The Fry Chronicles (37 page)

I learned off by heart Tempest’s ‘Confirmation Class’, in which he attempts to give a lesson on the facts of life.

I also committed to memory a monologue in which Tempest plays a rather precious and faded literary figure recalling the great days of Bloomsbury.

With these and other scenes safely in my head I made my way by bus and Tube to the Garrick Theatre in the Charing Cross Road. I found the stage door, where I was greeted by a friendly young man who led me backstage to a little green room.

‘My name’s Michael,’ he said. ‘You’re a
little
early, so perhaps you wouldn’t mind waiting here while we just see some other people?’

I looked at my watch and saw that it was ten to three. Perhaps the appropriateness of the number of minutes early I was could be read as a good omen.

Forty minutes on I walked nervously on to the stage, a hand shading my eyes as I strained to see down into the auditorium.

‘Hello,’ said a neat, friendly and delicately precise voice, ‘I am Patrick, and this is John Gale, who runs the Chichester Festival Theatre.’

‘Hello,’ boomed a rich baritone from the dark.

‘And this,’ continued Patrick, ‘is Alan Bennett.’

The high tenor song of a cheery and attenuated Yorkshire ‘Hello’ floated up from the stalls and into my unbelieving ears.
Alan Bennett?
Here! At the audition! Every organ in my body screamed. A hammering came into my ears, and my knees turned to water.
Alan Bennett?

I remember not one minute or second of the half hour
that followed. I know I must have recited or read some scenes and I do recall stumbling through the London streets in an agony of despair and disappointment, so I must have said goodbye and left the theatre in some manner or other.

Richard Armitage called me up at the flat that evening. ‘How did it go, m’dear?’

‘Oh Richard it was
awful
, I was terrible. Appalling. Monstrous. Unspeakable.
Alan Bennett
was there!
In the theatre.’

‘I don’t doubt it. Is that a bad thing?’

‘Well, it never
occurred
to me he’d be present. Never. I was tongue-tied, struck dumb. So nervous I could barely speak. Oh God, I was
dreadful
.’

‘I’m sure you can’t have been as bad as all that …’ He made the series of soothing and clucking noises that agents make to calm hysterical clients. They failed to console me.

The next day Lorraine rang. ‘Darling, could you go to the Garrick again at three o’clock for a recall?’

‘A recall?’

‘It means they want to see and hear you again.’

‘You mean they haven’t ruled me out?’

I arrived at the Garrick bang on the hour determined at least to try to override my nerves. Michael greeted me like an old friend and led me straight through to the stage. The house lights were up, and I looked out and could clearly see Patrick Garland and John Gale in the stalls but this time no Alan Bennett. A great wave of relief swept over me.

‘Hello again!’ Patrick called cheerily. ‘We were wondering if we might hear the Bloomsbury monologue this time?’

I sat and delivered.

‘Thank you!’ said Patrick. ‘Thank you … I think …’ He conferred with John Gale, nodded his head and looked down as if seeking inspiration from the floor. From where I stood he seemed to be whispering to the carpet. ‘Well, yes …’ he murmured. ‘I think so too.’ He looked up towards me with a smile and said in a louder voice. ‘Stephen, John and I would be very pleased to ask you to play the part of Tempest for our production. Would you like to do that?’

‘Would I? Oh, indeed I would!’ I said. ‘Thank you. Thank you so very, very much.’

‘That’s excellent news,’ said Patrick. ‘We’re delighted. Aren’t we?’ he added, to the carpet.

There was a sort of scuffling and scrabbling, and a figure rose from behind the seats where it had been crouching out of sight. The long, lean form of Alan Bennett unfolded itself with an apologetic cough. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, brushing dust from the knees of his grey flannel trousers, ‘quite delighted.’

Patrick noted my bewilderment. ‘Your agent was kind enough to mention to us that Alan’s presence had made you a little nervous, so this time round he thought it might be best to conceal himself.’

Such consideration from a hero was almost more than I could bear. Naturally, being an arse, I expressed my gratitude by not managing to express any gratitude at all. To this day I do not think I have ever properly thanked Alan for his grace and sweetness that afternoon.

Alan Bennett has a huge advantage over most of us in that his shyness is known about and expected; indeed it
is one of the qualities most admired in him. It proves his authenticity, modesty and the classy distance he naturally keeps from that creepy media gang of loud, confident, shallow and self-congratulatory wankers to which I cannot but help belong and which the rest of society so rightly despises. Nobody seems to expect me to be shy, or believes me when I say that I am. I cannot blame them. I seem to move with such ease through the world. I was reminded of this only yesterday afternoon. I was a guest on the CBS programme
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
. Craig is the Scottish comedian who has now become, in the opinion of many, myself included, the best talk show host in America. He told me, as he began the interview, that back in the eighties, when he had been a regular on the British comedy circuit, he had always regarded me as almost unnaturally calm, sorted and in control, to the extent that he was in a kind of angry awe of me. I ought to be used to being told that, but yet again it brought me up short. Never, at any point in my life, can I remember feeling that I was any part of assured, controlled or at ease. The longer I live the more clearly one truth stands out. People will rarely modify their preferred view of a person, no matter what the evidence might suggest. I am English. Tweedy. Pukka. Confident. Establishment. Self-assured. In charge. That is how people like to see me, be the truth never so at variance. It may be the case that I am a Jewish mongrel with an addictive self-destructive streak that it has taken me years to master. It may be the case that my afflictions of mood and temperament cause me to be occasionally suicidal in outlook and can frequently leave me in despair and eaten up with self-hatred and self-disgust. It may be the case that I am chronically overmastered by a sense of failure, underachievement and a terrible knowledge that I have betrayed, abused or neglected the talents that nature bestowed upon me. It may be the case that I doubt I will ever have the capacity to be happy. It may be the case that I fear for my sanity, my moral centre and my very future. All these cases may be protested, and I can assert their truth as often as I like, but the repetition will not alter my ‘image’ by one pixel. It is the same image I had before I was a known public figure. The image that caused a delegation of college first-year contemporaries to visit me in my rooms and demand to know my ‘secret’. The image that satisfies and impresses some, enrages others and no doubt bores, provokes or irritates many more. I would be a tragic figure indeed if I had not learnt to live with that persona by now. Like many masks this smiling, placid one has become so tight a fit that it might be said to have rewritten the features of whatever true face once screamed behind it, were it not that it is just a mask and that the feelings underneath are as they always were.

What I want to say about all this wailing is not that I expect your pity or your understanding (although I wouldn’t throw either of them out of bed), but that perhaps I am the one actually offering pity and understanding here. For I have to believe that all the feelings I have described are not unique to me but common to us all. The sense of failure, the fear of eternal unhappiness, the insecurity, misery, self-disgust and the awful awareness of underachievement that I have described. Are you not prey to all those things also? I do hope so. I would feel the most conspicuous oddity otherwise. I grant that my moments of ‘suicidal ideation’ and swings of mood may be more extreme and pathological than most have to endure, but otherwise, I am
surely describing nothing more than the fears, dreads and neuroses we all share? No? More or less?
Mutatis mutandis
? All things being equal? Oh, please say yes.

This is a problem many writers and comedians face: we possess the primary arrogance that persuades us that our insights, fixations and habits are for the most part shared characteristics that we alone have the boldness, insight and openness of mind to expose and name: we are privileged thereby, or so we congratulate ourselves, to be spokesmen for humanity. When a stand-up comic describes nose-picking or peeing in the shower or whatever it might be we can interpret our laughter as a ‘me too’ release which itself triggers more laughter: we laugh again because our initial laughter and that of the person sitting next to us in the audience proves our complicity and shared guilt. This much is obvious and a truism of observational comedy. On top of it there can also be laid, of course, that conscious game comics play in which they shuttle between those common, shared anxieties and ones that are very particular to them. And here I suppose we laugh at how
different
we are. How similar, but different. How the comic is living a more extreme life of neurosis and angst on our behalf. A kind of ‘thank God I’m not
that
weird’ laughter is the result. When a comic or a writer has established their credentials by revealing how much of what they do or feel is something we also do or feel, they can then go further and reveal depths of activity or feeling that we may not share, that might revolt us or that perhaps we
do
share but would much rather not have dragged up into the light. And of course, comics, being what they are, appreciate that point.

It is common enough to hear this kind of routine: ‘You know, ladies and gentlemen, you know when you’re sat
watching television and you stick your finger up your arse and wiggle it about? … No? Oh, right. It must be just me then. Sorry about that. Oops. Moving on …’ Well, with an average stand-up comic talking about physical things like peeing in the shower and nose- or arse-picking it is easy enough to see the distinction between what is communal and what is individual. But those are discrete identifiable actions of which one is either ‘guilty’ or not. Some people pee in the shower, others do not. I have to confess that I do. I try to be good and refrain from doing so in somebody else’s shower, but otherwise I am guiltless about what seems to me to be a logical, reasonable and hygienically unexceptionable act. I also pick my nose. I will stop the confession right there for fear of embarrassing you or myself further. You can decide whether to put the book down now and say to the vacant air: ‘I too pick my nose and pee in the shower.’ Plenty of people do neither. They are likely, I hope, to forgive those of us who are less fastidious in our habits. But in either case whether or not they do is not susceptible to interpretation. But
feelings
… I may know whether or not I pick my nose but do I really know whether or not I feel a failure? I may be aware that I often feel bleak and unhappy or filled with nameless dread, but am I right to interpret these feelings as a sense of moral deficiency or personal inadequacy or any such thing? The root of the feeling may after all be a hormonal imbalance, heartburn, a triggered unconscious memory, too little sunlight, a bad dream, anything. As with colour sense or pain sensitivity we can never know whether any of our perceptions and sensations are the same as others’. So it may very well be that I am just a great big cissy and that my miseries and worries are nothing compared to
yours. Or perhaps I am the bravest man on the planet and that, if any of you were to experience a tenth of the sorrows I daily endure, you would scream in agony. But just as we can all agree on what is red, even if we will never know if we each see it in the same way, so we can all agree – can’t we? – that no matter how confident we may appear to others, inside we are all sobbing, scared and uncertain for much of the time. Or perhaps it’s just me.

Oh God, perhaps it really
is
just me.

Actually it doesn’t really matter, when you come to think of it. If it is just me, then you are reading the story of some weird freak. You are free to treat this book like science fiction, fantasy or exotic travel literature. Are there really men like Stephen Fry on this planet? Goodness, how alien some people are. And if I am
not
alone, then neither are you, and hand in hand we can marvel together at the strangeness of the human condition.

Aside from
University Challenge
, the BBC’s transmission of
The Cellar Tapes
was the first time I had appeared on national television. I don’t count
There’s Nothing to Worry About
, which was inflicted only upon viewers in the north-west ITV region.