Stephen Fry

[faceless]

FRY ADMITS COCAINE HABIT
Thursday October 25,2007

HAVING admitted to suffering from bipolar disorder, polymath Stephen Fry now confesses to having an “addictive personality”. The actor, writer and comedian, 50, pinpoints three things he has been dependent on: cocaine, tobacco and, since childhood, fattening sweets – all of which he has now given up.

“Is there some gene in me that predisposes me to dependency? Am I simply weak? Weak-willed, self-indulgent, lacking in character, moral fibre, decency, strength of mind, honesty and courage,” he muses in a voluminous, self-flagellating posting on his blog. Maybe there’s an admixture of weakness, genetic propensity and hedonistic degradation in me.”

Of his cocaine use, he writes: “What a strange thing to do to suck powder up into your nose. A bit like tapping yourself lightly on the head with a parsnip, only sillier. But… unlike parsnips and unlike tobacco, this substance alters mood and energy levels. It’s the new sugar. There’s a rush.”

He adds that he never mixed business with drug-induced pleasure. “I didn’t ingest cocaine when working. But my play time was often fuelled by the sherbet of shame. To cut a long, meandering and tedious story short, I stopped all that some four years ago. ‘No more coke,’ I said to myself and never touched the stuff again. I never had the slightest withdrawal pang, nothing like the agonies of giving up smoking. Now there’s a brute…”

Fry began smoking at the age of 15 and gave up five months ago. He continues: “Goodbye ciggies. That particular avenue of pleasure has been closed off. And so have just about all the other avenues. Coke, sweets, eating. And yet… is that it now? A life on a plateau? It’s possible I will live longer and it’s certain that I feel physically better now than I have for decades but oh the ache inside.”

--------------------

That's quite interesting...

[faceless]

I watched this last night and thought it was really good too...

[faceless]

US elections 2008
STEPHEN FRY is hooked on the US election. The comic is watching every minute of the battle between Barack Obama and John McCain, to be decided on November 4. Stephen, 51, fell in love with America after travelling across the country in his black taxi cab for a new book and TV show. Here the liberal actor gives his opinion on the presidential rivals . . . and says who he is backing.

I WAS nearly born in America. My father was offered a job there just before I was born. He turned it down. But since I found out about my nearly life, I have been fascinated with the country. And like everyone else I have been deeply fascinated by the presidential election. The Americans do these things really very well.

This has certainly been the most exciting presidential election for years. I was surprised when I did a bit of filming around the New Hampshire primaries with Mitt Romney. Do you remember him? He ran against McCain for the Republican ticket. He was a nice fellow and very relaxed. What was interesting, though, was none of the Democrats would let us film with them because they wanted complete control over everything.

Quite surprising. You’d expect the Republicans to be the uptight ones not the other way round. It did make me think about things. At one point Obama was David Beckham, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela all rolled into one, a worldwide celebrity. I think he lost a bit of ground, though. Like with David Cameron in Britain, people want to know what he’s actually going to do. I do like him, but the thing is he’s not as GREAT as I want him to be. He’s a fine orator but, you know, he’s actually a bit joyless. He’s great to a large room or a big crowd but unfortunately he speaks exactly like that when he’s doing a small interview as well.

I really like McCain. Judging both of them on public image, which is dangerous, McCain looks like a far friendlier character than Obama. I do think the McCain/Palin thing will blow up in their faces. There’s the joke figure of Sarah Palin, who is laughably dreadful, but McCain, for all his faults, is a remarkable man. I think the Democrats will get their act together and I’m guessing Obama will do it. The Democrats are very slick, which will make things over there very, very interesting.

Americans mistakenly believe that they invented democracy but because they have that mistaken belief, it means they’re intensely proud and aware of the nature of democracy. I think that’s probably why they have higher turnouts than we do and why they take their democracies so seriously.

------------------

[faceless]

click here to listen to 'Fry's English Delight'

[faceless]

Television is only made for children, moans Stephen Fry
Broadcasters no longer make programmes for intelligent adults, according to Stephen Fry, who claimed last nght that British television has been “infantilised”.
By Anita Singh,
Showbusiness Editor
telegraph.co.uk
16 Jun 2010

Doctor Who is a show for children yet the BBC trumpets it as a drama, Fry said. Challenging, interesting programmes, once the mainstay of the schedules, have all but disappeared, he lamented.

Speaking at Bafta, where he delivered the Annual TV Lecture, the writer, comedian and broadcaster said: “Infantilism is the problem. It’s just shocking. The only dramas the BBC will shout about are Doctor Who and Merlin. They are wonderful programmes, don’t get me wrong, but they are not for adults. It’s children’s TV. I’m not saying TV should be pompous and academic, but it should surprise and astonish and say there’s a world outside we know nothing of.”

Characters are simplified and plots reduced so even an idiot could understand them, he said, adding: “You’re told what is a good thing and what is a bad thing’. You have a villain or a hero. In the first five minutes you have to know he’s like that because he’s got problems at home, she’s like that because she’s lost her faith, or whatever. Everything is given to you. Nothing is given time.

“We are so used to laughing at the Americans because they are so 'vulgar’ and 'stupid’, but you watch good American TV and it has maturity and surprise. The more TV trusts that British adults are not children, the better our TV will be.” He held up Sir David Attenborough’s natural history programmes as a rare example of shows which have not been dumbed down.

Fry, whose television credits include Blackadder, QI and A Bit of Fry and Laurie, lamented the fact that television is no longer “the nation’s fireplace”. The 52-year-old reminisced about growing up during the “golden age” of television, citing programmes such as The Avengers, The Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise, The Ascent of Man and dramas from the likes of Ken Loach, Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett.

It was an era when families gathered around the television set and programmes could be landmark events. However, times have changed. “The 24 million who tuned in to Eric and Ernie’s Christmas shows can never be assembled together to watch a television show again - maybe if England make it to the final of the World Cup,” Fry said. The nation’s fireplace - the heart and hearth of the country, the focus of our community - is surely dead, unlikely ever to return. It is now closer to being the nation’s central heating - conveniently on in every room.”

Fry also gave an impassioned defence of the BBC and rounded on its critics, particularly listeners and viewers who contact the corporation to express their distaste at particular programmes.

"People who have nothing better to do than phone a television station at night are, by definition, desperately in need of help,” he said. “I read before I came here that 564 people rang the BBC to complain about vuvuzelas. Did they imagine the BBC could go into the stadium and wrench them from people’s lips? Some technical way they could stop the sound being heard? Un-be-arsing-lievable. These are the people with whom the BBC has to deal.”

The BBC should not entertain the views of “vexatious, unhappy people who want to criticise Fiona Bruce’s use of blusher”, he said, while he dismissed those who hold the BBC to account for the way it spends the licence fee - “who think we have the right to expect executives to travel coach class” - as “bordering on the pathologically cruel”.

The BBC cannot please all of the people all of the time, nor should it, Fry argued. “If you get a bad olive in a tin of olives, even a whole bad tin of olives, you throw it away but you don’t make that much of a fuss about it. But with the BBC we have this thing: I own it, I pay for it because I have a TV licence. I would be shocked if all TV was what I liked. It would be weird.”

-------------------------------

[SquareEyes]

I found myself with so much of this, and ashamed that I've been guilty of a lot of it

[faceless]

the first post in this topic from 2007 shows how things never change much...