You've done all the Harry Potter, how guilty as charged? Yes, my agent had read it, and so there's a children's book and they'd like you to do it for an audio. And I said, it's okay, thinking, you know this half a day's job, isn't it that the cat looks at the dog, the dog looked at the cat. It was nice the end, And that's a children's book. What could be better? It turned out to be a full novel length. But I started reading it and I thought this is
about the good. So I agreed to do it. And I turned up and there was Joe Rowling and if she likes to remind you of this, I said, you know, I think this is just wonderful. People are gonna love it. It's such a great thing. If she said, well, I have to Chad, but I've actually I'd already written the second one and it's going to be publised in two months. And I said, good for you, Good for you? Why not? You never know you might get lucky. Oh my god, Hello,
I'm Mini driver and welcome to many questions. I've always loved prus questionnaire. It was originally an eighteenth century parlor game meant to reveal an individual's true nature. But with so many questions, there wasn't really an opportunity to expand on anything. So I took the format of Prus's questionnaire and adapted What I think are seven of the most important questions you could ever ask someone. They are when and where were you happiest? What is the quality you
like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that has grown out of a personal disaster. The more people we ask, the more we begin to see what makes us similar and what makes us individual. I've gathered a group of really remarkable people who I am on a and humbled to have
had a chance to engage with. My guest today is author, actor, director, and broadcaster intellectual explorer of rare talent, Stephen Fry. I grew up watching Stephen in the two genius British comedy series Blackadder and his show with Hugh Laurie. A bit of Fry and Laurie, but he's also memorably played in his Golden Globe nominated role as Oscar Wild in movie Wild, and he's been in numerous other fantastic films like Gossford
Park and A Fish Called Wonder. He's fearlessly explored his own experience with bipolar disorder in the documentary The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive, and since two thousand eleven, has served as the president of the mental health charity Mind. Stephen is a prolific writer to boot and has four novels and three autobiographies in print. I was completely transported by our conversation. Talking to him is like trying to
keep up with the shooting star. We talked about everything from Sherlock Holmes to Amazonian tree frogs to the time he went to prison for credit card theft. This is the first half of a wonderful two part episode. When I was thinking about the questions, because I really love Proust's question, I've always loved it. I've always loved listening to people's different answers. They do one in Vanity Fair, don't they? That might have been where I first discovered it.
And then I went back and read this sort of full narrative, and then some really fantastically Victorian responses. I chose where and when you were happiest as the first question, largely because we put such a premium on being happy. But I also think that happy nurse. Maybe it's just from where I sit at fifty one. It includes so much. It's the balance to everything. So when I asked that question,
I mean it as largely as you can conceive it. Really. Yes, Well, I remember there was a time a few years ago, maybe twenty, when I was desperately trying to give up smoking and all kinds of other things, and I looked into this, this thing called neurolinguistic programming. I'm sure you're aware of it. It's a grand title for a way
of making your making your mind obey your will. If you like you you want to do something like giving up smoking, but something's getting in the way, both physical addiction, of course, and something else. We're all familiar with that. It's not easy to will, but it's easy to will to will. In other words, you want to want something,
but it's very hard for it anyway. Neuro linguistic programming one of the things they do is they ask you to remember a time, just a snapshot in your memory when you know you were just unbounded in your happiness. You think of something a sunny day on the beach or in a park, maybe that you're very so your mother's let you skip along to buy an ice cream, and you're looking down at the ducks with your brother
and everybody's with you, and you're content. You then do something physical like pull out your ear lobe while enjoying that memory, and you keep twisting your ema and you do that several times until the idea of being All you have to do is twist your ear lobe and you will get that memory. And I have to say, I still think to that moment in a park with a with a with an ice cream, and I can get what feels on the inside to be a beatific smile to spread across my face, and I remember happiness.
And anyway, that's a thing, that's an exercise you do. So if ever I see you twisting your emb party, I'll know that you're secretly thinking about the ducks and the ice cream exactly. And the idea is you do that when you want a cigarette or you want something you know, because it fills you with the happiness and possibly even with the self supplied drugs, you know, the noor adrenaline, the serotone in, the metatone in all etcetera, etcetera, the endorphins and all that, and maybe it does work,
but that was an interesting time. But of course that's a snapshot. It's a vertical moment of happiness, one little drop of bliss. But I would say probably, And this only works looking back because at the time you're young, and when you're young, you're never happy. You're always angst written or wanting to be better looking, or wanting to take someone to bed, or wanting to be asked to go to bed, or or you know, just not feeling
clever enough or confident all the rest of it. But those three years I had at university, and particularly the last year when Hugh Laurie became my best friend and we started writing comedy and realizing that we were doing something that gave others pleasure. We could hear the laughter and we felt just charged with optimism and and it was just I you know, because we were very lucky, you know, with me and Hugh and Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. Our year at university. It was a great
footlights collection. I mean honesty, I still have to pinch myself to realize that. But for all kinds of extraordinary provisional contingent things, it might never have happened. I might have been a year earlier, two years earlier, or never have got there. And who knows. Did Rowan Atkinson go to Cambridge? He went to the other place, he went to the other place. We'll not mention that, but I'll tell you a scene which was one of the happiest moments of my life, was we were performing our review
in Edinburgh. It happened to be that year in Edinbury eighty one was the first year of a new award called the Perrier Award, which was going to be given to supposedly the best comedy show on the fringe, or at least what the judges thought was the best one thing. We were certain obvious that they wouldn't give it to Boo Cambridge Nears snobs. You know all the horror of that. But anyway, we were doing the show and we finished it. We bowed and there was cheers and applause and all
the things that you live for. And then suddenly the applause went wild while we were bowing, and I saw people looking what I thought behind me. So I turned around and that was the figure Rowan Atkinson standing back of the stage on our show. Now he was already a household name because not the nine o'clock News had had I think done too serious already and was a
huge hit. And he was holding something and he came forward, um ladies and a gentleman, and he announced that we had won the Peri Award and handed it to us. And there were people waiting in our dressing room from the BBC asking if they could show up our review on BBC two and then the next nights, and people from I t V, which developed into a series with
Robbie Coltrane and Ben Alton. And I mean, you know, I sort of resist telling this story because it cost me as the luckiest bustard in the world, and we were. It's as if it's sometimes that I've heard younger comics and actors saying this, that they could almost see the door closing in the eighties and nineties on that sort of thing, you know, graduate comedy from especially from Oxbridge,
just waltzing into the BBC. I think it's great. I think so grateful that I grew up watching what you chaps were doing, and that that was a cornerstone of comedy for me, and growing up and seeing it's extraordinary because I was old enough to really laugh and really understand the jokes. But then to go and see what everybody did, what Emma did, what Hugh Laurie did, what you have done, what Rowan has done, what Simon Curtis has done. It's it's so inspiring because that's all I
wanted to do, was be a performer. But I didn't have a gang. I always wish they'd had a gang. I was about to say, when I'm asked, and as I'm sure you are, by young drama students or teenagers hoping to go into some aspects of the performing arts, asked to give advice, I can only say, cluster around your friends who have a similar ambition and make your own shows, make your own whatever it is, and get
your friends to come and watch them. Because the more you perform, even if it's barely to any kind of paying audience, but the more you do it, the more you get the confidence and the self belief and the idea in your head that you're allowed to because you know, we all grew up watching these glamorous figures. You know. I saw Peter Cook and John Clees on the Parkinson Show or Peter Sellers or whoever it might be, and
they were behind the glass in every sense. The idea that one could from tread any aspect of their boards, as it were, was just out of sight, and slowly because of writing with friends and kind of finding out how audiences behave and feeling that one belongs on the stage, it gives one this fabulous idea that you could be part of that huge family of people who are the clowns,
the circus and the entertainers. I was constantly deputizing dolls to be my audience, and they always loved everything I did. Of course, that was a standing ovation, as my mother used to say when I used to get my brother to do plays behind the curtain as well, and my mother used to say, without being aware of the preposterousness of the remark, you were both the best thing in it.
So you know what. My mother actually said something somewhat similar after a particularly obscure film that I've done, and she was like, gosh, you know, both people who see that will love it. What relationship, real or fictionalized defines love for you? In fact, will you say real and fictionalized, because I want to hear about lovers and defining love with fictionalized characters as well as the real one. Well, I think first love is fictional love to some extent
good one. It's so overwhelming, it's expectations are so high, it's consumes the self. It becomes so obsessive and infatuated. And when I was fourteen and a half fifteen, I fell in love with a boy at school. And I had no idea that I was capable of feeling such things. They weren't erotic. A part of them, I suppose, must obviously been erotic, but they were mostly to do with
beauty and lyricism and absolute devotion. And every waking moment was concerned with trying to follow the path that I thought he would be taking between this school block and that school block, or he had games that day and so he'd be be on the ruggy field at this time or cricket field at that time. And you know, my whole life has diverted into it. And I suddenly realized that the thing I had hated as a child, this propensity of films to wander off into kissing scenes
when there was a good adventure going. What mommy, why are they kissing? You know? The Germans areund the corner and though suddenly he's looking down into a face of that smooching and wasting time, and what's it all about? It just in all song lyrics were loving you, and the Beatles were around. You know. My seventh birthday treat was to go and see a hard day's night, you know, and I love that. There was none of that sopping us.
But the lyrics were all she loves you and love love, love, and all you need is love and love this and love that. It made no sense, and the poems one was being taught at school and all about love. Then suddenly it hit me that it was the only thing in the world that mattered, That nothing else had any significance at all except this absolute loss of self into the idea of someone else, and this understanding of why
beauty was so important. And it translated into a great sort of dippy adoration of spring and trees and blossom and birds. Did you get to tell him that you loved him? He knew I never quite expressed it in those ways. I think it's quite probably quite hard to to hide a little rumpy pumpy tussle in the grass once and that was good, oh it, But that was fictional inasmuch as it was. It belonged to a Petrarchyan idea of ideal love or Shakespearean's sonet idea or whatever,
you know. It was absolutely nothing to do with what I now think of his love, which is naturally me and my husband, which is contentment, companionship. Yes, I mean all the all the joy were of our first meeting and realizing we were soul mates and made for each other, and the happiness and the extra special pleasure that it coincided exactly with the time when we could get married legally in this country, which was so fabulous. I think that's rather a good trajectory to begin with a fictionalized
reality and to wind up in really something. You know, the marriage between two men or two women was a complete fiction until very recently. I think that's a wonderful path to have begun in that place and to have wound up in this other place. I think that's a beautiful bookend and should all be so lucky, And that you've got rumpy pumpy like the yeah, but the fact that it was actualized. There's an ideal devotion of you know,
sneaking around buildings, staring at your your love. That it actually materialized into the long grass makes me very happy. It was mainly happy, as you can imagine. Underneath it was the misery of the realization that for him it might have been an amusing episode, but for me it was part of what I absolutely instinctively understood was my nature, which was that I would only ever fall in other people of my own sects, and that I was never
going to be therefore accepted by society. Because that same knowledge had driven me to the library, because in those days, of course, there was no online there was no affirmation or vindication of sexuality available except in the forbidden by ways of literature, not pornography, but stories like Oscar Wilde's trial or various other people exiled to Rocco and Capri in the Mediterranean, generally where a slightly more LuSE lifestyle was acceptable, and otherwise it was skulking in the shadows,
and it was you know, it was the terrible fear of the police, courts and and shame. Did you think of that at fourteen and fifteen when you first fell in love. I was aware that my whole interior life would have to be a secret. At least I thought that would would be a secret that I would never be able to share with anyone except through books. You know.
And for all the horrors we attribute to social media and the email and the whole digital world, now, it had that been available to me, it would have completely altered the way I felt, because I would have been more instantly to discover that I was not alone and that I was not criminal, I was not creepy, I was not a pervert. You should be punished because I knew that although sex was important, it was really love
that was the massive thing. And that's, of course what has been allowed by this acceptance and legislation and everything, is people can love each other. Yeah, exactly what is the quality, at least about yourself? I give answers that people can get very annoyed by because they sound like false modesty or surd expectations. But I know that, as far as other people canse, I'm not lazy, and yet I still feel lazy in myself. I still feel there's
always more I could do. In my husband, it's driven crazy by my need not to see a single red notification badge in my email box. I have to answered everything, I have to have done the thank you letters and the bread and button letters, and I have to be on top of things. And I always say to him it's because I so hate it. I want to get it out of the way. I'm the same with washing up or anything. It's a peculiar, but that seems like a very good thing. That it seem like a bad
thing at all. I wish I did the washing up. No, I know it's not a bad thing. That it annoys me, that I'm so that I'm so anxious about it, and I can't be more relaxed. But you're right, it's not the thing I hate about myself most. I think my anxiety to please, my inability to rest until I feel that everybody is unoffended by me and possibly even likes me or is pleased with me, and it doesn't come away with a wrong idea about me, or what I think is a wrong idea about me. And I'm aware
that this desire to please is transparent. That's to say others can see it. I mean, I've actually happened. I don't seek them out but I've happened on the odd phrase online or in the press saying his overwhelming desire to be liked or whatever, and I think, yeah, that they're right, and it's you know, the people I most
like aren't like me. I suppose that's the way I should put it, that you know, they it's not that they absolutely don't care who to what people think about them and are sort of quite happy to be cruel and unkind or dismissive or not to answer letters or whatever. It's not that, it's just that it doesn't seem to possess them quite as it does me. I don't know where it comes from, but it's a it's a desire to please. It's that little Jack Horner, what a good boy am I? Sort of thing that I know is
very obvious in me. Well, I think you're great. I've done it. Can't cross that off the list, take at least until tomorrow. What person, place, or experience has most altered your life? Well, I think I would go back to an occasion my screw up in the country and quite a large house. It's not Tonton Abbey, but you know, it was big and it was very old fashioned. It
wasn't on the mains water. We had sort of pump house somewhere in in the back to pump up the water, and the bread man would come on a horse and cart. You know. When I was young, it was a very rural and peculiar and fun sort of life I supposed to grow up in. But one thing my purchase did
not like was television. There was one kept in a cupboard somewhere, was a tiny little thing, and if if a member of the royal family married or got or died, or Winston Churchill's funerals say, or the moon landing, the television would be got out and sat in a corner and told to behave itself, and then put away again.
But occasionally my father that the stable block of the house had been converted to a laboratory for my father physicist inventor sort of figure, and so he would sometimes spend days over that would be like Sherlock Combs, you know, just completely lost amongst his equipment. And and then I would especially was raining and there's nothing else to do, I would take the television out and secretly watch it.
One afternoon a Sunday afternoon, I turned it on and it something had just started, and people were talking to each other in the most extraordinary way. I've never heard anything like it. It wasn't Shakespeare, but it wasn't contemporary. I was not old enough to recognize it, but I was old enough to recognize that it was stunning. And I watched it with my mouth open because of the way people were speaking. And it finished with a curtain dropping, so the camera had sort of been inside in a
real world. And then at the end it pulled back and the curtain fell, as if to suggest that it was a play. So I rushed off to see my mother, and there was a particular line in it. You know how something When a movie is really good, you remember almost every detail of it, and when a movie is
colossal garbage, you cannot remember a single scene. And I remembered so much of this just watching at once, including this speech where a man whom I subsequently discovered was the actor Michael Dennison says to a woman whom I subsequently discovered was the actress Dorothy Tutin. He said, I hope I will not in any way offend you if I say that. You seem to me to be the
visible personification of absolute perfection. And I thought that was the most extraordinary line I've ever It was funny because of course, if you declare love to someone, you don't use Latin at words like visible personification of absolute perfection. You say I love you. You're gorgeous, you know that's what. But and yet it was a beautiful compliment and courtly. And so I ran to my mother and said, mother, I hope I shan't offend it if I say that. You seemed to me to be, in every way the
visible personification of absolute perfection. She said, what are you talking about. I said, I've seen this thing, and I explained it. She said, oh, that was the importance of being earnest. And I said, well, what is it? And she explained it was a play. Now, we were so deep in the country that were miles Sydney Smith once said, miles simply miles from the nearest lemon. But we were we were. We were also miles from the nearest library.
And so what we what had in those days? I don't know if they still do this little gray vans, the kind that would be called antechnical news. We had a van like that, a library vane, a mobile library. Yeah, and it would come too. There was a crossing of the roads about a quarter of a mile from our house, cut lanes met and it would stop there on Thursday afternoons. Would you wait for it? Yeah? I waited for it.
On the corner. The driver got out and wheezed his way around the front bonnet and opened the side door, let down the steps, and patted my bottom as I went into the library. And and there was a little lady in there with powdery soft cheeks and little little glasses on a chain. And I asked her if she had the importance of being earnest by Mr Oscar Wilde. She gave me this collection of his comic plays, four of the Women of No Importance, Ideal Husband and Lady
vander Meer's Win. I got this and um and I read them for I kept them for the week, and I read until I and I knew the importance almost off by heart. I could still quit most of it. And I just fell in love with the language. And then I went back and I said, have you got any more by this writer? And she stamped out a new book, the Complete Works of Oscar World. I took them home and I read these fairy stories as an amazing sort of the Happy Prince and the Young King
and all these, and some I didn't understand. There were some very sort of grown up essays, like the Soul of Man under Socialism, and one which we should be reading now called The Truth of Masks, very appropriate. And then I went back the next week and I said, have you got any more? And she said, well, if that's ay the complete works, that that's probably the complete works. And I said oh, And I started to look around, and then I saw a book called The Trials of
Oscar World, by a man called hell Montgomery Hide. And she said, I'm not sure that's appropriate for you. And I said, no, no, I'm I'm studying this writer even nothing.
So she standed up, let me read it. And there I read about this extraordinary man is warmth, his generosity, his wit, his gift genius for friendship, and then I kind of lived with him as he was pulled down into the greatest and most terrible scandal of the Victorian Age and ended up in Paris, despised and rejected of men, as I puts it, and died a miserable death, thinking he would be perhaps forgotten or always in disgrace in men's eyes, and it just took the wind out of
myself because I knew that I had that thing in me, that the reason he was pulled down would be the reason I might do this belief that I'd never been accepted. So there was on the one hand, there was the joy of discovering literature and how language can because many I can't. I can't dance, I can't paint, draw, you know, I'm not athletic. Those ways people have an expressing joy and delight and texture and thrill all for me are in words proceeding out of my mouth or put on
a page. And in our culture, not uniquely, I think we're not encouraged to believe that language, which is the gift we all share, and there's a very strong dysfunction, is not just for saying past the mustard and where toileted, but it is actually something that can be used to entrance and delight and seduce and beguile and thrill and deceive and create as much art as a paintbrush or a cello can. Just in the sound of the tongue hitting the back of the teeth, there's a beauty and
a majesty and a glory. That's one of the reasons I admired people like M and M and some of the great hip hop artists is because they have brought language really back into popular art in a strong way. And an Oscar was the first to do that. For lit that like many other things. So I think everything flowed from that. It woke me up, That's what That's what lit a fire in me. That still it still burns. Stephen.
I end up that so much. I had. I had awesome wells reading a selfish giant on a record that I listened to and I was about five or six, and I this is my garden. It is. It is so brilliant. Anyone find it. Everybody should listen to it. The children are my flowers. Yes, it's glorious. I only have to hear those. And I can smell an old fashioned gramophone and the rest that went on, you know that dust it warmed up with little crackle. Join me next week for the second half of my conversation with
Stephen Fry. Mini Quests is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer Aaron Kaufman, producer Morgan Lavoy, research assistant Marissa Brown, original music Sorry Baby by Mini Driver, Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Executive produced by Me Mini Driver. Special thanks to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison No Day, Lisa Castella and Annicke Oppenheim at w kPr de La Pescador, Kate Driver and Jason Weinberg, and for constantly solicited tech support Henry Driver,