of tranquility and happiness that you were talking about by focusing on Kiff and kin, have you gotten better at that with age? Is it easier at any particular stage of life? It is easy. It's easier not to, it's easier to be patient, I think. I mean, in a literal sense, when you're young, very young, like now, what do I mean now? We're in November as you and I are talking. If I was a child then, if I was eight, nine, 10, and I saw Christmas was happening in weeks away, it is six, seven weeks away. I'll go, oh my God, it's never coming. I would be so. Oh, and if I made the weight in the car for an hour, just go mad. None of that matters anymore. You know, absolutely. It doesn't, you time passes and you know it does. And even bad things, boring things, dentists visits, whatever, you know, tests and all the things you get when you're older, they're, that'll, that'll be gone. Don't worry. So the things do pass and you were aware of cycles more in, because you've had a long time to live and you know, things go up and down. The Revan's had a nice image, which was wrote to Fortune, either the Wheel of Fortune. Nothing to do with the American Chris show that's now Ryan Seacrest, I think, has taken over. Oh, yeah. Yes, C Jack, never mind. And, but the Wheel of Fortune was essentially like a sort of big, ferris wheel, like a wheel that goes around, but it was blown by the wind and the wind was, was time and chance. And sometimes it blew harder and the wheel went faster and sometimes it was slow and the wheel was slow. And I remember when I was in kind of in my prime and Bill Clinton was president and Tony Blair was prime minister. And there was talk of the third way, the idea of extreme right wing or indeed the kind of strange left wing cultural imperialism that is filtered into universities was Mars away, Mars was the bottom of the wheel, if you like, both of them were. And it seemed like at the top of the wheel this third way between the left liberal and and and right conservative was the natural path that the world was going to take. And the end of history, the end of history indeed, as Fujian called it, and and and and and and the, yeah, because the Ballet Mall was falling and Mandela was free and you know, everything really did seem quite remarkable and interesting and fun and even art and music and things were interesting and original and you know, there was Oasis and Blair and there was Damien Hurst and the young British artist, there was, you know, things going on, there was style and there was fun and it seemed like that's how it would be. But the wind blew and the wind continued to blow and now those things are right at the bottom. Yeah, it couldn't be more contemptuously held by most of the world. And often when the wheel goes round things become opposites. So words take on opposite meanings. So now the word elite does not refer to billionaires who are saving on tax and who are running the world. It refers to people like us sitting in this graphic studio moaning about the fact that the world doesn't go the way we wanted to, but apparently we're elite. Well, we do, there is a, but that's a bit cute isn't it to avoid the cultural definition of elitism in the sense that we, we and people like us hold the organs of a cultural power or at least have up until now. But we don't really know. Well, people in a Hollywood, people on television, but that's not power in Hollywood. Every film that makes a disaster, streaming is going down. No, seriously, I mean, it's absolutely not. Hollywood is a shit condition. Well, all the studios are, uh, they're combining to try and make money and they're shedding their margins have never been tighter. Yes, they do. I'm saying all the conversation kind of cut the culture that people consume by watching television and going to the movies, regardless of what sort of economic fortunes of that industry are, combined with the kinds of things that get said in newspaper editorials, combined with the kinds of things one is supposed to believe in order to get invited to the right parties in Brooklyn and London. Like, there is a, I understand the, the tromperist definition of elitism, which is this fairly. So most people, you know, how many, uh, Seth Rogen has how many listen to Joe Rogan? Well, hundreds of hundreds of millions of millions. How many people watch television program? Two million? Yeah, I mean, but that's an instance. Yes, but that insertion mean by the opposite. It just isn't true. But it's a perception. Well, what did you mean a moment ago when you talked about the, uh, the cultural imperialism of a certain type of absurdities in academia? Academia? What does that mean? Oh, God, do we have to go through? Well, that probably intersects with the intersection that's another word. Yeah, again, the rest of the rest of my life can have it been going. I know what the, of course, I know what he said and I did, but nobody reads newspapers. Nobody watches television. It's all, this is how it used to be that the wheel has gone round. That's the point I'm making. Right. Things are the opposite. Yes, I understand. And the rhetoric of the right is still as if this enemy of, uh, of theirs, these liberals, these liberal elitists are still ruling the world. We're not. We're just winding in corners, like you and I, yeah, we don't have any, and I'm not saying I want any power. I'm not interested in it. If people want to listen to me, I appear on the podcast, but so do millions of others. And you're this Rogen, who's now I got wrong. For example, far more people listen to him than we'll be listening to us. But the reason, but Steven, the reason why a lot of people are drawn to people like Joe Rogan and the reason why a lot of people voted for Donald Trump, I would suggest is because of those are counterrevolutionary movements against the rhetoric. It's a lie, but it's a believed one. Right. Yeah, the wheel has gone round. That's all I'm saying. And now, yeah, you can, that's why they use the word elite. And it, it pricks the excitement of the voters. You think, yeah, those guys like, you know, Josh and Steve and sitting there using long words and referring to things and fuck them, you know, and yeah, eight guns. Yeah, fuck us one hour. Okay, because we, you know, I'd rather I'd rather not listen to Joe Rogan or watch martial arts. And, you know, I'm not interested in their world. And it's the world that's winning. It's the big world there. entertainment, the wrestling and the, you know, all the things they like and the music they listen to and the, you know, the clothes they wear and the language they use is dominant in the world. It is winning. It has won. Mine may once have seemed smart and interesting, just as the aristocrats of the 19th century, but we don't wish someone went around wearing ribboned wigs and saying, "Lar," and talking out in the British and language, we would think there were pretentious or mad. You're giving me an idea about something I'd rather like to do. Well, by all means cosplay, then it becomes, doesn't it? Yes. Well, something is cosplay, isn't it? Well, I mean, there's so much of this. But there was real, that's the point. It was real, it was a real way of thinking, real way of appra-ending the world and describing it. It was a real way of offering an organizational and political structure for us to follow. No, that is gone. The world has turned, and now there is another one, and people find it very difficult to understand when the world changes, that it really, really does change. And I am not of the generation that belongs to this new world, and I am not politically, culturally, socially, disposed towards the same set of beliefs and aspirations that those people are. I don't want to persuade them that I'm right and they're wrong, I just, it's become a different country. If you go to, you know, like my university, I went to an ancient university, Cambridge, I founded the best part of a thousand years ago. It's the same buildings that it has been for that 900 years. The same colleges, some of them have been added to by different, you know, generations, a bit Georgian here and so on, but it's basically a medieval building. But if I went in there in 1790 or something, I would see in the young barren there, at Trinity College being a student, and all the dons, all the teachers would be single and they would be in holy orders. That's how it was then. That's how the place worked. Same building, completely different world. And we are in the same building, the earth, it's still got the Alps, still got Australia, still got the English channel, but it's a different world. And it's a different world than the one I was born in and grew up in. And I can be, like most old people, hand-ringing and nostalgic and sentimental about it, I can be angry and gnarly about it, I can be grumpy. But I choose not to be, even though inside a lot of me is churning and thinking, fuck this new world, I hate it, I hate every part of it, I recognize the buildings, but it's not the same world. And this happens, as the wheel turns, it happens all the time. And different generations get caught up in it because they belong to it. And we now live in a time where people are very, very self-conscious about those generations. And I think that's why, when I was young, yes, the phrase baby boomer existed, but it really merely was a reference to the fact that there was a peak in births after the Second World War. It was a demographic statement. It wasn't a huge cultural one. But now, every fucking ten years, there's a new generation that is apparently described with piercing accuracy as, oh, Gen Z, think this. Do they? I mean, if you said that about black people or Jews, you'd be considered racist. Just on the basis of someone's birth, you interpret who they are, what they think, and even can say you hate them. I hate baby boomers, do you? And do you hate black people? Is that a reasonable thing to say? No, it isn't. How dare people be so bloody bigoted about generations? It's a whole, but I think part of the reason is because the because the wheel is turning so fast. And people are unstable about it and unsure about it, and they want to be rooted. I mean, in my real theory, I suppose, again, it's a sort of examination of Greek myth. But it's the half. I talked about KISS and KIN. The word "half" in almost all cultures is extremely important. Obviously, fire was important when we invented it. And one language arrived 60,000 years ago, very, very recently. We were, you know, the putative human family was gathered around the fire in the putative cave with the dogs helping us, you know, guard from wild animals and other tribes and so on. And we started because we had language and some element of safety children went start asking questions and around the fire would tell stories about how the world was created and why the was thunder in the sky and what it meant, who was in charge of pushing out flowers from dead twings at the springtime and all those sort of things. And we've had the half. We've had the half ever since. And the word "half" is cognators, linguists say, with the word "heart" in Anglo-Saxon. Heart and half are the same. The word "cardier" in Greek was used for half, as well as Oikos. And the Latin for half is very revealing. Its focus, word "focus" means "half" at the origin. We now use it metaphorically to mean anything around which we concentrate our thoughts and we focus on this. But it comes from the half. It's deeply part of who we are, to have a half. And right up to your child and my child, we still had a half. It wasn't the story of fireplace. It was a television, frankly enough. There was a flickering light that told stories about which we all gathered. And everybody watched them at the same time and the stories came out. And they went always good stories. Obviously, they were often red grundy, so popperies or whatever you might say. But nonetheless, there was a sense of commonality in the fireplace, a national fireplace. And now that's utterly disintegrated. Nobody watches the same things anymore. The mummy and daddy are watching an Apple TV series. And the daughters watching something in her bedroom and the son is wanting to ask what the son is watching in his bedroom. And the food is different. Probably the most interesting. Yeah. The food is utterly different. He's getting a pizza, she's getting a burger, we're getting delivered. So they're not eating together and they're not listening and they're not telling stories in the evening and they're not gathering around a fireplace of any kind. Sharing stories. And that disintegration of the hearth is a disintegration of a lot of things. And I know that's almost a right wing thing people used to say out of a Christian or some sort of strong social sense that young people with their music and they don't have any structure and they don't family life is disintegrating because of divorces and gay people and so on. And so it almost senses if I'm using that kind of language, but I'm just speculating really on the fact that we don't have this anymore, we don't have this hearth. Social media tries to be a hearth. I suppose the strange image that Americans have that must keep using about a town square. I don't know why he thinks it's a town square. In town squares, do you have one person with a microphone, the size of Africa? Well, other people have one the size of a small pebble because that's what he's got. Does that mean free speech and a town square? Also, you don't promote or demo ideas on the basis purely of how much people engage with them and how much people think on them and comment on them and how much it outrages people. That seems a weird way to shuffle ideas up and down. When I think of a town square and there's 10, one thinks of the charchescus on the balcony or the king on the balcony or the or the or the brazen there for the balcony and everyone looking up and that's what they're doing. But it's worse than that there's something hunger games here about it. There's something called seam about it as well as charches for the balcony. Who can say the most, who can say the thing that either most reinforces what you already believe or most demonizers and caricatures call it your idea. There you go, exactly. This cyclical nature of history and of life is something you've actually been quite perceptive about. Even when you were young, I think one of the reasons that your autobiography Mauibe is my washpots spoke to me so much when I was a teenager. It's such a beautiful box, Stephen. It is so beautiful and so open and revealing. But it's also like you quote from yourself aged 15, writing to your future self. Do you remember this passage? I do. I mean, I can't quote it. I have it. Could you read it or would you want me to, would you read it? Because it's so, anyway, I want to talk about that and what it tells us about life. To myself, not to be read until I'm 25, I know what you will think when you read this. You will be embarrassed. You will scoff and sneer. Well, I tell you now that everything I feel now, everything I am now is true and better than anything I shall ever be ever. This is me now, the real me. Every day that I grow away from the me that is writing this now is a betrayal and a defeat. I expect you'll screw this up into a bowl with sophisticated disgust or a best with tolerant amusement. But deep down you will know, you will know that you are smothering what you really, really were. This is the age when I truly am. From now on, my life will be behind me. I tell you now, this is true. Truer than anything else, I will ever right feel or know. What I am now is me. What I will be is a lie. I mean, heck, I remember writing the "Harmony of the Tears" streaming down my faces, I roaches, and I felt it. And what it was really about Joseph, of course, I suppose. It was I was in love, and there was a transgressive love because it was a gay love, as we would now say, and I felt that it connected me with all the poets and writers in the world. It made me force me to go to the library to try and find some vindication that I wasn't alone, and I read novels set in schools, sort of lyrical ediless and moon calf love of the kind I was feeling, and which had been banned at the time, but I or I read biographies of Oscar Wilde in his circle, and the ripples went out into other circles and other groups into the pulled bowls and the tangy as set. And so I became quite a sophisticated reader of what we would now call queer literature, but also it gave me a sense that there was compromise in the later lives that I was reading, that my purity and ferocity of what I felt, and also my very adolescent sense that I could connect with nature, that the drops of dew on a tree spoke to me more than to others, and not just that grown ups because car keys and mortgages and having lawn mowers and all the attributions and things of adulthood that the other boy so looked forward to, I saw his growing away from this intensity, and although it's a bit like a Chinese foot massage, it's absolute agony, but you love it. And I loved this agony. It was, it was, you know, Catullus, Udi Edamo, I hate and I love, and it was so intense, and I felt it so powerfully, and I suppose unusually for a teenager, I had an element of the literary now to be able to put it down, and I was asked by gay times many years later to respond or to write a letter to my 15-year-old self, and I said, "Oh, well, that's interesting because my 15-year-old self wrote a letter to me." And they said, "What do you mean?" And I pointed them to that, and they said, "Well, can you reply to it?" So I did actually write back in which-- What did the replies say? Well, it, it, it said, "I might even have it in a strange way if we can just have a second, because it was published in the Guardian, and someone reminded me of it recently, and so I-- I won't be the whole thing, well, I can, you can always cut it, I suppose-- dearest absurd child. I hope you're well, I know you are not." As it happens, you wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self, and it's high time that your future self had the decency to write back. You declared in that letter reproduced in your 1997 autobiography, "My Washpot," that everything I feel now as an adolescent is true. You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self, it would be a lie, a producing, treasable lie, a crime against adolescence. This is who I am, you wrote. Each day that passes I grow away from my true self, every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal. O Lord, love you, Stephen, how I admire your arrogance and rage and misery, how pure and righteous they are, and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence, how filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride, and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you, of me. Tears splash onto my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been, and yet I cannot but recognize that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen, angry, angst-ridden and awkward, but alive, because you knew how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do, it is mask, deadness of soul. I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether that love is for someone of your own sex or not, gay issues are important, and I shall come to them in a moment, but they shrivel like assaulted snail when compared to the towering question of love. Gay people sometimes believe, to this very day, would you credit it, young Stephen, that the preponderance of obstacles and terrors they encounter in their lives and relationships is intimately connected with the fact of their being gay. As it happens, at least 90% of their problems are to do with love and love alone, the lack of it, the denial of it, the inequality of it, the mist reciprocity in it, the horrors and heartaches of it, love cold, love hot, love fresh, love stale, love scorned, love mist, love denied, love betrayed. The great joke of sexuality is that these problems bedevil straight people just as much as gay. The 10% of extra suffering and complexity that uniquely confronts the gay person is certainly not incidental or trifling, but it must be understood that love comes first. This is tough for straight people to work out. Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and lines go wrong, as they certainly will, when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault. We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature. They, poor normal lambs, naturally find it harder to understand why, in Leisander's words, the course of true love never did run smooth. Sexual availability, so long an impossible dream in your age, becomes the norm in the late 70s and early 80s, only to be shattered by a new disease whose horrors you cannot even imagine. You would little believe that I can say to you now across the gap of 35 years that we are the blessed ones. The people have written a happy or not because of toll-puttled martyrs, chartists, infantry regiments, and in number of ancestors who made the world more comfortable for them. And we gay people are happy now or not. In large part, thanks to Stonewall rioters Harvey Milk, Dennis Lemmon, Gay News, Ian McKellen at Al, and the battered bodies of bullied, beaten, and abused gay men and women who stood up to be counted and refused to apologize for the way they were. It has given us something we never thought to have, pride. For a thousand years, shame was our lot, and now, turning on a six-pence, we have arrived at pride, without even it seems, an intervening period of, well, it's okay, I suppose, wouldn't have chosen it, but there you go. Who would have thought it? I know what you're doing now, young Stephen. It's early 1973. You're in the library, cross-referencing bibliographies, so that you can find out more and more examples of queer people in history, art, and literature against whom you can hope to validate yourself. Leonardo Czarkowski, Wild, Barren's Corvo, and Fung Glurdon, Robin Moore, Wersley, and Englishman John Jean-Jonnais, Cavaffee, Montelone, Roger Perife, Mary Renault, Michael Campbell, Michael Davis, Angostio, at Corvidal, John Richie, William Burras, so many great spirits, really do confirm that hope. It emboldens you to know that such a number of brilliant, if often doomed souls, share the same impulse and desires as you. I know the index card waltz of autobiographies, poems, and novels you are dancing. Those same names are still so close to the surface of my mind nearly four decades later. Novels, poetry, and the worlds of art and ideas are opening up in front of you almost incidentally. You spend all your time in the library, yearning to be told that you are not alone, and an unlooked-for side effect of this just happens to be a real education achieved in a private school designed for Philistine bumpkins. Being born queer has given you, by mistake, a fantastic advantage over the rugga-playing ordinaries who surround you. But those rugga-playing ordinaries have souls too, and you should know that. I know you cannot believe it now. They seem so secure, so assured, so blessedly normal. They gave Coughbert Wersley the Kipling-derived title of his overwhelmingly important to you, autobiography, "The Flanneled Fool." These are the men that have lost their soul, the flanneled fool at the wicket, and the mudded oaf at the goal. You look down at the fools almost as much as you fear them. The ordinary people whose path through life is guaranteed. They weren't have to spend their days in public libraries, public lavatories, and public courts, ashamed, spurned, and reviled. There is no internet, no gay news, no gay chat lines, no men seeking men and personal, no out-and-proud celebs, just a world of shame and secrecy. Somehow, as you age, a miracle will be wrought. You will begin by descending deeper into the depths, expulsion, crime, and prison. Nothing really to do with being gay, but everything to do with love and your inability to cope with it. Yet you will, as the regency rakes used to see. say, make a recover and find yourself at university where it will be astonishingly easy to be open about your sexuality. No great trick for the university's Cambridge, long a hotbed of righteous tolerance, spiritual heavy petting and homo-historier. You will emerge from Cambridge and enter a world where being out is no big deal, although a puzzlingly small number of your co-evils will find it as easy as you to emerge from the shadows. But before you damn anyone for failing to come out, look to their parents. The answer almost always lies there. Oh how lucky in that department has in so many, you are young Stephen, but don't kid yourself. For millions of teenagers around Britain and everywhere else it's still 1973. Torne's beatings and punishment await gay people the world over. In playgrounds and execution grounds, the distance between which is measured by nothing more than political constitutions and human will. Yes, you will grow to be a very, very, very, very lucky man who is able to express his nature out loud without fear of hatred or reprisal from any except the most deluded, demented and sad. But that is a small battle, one. A whole theater of war remains. The theater of war is bigger than the simple issue of being gay, just as the question of love swarms the question of mere sexuality. For alongside sexual politics, the entire achievement of the Enlightenment, which led inter-Alia to gay liberation, is under threat like never before. The cruel, hypocritical and loveless hand of religion and absolutism has fallen on the world once more. So my message from the future is twofold. Fear not, young Stephen. Your life will unfold in richer, more accepted and happier ways than you would ever dare to hope. But be wary for the most basic tenets of rationalism, openness and freedom that nourish you now and seem so unassailable are about to be harried and besieged by malevolent mad and medieval minds. You poor, dear, dear thing. Look at you, weltering in your misery. The extraordinary truth is that you want to stay there. Unlike so many of the young, you do not yearn for adulthood, pubs and car keys. You want to stay where you are in the Republic of pubescence, where feeling has primacy and pain is beautiful. And you know what? I think you are right. Beautiful. Yeah. Beautiful. Isn't it to have a dog with a self-right walk? I mean, do you believe that the sixteen-year-old is right? I mean, I do. There is something about adolescence that for me as well. It is burning bright. Yeah. And so intense and the colors, everything was turned up to 11. That's exactly right. Exactly right, Josh. And you know, that's what I was saying when I was that age and I suppose recognizing it still to be true when I wrote that, which is now quite a long time ago, as you can really tell in the sense, although I was right, perhaps, to be pessimistic about the future. And so is the price then when you talk about happiness and being happier now, is the price of happiness, contentment and the turning down on the volume of intensity? Yeah. Contentment is being in the non-chair. Happier is skipping around. I don't skip around. Skipping around like a child with an ice cream is happy. Contentment is in a chair, I think you also do. Yeah. Something like that. Is that a bit sad? Yes, it's sad and inevitable, I guess. I mean, on top of that one has to, I have to layer at least the fact that I, you know, having bipolar disorder will have phases in which I'm, the happiness is turned up not to 11, but to, you know, 111, 111, you know, a sort of hyper-manic phase of, I call it sometimes my Joan of Arc phase, you know, this kind of radiance that fills one and this sense of energy and things being possible. Is that reminiscent? Is that reminiscent of what the 16-year-old Stephen was talking about? Yes, very interesting. I mean, sometimes you think psychiatry and the language of psychology and mental health is just another linguistic discourse to describe what medievals use demons or humors and, you know, that it's no truer to say that, but there is something about adolescence in which, yeah, mood swings are greater and, yeah, I was also, I found it harder to concentrate and you can call that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, you know. I mean, if you imagine a hypothetical spirit who waxed and waned from being a 16-year-old Stephen writing that letter to the Stephen and present day over the course of 24-hour periods, maybe we would diagnose that as well. Yeah, and I think there is an element in which one can, I mean, I'm not scientific in the least, you know, a lot of my friends accuse me of being over-scientific or over-rational, though I don't think I'm a rationalist. But there's an element in which the medicalization of human moods and behaviors is no more convincing than the medieval theological demonizing of the same thing. Yeah. You know, they're both ways of kind of controlling and creating a narrative for something that is deeply un, you know, incoherent and misty and brownie and sometimes. Yeah. And it's, it looks clear from that letter that you wrote to your younger self that you would not, if you could, snap your fingers and erase having been that person. Would the converse be true that if you could snap your fingers and retain that sense of passion and, you know, life for the duration of your life, would you keep it? I think the question contentment contentment. I think what I would, the thing that would help but pause me from that snap is that, and this is such a dull answer and my teenage self would be astonished, is the discipline and joy of work that the control over my emotions that I was, that I gave myself all somehow learned through language and writing and whether it was originally just writing comedy sketches with my friend Hugh and, and, and becoming a professional entertainer. And then that word professional somehow, then becoming a writer and finding out how difficult it was to write it, but how that difficulty was a, was a thrill and that the nature of creating a book required such professionalism and even acting in the theater and, and on film requires professionalism. You have to learn your life, you have to stand, we had told you have to behave, you have to be on time and so on and so on. And all of that, those structures and frameworks that are not social ones, they're not a boss telling you what to do, which I would find difficult. They are, you becoming your boss and telling yourself what to do. They are disciplined, I mean, it's a passion word. And I get fulfillment out of that of a kind that I never imagined. I had this idea when I was young, like a lot of people that art and poetry were about self expression and about, you know, about, really like that letter, I wrote myself, they were about that sort of outpouring of emotion, but I discovered that almost the opposite is true. There's a great essay, it's an introduction to a book of criticism that T.S. Eliot wrote, in which he basically says the same thing, that a lot of people seem to have the mistaken idea that the point of poetry is to express how you feel. It couldn't be further from the truth, he says. And this, you know, this is a lesson of very few people want to hear, and because we're mostly pretty adolescent still about the idea of poetry, and we think that's what poetry is, it's a way of, you know, letting your feelings out. It actually, it's way utterly controlling them through language and finding only the exact word to describe what necessarily isn't a feeling, it's a perception, and it could be the song of a thrush, it could be, you know, the way a river moves. And if you find the right word, just as an artist, a painter finds the right flash of white to convey water. Then the emotion pours out, but it's exact and it's formal, and it's not done in a kind of blast of, and even Van Gogh, if you read his diaries and letters to his brother Theo, he's totally technical. It's, you know, yes, he's a deeply disturbed, you know, he's got great mental illness and so on, and he's passionately sort of love for color and movement and nature, and he wants to represent it, he wants absolutely to represent it, but it's about how he does it, it's about the detail of the brush. It's that, it's that that makes art not emotion, not, it's the controlling of emotion. That's fascinating, because in terms of discipline and precision, you're a precocious child. Yes. And your father's criticism of you was that you were a bit too cute and knowledgeable and fancy, and you were great at putting together a disciplined pastiche of what other brilliant people had said, but you are fundamentally unoriginal, and that, you know, all you were good at was putting on a show of intelligence. Yeah. Exactly. Is that a criticism that stuck or that's really interesting, because I'm not wishing to suddenly become all lecturey about it, but it's so, because that is what he said, that I was a pastiche, that it was just a. kind of laying on of things that I perceived from outside in the world and that I could recreate cleverly and make it look like it was a work of art. Isn't that exactly what we moan about in AI now because AI does the same. It just scrapes all the data and puts it together so neatly and so cleverly, but it's not original. But the reason I call my first novel "The Liar" was about this image I had because I noticed that this is actually how it all works and in fun and avéliates are the same thing to what I'm quoting him all the time. But, you know, great artist steals the way he puts it and the image I have for it is, Tina just very often and younger, you practice your signature because it's your logo, it's your little image that you give the world, your name, the way you write it, your signature. And it used to be a very common thing because it was on checkbooks which don't really exist anymore. The back of credit cards which everyone forgets to sign these days because it's, you know, you use a chip and pin. But the signature was a very important thing as you signed a letter with it and it was your signature. And when you were young you would practice it and you would make it up, you would, it would be fake because you would say one day, like my name has a Y in it, I'll do a straight down line for my Y with no curl on it. And then I think, now that's not right, I'll do a little curl till it goes up against itself. And I would try different signatures. And then one day, it's fixed and it is your signature. And the same with the walk, I used to look at other boys as we sort of walked into school from our houses and think, Oh, he carries his book in front of him like that. That looks quite cool. These books kind of like that. And he's got them under his arm. And I would sort of try different walks. And similarly with writing and it takes a long time, but I loved various writers. I have my, what you now call a worldwide web, my WWW, Oscar Wilde, PG Woodhouse and Evening War and loved their novels and writings. And everything I wrote was a ridiculous pastiche of those styles, you know, bit of woodhouse, bit of wild bit of, bit of wall, with possibly a bit of Arthur Conan Doyle shoved in as well. And it was obvious. And I knew it. And my father saw it in everything, of course, pastiche sho, as he called me. But then I remember there was a magazine at university where he used to write reviews and articles and silly things. And it was always under pseudonyms. So no one knew who was writing what, so he could be rude about people and so on. And one day I was walking along and someone said, Oh, that article you read about so and so. And I go, why do you think that was me? I said, Oh, I would say it was your style completely. And I said, I've got a style. So of course you have. I mean, you might as well have been, you know, you physically on the newspaper, speaking out. It was obviously you. And I went back and looked at the article. It wasn't Woodhouse. It wasn't Wilde. It was, I mean, it was English. And it was an English style that had kind of, you know, was not of the streets. Certainly it was a literary style if you all wants to put it that way. And I thought, maybe I've certainly got this thing, a voice, my own individual voice. And it is a, it's layers and layers of other people's voices and other people's influences all over because everybody's would be. But then that's what also what artificial intelligence is. It's the Bayesian priors. Yes. Call it. And so maybe originality does eventually come out of these accretions of pastief. Do you think it will from AI? Yes. Yes. And I think it's inevitable. I mean, already there's a Sotheby's just sold a painting for 1.4 million. Was it that it was done by an AI? I mean, that could be a fad though. The question. Oh, yes, absolutely. That doesn't speak to the question of whether AI will be genuinely innovative. Yeah. And you mentioned in that article that in that letter that you just read that you wrote to your younger self one phrase left out at me, which was blessedly normal. So when you're talking about copying the other boy's walks, do you ever, I mean, I know you envied people who seemed to be blessedly normal, you know, people who just seemed to, you know, be able to dance without ever having had to be taught or you knew how to walk and hold themselves. Yeah. If you could swap out your life for a blessedly normal life, would you? I think I actually say in, in, in, in, in my, in my book, you were so kind about, I think it has a section that's called joining in or something like that. And I quote, is it, I would say to someone who defines the, the bourgeois anti hero in literature, which is kind of basically the hero of most novels since the Second World War, as being divided in the self between two opposite impulses to be a part of the tribe to join in, to be blessedly normal, to be accepted, but an equally powerful impulse to stand alone and be different and to be outside. And that is, they are so opposite. It tears one apart because you can't satisfy yourself. And I think I am like that. I think a lot of people are like that. You know, there's, is it the master builder or the public enemy? I think it is the Ibsen play that, that ends with he stands strongest who stands must alone, which is a powerful and terrible way to end a play and, and to say to an audience, you know, because it's a communal act theater. And it's a very, it's a brilliant moment because you kind of think it's tragic thing to say, but it's also defiant. And it is a lot of a lot of the things, well, admires in art or shaking fists at the gods. He stands strongest who stands must alone. Can that be true? Surely not. But he's writing, you know, the Ibsen plays about a poisonous society, a society that turns on a, on a, on a honest person with, you know, and, and yet we also believe that we only can be strong when we are together, you know, which is a kind of a barbarist kind of thing you say in politics. Yeah. And no one challenges it. Of course, we do. We are together. You know, we're stronger. But how can they both be true? And yet within one, they are both true. Well, it reminds me a little bit of the conflict between the desire for newness and adventure on the one hand and the desire for safety and certainty and familiarity on the other, which obviously something that you've also struggled with, you know, you want to be doing something new and incredible. And at the same time, you want to be comfortable and having around the familiar. How does Walt Whitman put it so brilliantly? Do I contradict myself very well? I contradict myself. I contain multitudes. Yes. And, and that, I remember reading that and thinking, oh, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever read. Yeah. Do I contradict myself very well than I contradict myself? And, and, and you, you know, that's, because that's what it is to me. We are completely mixed in, in our impulses. I mean, it's true in ways, you know, that ancient, the Romans always talked about Russ versus herbs, you know, country versus the town that, and, and that is a part of the, partly an expression of that. There was a generation of Roman poets and thinkers and writers and indeed rulers like Augustus, who, who fancied themselves in the countryside as a gardener, alone with nature, away from the rustle and the bustle of the city and the, you know, far from the maddened crowd's equal strength as, as Gray puts it. And, and, but also, like Catalyst, they were, they, they yearned for the pavement and the mob and the smell of people. Yes. And I like that. I, I love being alone in the country. So, I don't think it's a fantastic feeling and I, you know, I, I fantasize about just being in my house in the country and, you know, every year making chutney and jam and there's seasons and, you know, having eggs and, from the chickens and dead and being oh, and, and not knowing who's president or prime minister, you know, this is how we began our conversation. And then another part of me is never happier than when I'm, you know, in Piccadilly or Fifth Avenue or wherever it is, you know, just thinking, this is I am part of the dream. Do you know the Australian poem "Clancy of the Overflow"? No, I'm title. It's beautiful. It's by one of our greatest poets who I'm blanking on, um, who wrote The Man from Snowy River, Benjabte. Oh, Benjabte? Benjabte? Yes, I think it is. I won't waste three minutes of your time reciting it for you now, but it's beautiful. It's about exactly this. It's about, it's about this in in the 1800s in Australia and someone who's sitting in his dingy-doodle office writing a letter to someone who he met on a mustastation in the outback and the letter comes back to him from a colleague who says, oh, Clancy, who the name of the guy has gone off and he's, he's out on the range somewhere. And the letter is just this, this guy's sort of thinking, thinking through what it must be like to be out there in the wide open spaces of the Australian outback, sitting on horseback, seeing the vast sunlit plains extend and as he would certain, the whisper of the breezes and the river on its bars and he sort of brings his focus back to where he is in this gritty 19th century, you know, Sydney with the fett of air and gritty of the dusty dirty city through the open window floating spreads its foulness overall. And it, you know, it just ends up with saying, I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy. I'd like to take a turning, where the seasons come and go, while he faced the round eternal of the cash book and the journal. But I doubt he'd suit the office clancy of the overflow. That's brilliant. I love it. I love it. That reminded me the office thing of the great opening of the words with poem, "The world is too much with us, getting and spending." Yes. And we feel that. But the marvelous thing about the brain, Josh, isn't it? It's astonishing. You can be like clancy there on the range. And you stand and all around you is nature and not a single human being or a thing made by a human. And a little fresher to wind will turn a leaf in the distance and your eye will catch it straight away. You will see the tiniest movements. Your brain is tuned to them because it might be someone who thinks you're a lunch, or it might be a potential lunch for you. And we're obviously evolutionists trained us to have this sensitivity and our perceptions when we're out there. But you can then get on the train, and two hours later you're in the middle of the city with 600 people on the pavement, either side of you, playing music, you can be on the phone, hopping out of the way of a taxi, music coming out of the barbershop as you pass by all this noise, all this, and your brain can cope with that. Yes. So the same brain that finds the tiniest little nuance in a leaf. Yeah. It is able to filter out all this incredible noise and have a conversation. I thought you were also going to say something different, which is that you could be on horseback in the outback, and your brain could be full of all the junk of the city. And you could be completely non-present to the tranquillation you're inhabiting, and your brain could be racing. And similarly, you could be walking through Fifth Avenue in New York City. This is one of the things that I used to love doing when I lived in New York is walking down the street in a kind of contemplative, rather sort of Buddhist. Yes. When you're surrounded by the mayhem, but you're not of it. You're not in it. And you can kind of coast through it in a tranquil way as the madness surrounds you. I want to let you go, but I want to ask you, can we do a quick one word, Rorschach? I'll do my best. Throw a word at you. You'll give me a word. Haggis. Paul. Hugh Laurie. Friend. Winston Churchill. Bulldog. Twitter. Says Paul. English prep schools. Oh, joy, pain, two answers. Brexit. Testraphy. Circumstition. Cruel. Michael Tancher. Bodhishear. Libraries. Smell. Pornography. Smell. Australia. Sun. Los Angeles. Noise. New York. Clammer. George Orwell. Purity. Elon Musk. Foulness. Companies that make their staff write he/him, or they them gender pronouns in their email signatures. Bless. Tiktok. In comprehension. Capitalism. Fuck it. The ethos have moved fast and break things. Disaster. What's the most unusual place you've ever been? There's a good question. The most unusual place I have ever been. I mean, one can say Utan, probably in terms of countries, unlike almost any other I've ever visited both geographically and socially. What else? And unusual. Well, I grew up in Norfolk, which is the most unusual country in England in some ways. It's eccentric and peculiar. We do different, they say. Also, in this rapid fire, a series of questions, I was also going to ask you what's the most underrated part of England, or Britain? Oh, and we definitely say it's angrier, yes. Yeah, Norfolk, it's fantastic. Should we colonize Mars? I don't, you know, I don't care. I mean, I know it's important and an extraordinary step for mankind, but because of the kind of people who talk about it and because obviously, Marsk is just so full of bullshit about what year we're going to do it and how we're going to do it. And it's a lot of things that we can do will unfortunately be done by such dreadful people that they sort of make it, you know, I mean, in a sense, you could say this is the story of humanity. It was wonderful to explore. I just read a wonderful book by the American historian Hampton Sides. It's called The Wide Wide Sea and it's about the last voyage of Captain Cook. And I wasn't sure what I was expecting, but first it's beautifully written, so it's a thrill to read. And I didn't know much about Captain Cook, you know, I suppose I could have imagined that typical, you know, white supremacists, style, British person, claiming things in the name of the King and being part of the ruination that is empire. He turned out not to be like that at all. He was very uncomfortable at changing the lives of the places that he discovered as a European, you know. And in his last voyage, he went, he was supposed to be on behalf of the crown, going all the way around the world and up to find the Northwest passage, the idea being that you could get from the Pacific to the Atlantic across the top of the world, which we now know you can't do. It's just it's all ice. Give it time with time and change. The only way was to go all the way down to the bottom of South America. That was a huge voyage until we cut. Let's say we until the Panama. The two of us, Steven and Josh cut the Panama Canal. That's right. But anyway, so it's fascinating because he goes down, you know, all the way down to South Africa and then across the Pacific to New Zealand and then back to Australia where he'd first been, of course, to Botany Bay, not very far from where we are talking now. And he's in Tasmania. And then he he goes up to Tahiti to return, oh my, this extraordinary Tahiti who has he brought back to England. His second voyage and became the sensation of Britain, this remarkable Tahiti who's complete desire was to get his revenge against the people of Bora Bora who attacked his island. There was a lot of war going on in the in the society islands or whatever you prefer to call them now, that that area of Polynesia. And then he went a bit north and discovered something completely new to to the West, which was Hawaii. And had an amazing time in Hawaii. It was astonished by how wonderful and beautiful it was and they were and everything was gorgeous. Then he went up to the north and sailed around. And anyway, one I thought was what a good and interesting man he was. He was killed in when the second visit to Hawaii. Did they eat him? They may have done it in a ritualistic way because they thought he was a god and that the god had betrayed them, this god Loma. I'm not judging them for that. No, no, absolutely not. And it was it was what was interesting was that he he felt very bad about the interference anyway and about the trading and all the rest of it. He was fascinated by the way they lived and very respectful of it and had no sense that these countries should be run by Britain or anything else. They should be governed the sent out. He was a decent person and I guess they're a very decent scientist. In a sense, he was like a scientist because his real skill was astonishing navigation. He's a remarkable seamen. I mean, absolutely incredible. The greatest of his age and people were astounded. His crew were astounded by his skill and his instincts and so on. That's what he was. And there are scientists who have that knowledge about Mars. But the people who will go to Mars will be like the people who will exploit what cook discovered and go, all right, well, we'll go there then. We'll go with the Royal Naval ship and we will run it and we will call it part of Britain. Who would lead the mission to Mars that would get the maximum buy-in from Stephen Fry? It would have to be a scientist and the scientist only, not someone who wanted to colonize it admittedly. There don't seem to be any Martians to be exploited. But the fact is we would just ruin another place. You know, it's like that hymn by Greenlands icy mountain and there's a line in it where every prospect pleases and only man is vile. And we are just such an infection. It's a terrible thing to say. We have some upside. We are part of nature. You know, there are other animals that are infestations. And you know, other creatures can't write moeb is my washpot. Well, that's a very sweet thing to say. You know what I mean? It's like we are an infestation who has great redeeming things. We are a god. We are gods and creatures. Yes. We're all of that. So very quickly, final things. What was the best thing about hosting QI? Oh, I mean, the guess Alan really, Alan Davis is charming. Where he allowed himself to be presented as a fool, he is anything but, and he's delightful. - What's the least bad sport? - The least bad sport. Well, cricket, cricket is a great sport, a great artistic achievement. It's the greatest thing man has ever done. - What's the best thing Oscar Wilde wrote? - The importance of being honest. - And Dave Profundi's a close second, his letter to Bozy from prison. - Right, you get a time machine and you can go into the past to any period and any place. - You're not going to be killed, you know? - No, I'd go to the cafe royal in 1889, 1890, in the hope of meeting eventually all the people who lived in that part of Victorian London would be Oscar Wilde, but also Sherlock Holmes would be just around the corner, at least Gernan Doyle. And they might actually Gernan Doyle and Wilde and Gernan Doyle was really impressed by Oscar Wilde. Wrote about him, even after the trial and the disgrace of Wilde, he wrote in his autobiography in the 20s, Conan Doyle, just how impressive a man he was. They were invited, it's a rather marvelous story. It could almost make a short film or something. It was a man called Stoddard, who was the managing editor of a literary, American Literary magazine called Lippincots magazine, which published short stories and did full stories, novels. And rather like an American film producer, he went to England to get some talent. And he invited to dinner at the Langham Hotel, the original Langham, there are now Langham's, all over the world. He invited Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and Conan Doyle. Rada Kipling wrote the light that failed, his fantastic autobiographical novel about his blindness, about his, you know, what at least loss of good sight. He was very, very short sighted. Kipling, it's a marvelous book. Conan Doyle was persuaded by Stoddard. This, the Stoddian Scarlet you wrote with that chap, what's he called, Sherlock Holmes? Yes, I think there's another book in that. And so he wrote the second Sherlock Holmes book, it's a sign of four. And he said to Oscar Wilde, you've never written a novel, why don't you, you've written plays, and everyone says, "I wish you well, why don't you write a novel?" And he got an idea for one, and Wilde said, "Well, I was thinking about someone who's portrait-aged when they didn't, that sounds good to me, right? That, that's how a picture of Dorian Gray was written." So that one didn't have the langum hotel. So I'd like to be around there, you know, sort of bumping into those people. And thinking of that, you're such a polymath, and you've done so many different things from black editor, QI, to your books, to your Greek mythology and everything. Do you ever wish you'd had a clearer focus? Yes, in a way, I do, I mean, I admire artists. And I'm not an artist. I have arguments with artists about this. They say, "Oh, yes, you're an artist." I said, "No, no, no, no." No, one reason, I know I'm not an artist. Every artist I know, in the end, doesn't care what people think about them. They just go fuck about that, I don't care. So Damian Hurst, someone like that, people have been incredibly rude about his work, or other painter friends of mine that they can get, you know, criticism or the market price goes down and they go, "Man, man, man." I care, that's my problem. I'm sensitive to the audience. I am in that sense. I suppose the word I would use is I'm an entertainer. I want people to be entertained by what I write, by what I say, and when I perform on a stage, and therefore, as an entertainer, it's my, I am the servant of the audience. An artist is a servant of no one, except their art. And I can't be like that. And part of me thinks it would be an adventure to be an artist, to be absolutely dedicated to something, and care about that more than about what people thought of it. But then I care what people think about me too much socially, as well as creatively. But that's okay. I mean, I suppose one of the themes of our conversation has been that I've come to the conclusion that it's okay. It is okay, and you are very entertaining, Stephen. - Thank you. - Thank you so much. (upbeat music)