The Fry Chronicles (9 page)

I had been a most vocal apologist for smoking and a noisily belligerent enemy of the anti-smoking lobby. But as I sat toying with the Dunhill microphone pipe that day I realized that I had changed. Inasmuch as experiences are rarely to be regretted there was something pleasing to my mind now in considering life as a non-smoker. I had enjoyed well over thirty years of tobacco use and now I was to see what life would be like without it. I was almost looking forward to testing myself. So long as I pledged never ever to be intolerant of those fellow smokers I left behind.

Fight fire with fire, fight drugs with drugs. I had heard about a pill called Zyban, a proprietary name for amfebutamone, better known in America as Welbutrin,
one of the most prescribed anti-depressants in the world. I had read somewhere that it also works as a ‘smoking cessation aid’ in almost 30 per cent of cases. I called up my doctor’s secretary and made an appointment. He wrote out a prescription for a three-week course. In the same way that these pills, in order to counter depression, acted on the brain’s own store of mood elevators – noradrenaline and dopamine and so on – so they acted, it was claimed, to calm, inhibit and allay the anxieties and horrors of nicotine withdrawal. The unusual and appealing thing was that you were told to take the pill and carry on smoking. For some reason the craving would leave you, if you were one of the 27 per cent on whom the treatment worked.

And you know what? It turned out that I was.

It was a miracle. I just found myself stopping and not minding.

I fly to America, for the first time in my life happy to spend twelve and a half hours on an aeroplane without being reduced to the indignity of nicotine-replacement patches, gums and inhalers – sometimes, in the bad old days, all three at once.

On the fourth Thursday of November, which is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, I have a meeting with the film-maker Peter Jackson, for whom I am to write a screenplay based on the great raid on the German dams of the Ruhr in 1943. A masterpiece of British cinema had already been made on the Dambusters story, of course, but we hoped to be able to tell it again, incorporating details that in 1954 were too sensitive or secret to reveal.

I arrive at the Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow that Peter has taken for the duration of his stay, and we
talk over the details. Fran, Peter’s wife, is present as well as other members of their production company, Wingnut. Thanksgiving Day is a perfect time to have an uninterrupted meeting if, like us, you are not American.

When the conference is over an assistant loads into the boot of my rental car an enormous box of research materials that Wingnut has assembled for me. Every imaginable archival resource on the subject of the Dambusters raid, in text, video, sound or photographic form has been gathered together for my convenience. There is even a facsimile of R. C. Sherriff’s screenplay of the 1954 Michael Anderson film. I drive along Sunset Boulevard, into West Hollywood and towards the Chateau Marmont, the hotel where I have taken an apartment-like set of rooms for the month or so I have to deliver the screenplay.

I spend a happy evening going through the documents and planning the next day’s writing. How pleasant it all is. How lucky I am. What can go wrong?

There is something of a commotion next door, and I look out into the corridor to see the actress Lindsay Lohan being stretchered away. It seems that her partying has caught up with her. The Chateau Marmont will always be best known, I fear, for being the scene of John Belushi’s final fatal speedball. It is still a favourite haunt of Hollywood’s more raffish party element, and Lindsay Lohan’s unfortunate overdose, while not fatal, excites much attention. But these are things that do not need to worry me.

The next day I am up early for a swim in the pool and raring to make a start on the script. I cook myself an omelette and brew up an enormous pot of coffee – the suites in the Chateau come with splendid kitchens – and settle down at my desk, photographs of Guy Gibson,
Barnes Wallis and a Lancaster bomber Blu-tacked up on the wall to inspire me. What could be more agreeable?

But there is a problem.

A terrible problem.

I cannot write.

My fingers go to the keyboard and I force them to type out.

FADE IN:

INT. THE AIR MINISTRY – EVENING, 1940

And that is as far as I can get.

Ridiculous.

I stand up and walk about the room. This can be no more than initial nerves. It is a potentially big project. The original film is one of my favourites. I am anxious about my right to tinker with this magnificent story. Sit down again and get on with it, Stephen.

But it is more than that. As I stare at the screen I feel that there is a void inside me, a dark space. What can it be, this sucking black hole that is somewhere between hunger, fear, dread and pain?

I shake my head and then my whole body, like a dog emerging from a bath.

It will pass.

I leave the room and descend in the elevator, listening to a couple swapping gossip on the subject of Lindsay Lohan’s dramatic departure from the hotel the night before.

I pace around the pool. Jerry Stiller, comedian and father of the actor Ben, is doing a few slow lengths.

‘Hiya, kid,’ he calls out. I do love, at the age of forty-nine, to be called kid.

After ten or twenty circuits I return to the room and sit once more before the screen.

The black hole is still there
.

This is all terribly, terribly wrong.

What can it be? What
can
it be? Am I ill?

And then with a bolt of certainty that almost knocks me from my chair I realize what it is.

I need a cigarette
. I cannot write without a cigarette.

It can’t be true. Surely?

For the next three hours I try everything I can to get the writing juices going, but by midday I realize that it is useless. Either I do not deliver the screenplay or I smoke. I lift the telephone receiver.

‘Hello, it’s Stephen here. Could you send up a carton of Marlboro please? Yes a whole carton. Ten packs. Thanks. Bye.’

Fast forward to April the following year, 2007. In July the ban on smoking in public will come into force throughout the United Kingdom, and the month after that I will be fifty. Now, surely, it is time to give up once and for all. I have been hypnotized by Paul McKenna in an attempt to remove the hard wiring in my brain that associates writing with tobacco. I have been given a session at the Allen Carr ‘Easy Way’ clinic in London. Neither seems to have been much use, grateful as I am to each for offering help. But there is good news …

A new drug has arrived. Farewell Zyban, hello Champix, Pfizer’s name for a new compound called varenicline, which is not an anti-depressant but a ‘nicotinic receptor partial agonist’. What could be whatter?

I have a course prescribed and, as with the Zyban,
I continue smoking as if nothing has happened. On about the tenth day I notice that my ashtray is filled with absurdly long stubs. I have taken no more than one puff from each. By the end of the second week I find myself taking cigarettes out of the pack, staring at them as if they are strangers and replacing them. During this time we are taping
QI
two or three times a week. When that finishes I find that I am no longer buying packs of cigarettes. I have stopped smoking.

I drive up to Norfolk and start filming for a new series of
Kingdom
. When this concludes at the end of September I fly to America to start work on a travel series.

The real test comes later, however. In May 2008 I return to Britain from Hawaii, the last state to be visited for the documentary, and I need to sit down to write the book of the series. Only now will I see if I can, for the first time in my life, write something more than journalism, letters and occasional blogs without consuming cigarette after cigarette as I type.

It seems, when that day dawns, that my thirty-five-year relationship with tobacco really is over.

Writing these words as I have been, sitting in front of a computer, and recalling the past, has the old urge returned? The experience has not opened up that black hole, but somewhere, deep inside me, a trace memory twitches and thrashes like a dragon in a cave sleeping a restless sleep.

Have I betrayed a way of looking at the world? Have I turned my back on freedom, perversity and outsiderism? Have I bourgeoisified and sold out? Most would think the question preposterous, but I do not. While the nicotine habit might rightly be characterized as dirty, dangerous,
anti-social, ontologically pointless and physically deleterious and while those in its thrall might be regarded as reckless, foolish, self-indulgent, weak and perverse, I still find myself drawn to smokers and irritated by those who nag and bully them.

I was at a dinner party many years ago, sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses, but between mouthfuls. An American woman opposite watched in disbelief.

‘And you so intelligent!’

‘Excuse me?’ said Tom.

‘Knowing that those things are going to kill you,’ she said, ‘still you do it.’

‘How differently I might behave,’ Tom said, ‘if immortality were an option.’

Substances seem insignificant compared to the big things in life: Work, Faith, Knowledge, Hope, Fear and Love. But the appetites that drive us and our susceptibility, resistance, acceptance and denial of substances define and reveal us at least as much as abstract expressions of belief or bald recitations of action and achievement.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe other people have greater control over their appetites and less interest in them. I seem to have been driven by greedy need and needy greed all my life.

The Winter of Discontent, they called it. Strikes by lorry drivers, car workers, nurses, ambulance drivers, railwaymen, refuse collectors and gravediggers. I don’t suppose I had ever been happier.

After all the storm-tossed derangement of my teenage years – love, shame, theft, scandal, expulsion, attempted suicide, fraud, arrest, imprisonment and sentencing – I finally seemed to have found something close to equilibrium and fulfilment.
Seemed
. Smoking a pipe as a placid and confident figure of authority in a small prep school was one thing. Now here I was at a huge university starting all over again as a new boy, a fresher, a nobody.

It is natural for people to despise the very idea of Oxford and Cambridge. Elitist, snobbish, hidebound, self-satisfied, arrogant and remote, the Ancient Universities, as they conceitedly style themselves, seem to embody the irrelevant, archaic, moribund and shameful past that Britain appears to be trying so hard to shed. And Oxbridge doesn’t fool anybody with all that flannel about ‘meritocracy’ and ‘excellence’. Are we supposed to be impressed by the silly names they give themselves? Fellows and stewards and deans and dons and proctors and praelectors. And as for the students, or
undergraduates
, I beg their pompous pardons …

Many people, but especially I think the young, see pretension and performance all around them. They will read attitudinizing and posturing in every gesture. If they were to walk down Trinity Street in Cambridge during term time they would encounter youthful men and women that it would be very easy to characterize as self-conscious poseurs or play-acting pricks. Oh, they think they’re
so
intellectual; oh, they think they’re
so
Brideshead Revisited
; oh, they think they’re
so
la crème de la crème. Look at the way they bicycle along the cobbles with their arms folded, too cool to touch the handlebars. See how they walk along with their head in a book. See how they wrap their scarves around their necks with a flick. As if we’re supposed to be impressed. Listen to their drawly public-school voices. Or, worse, listen to their fake
street
accents. Who do they think they are, who do they bloody think they bloody are? Mow the fuckers down.

Well. Quite. But imagine for a moment that these wanky arsehole poseurs are actually no more than young men and women with real lives and real feelings just like anybody else, just like me and just like you. Imagine that they are quite as scared and unsure and hopeful and daft as you and me. Imagine that instant contempt and dislike really says more about the onlooker than about them. Then imagine something further. Imagine that just about every single student newly arrived at such a place as Cambridge went through exactly those same feelings of dislike, distrust and fear when looking at the easy and assured second- and third-years milling
around them with all their relaxed confidence and their superior air of assurance and belonging. Imagine that they too had compensated for such feelings of nervous inadequacy by choosing to ‘see through’ everyone else, by choosing to believe that those around them were pitiful poseurs. And imagine finally that without their noticing it they somehow became absorbed and naturalized into the place to such an extent that now, to an outsider, they are the ones who look like arrogant tossers. Inside, you can take my word for it, they are still shrinking and shrivelling like salted snails. I know, because I was one, just as you would have been too.