This can be a tad wearing at times he's never very far off from spluttering something along the lines of, "Gosh, I can't believe how lucky I was to have been a part of it all, and to have become, while still in my 20s and wholly undeserving, filthily, filthily rich." It's all good stuff, and proofed against pomposity by Fry's reliably self-deprecatory delivery. Minor collisions with the likes of Jerry Stiller, Raymond Burr, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy are duly noted, as are anecdotes about Stephen Sondheim and the early days of faxing, Douglas Adams and the early days of home computing, and Paul McCartney and the end days of John Schlesinger: Fry and McCartney were pew mates at the great director's funeral. However, there's no paucity of otherwise revelatory moments, nor is there a shortage of references to the celebrities with whom Fry has crossed paths en route to becoming himself very, very famous.Ĭonfession and name-dropping: That's what we want from a celebrity autobiography, and Fry is unstinting, amusing and generally kind in the stories he tells about his fellow travellers in Thatcher-era television sketch comedy: Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Ben Elton, Tilda Swinton and Rowan Atkinson among them. As these eight eventful years elapsed, by and large, during his attenuated season of carnal non-interference, there's not a lot of knickering to enliven the nickering.
The Fry Chronicles document Fry's Cambridge days and early show-business successes up until his 30th birthday. How he was coaxed out of retirement, and by whom, and with what Vesuvian shuddering, will presumably be revealed in instalment three, or possibly four, of his memoirs that more is in the works is the implicit promise of the last line of the present volume. The Fry Chronicles, will know that he would remain abstemious for another decade. Readers of his latest excursion in autobiography, So wrote Stephen Fry in 1985, when he divulged, in Tatler Magazine, that he had been celibate for four years. "I would be greatly in debt to the man who could tell me what could ever be appealing about those damp, dark, foul-smelling and revoltingly tufted areas of the body that constitute the main dishes in the banquet of love."
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