Stephen Fry (Part 2)

I'm mini driver and welcome to many questions. I've always loved pruce 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 Pruce's questionnaire and adapted what I think 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 honored and humbled to have had a chance to engage with. In last week's episode, we heard Steven's answers to when and where were you happiest. You think of something a sunny day on the beach or in a park, maybe that you're very young, to 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 the idea of being. All you have to do is twist your ear lobe and you will get that memory. What relationship real or fictionalize. It defines love for you and love love love, and all you need is love and love this and love that.

And it made no sense. And 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 what person, place, or experience has most altered your life. I said, I've seen this thing, and I explained it. She said, oh, that was the importance of being earnest. Here is the last part of our conversation. She could have any question answered, what would it be

such a good question itself? This one answer this question for me. I mean, at the risk of sounding very uh, I've always got to sound pompous, but the extra pomp us I am very interested in those called philosophical questions. Instantly makes them sound like a sort of game or intellectual quest, and I think they're more exciting than that. Although those are exciting things in themselves, those do actually sound quite fun. Yeah, they do, I hope, so an

intellectual quest. Yeah. It is the nature of consciousness. It's how it is that we can have this sense of self, of who we are manufactured in a wet but electrically sparkling object like a brain in our heads, that it can create such a powerful sense of self that is not just the thing you see in the mirror, whose voice you hear in your own ears, and whose effect

you see in other people. That it's also the entire sense of moral obligation, guilt, shame, love, passion, all these things that animate us, and that drivers and I just feel very strongly that it won't survive after my heart stops beating, excepting other people's memories or recordings of this podcast, all the rest of it. And yet that that isn't satisfactory. It's still a mystery, and it is still the mystery.

It's known in philosophy is the hard problem, the hard problem of consciousness, and people have come up with ideas that are crazy. I mean they're matrix like the universe itself is conscious. That there is a consciousness in the universe. And this is said by philosophers of great a clap in universities around the world. It just fascinates me because I good animals and I love animals. We have a sense,

don't we. It's very hard to prove, but I think we prove it to ourselves in all the ways that matter, that animals don't share this particular quality of self consciousness. Yes, we've all seen a cat look a bit ruffled and embarrassed when it's fallen over, and it's sort of sort of proudly sits up, so you know, we impute very human ideas of dignity and self regard to certain animals

that we live with closely. And of course animals that live with us closely mimic us in just as we mimic then, But the animal kingdom generally, I look, say this is the animal use because I'm so fond of them. But an Amazonian tree frog on a branch with that enormous grin on its face, and there's wonderful sort of silicon rubber fingers with a little round ends clutching onto the branch, And I see in that tree frog an animal that spends one of its time being a tree frog,

achieving tree frog nous completely. And I am as certain as I can be of anything that it doesn't wake up in the morning thinking I was a terrible tree frog. Ust today I hate myself. Look what I did to to to my to Mrs tree Frog. Look Look how I ignored my children in any sense like that. And you laugh because it is of course preposterous to imagine a tree frog thinking that. But every single human being

on earth does that all the time. We don't feel we are a hundred percent what we could be, and that's a most peculiar thing, a very very strange thing. If we accept that no animal has this sense of yearning to be better, yearning to have a greater moral force, yearning to to achieve more. Yes they want to have a full of belly. Yes they want to get their

rocks off. Yes they want to protect that brood. Of course they have these urges instincts, but they're very clear, very evolutionarily and necessary and transparent as motives and energies as it were. But what philosophers called our deontic sense, this sense of obligation and moral purpose that we have within us. What the matter count said, this moral law within me. It's a very strong sense. And we can argue that it's all kinds of people do. There's a

Freudian argument about it. There's a religious argument about it. There's all kinds of explanations for why we might have it, and they go back to Genesis. For Genesis is because they are the fruit. It's part of our particular evolution. It is it is something that evolved that the tree. For our gwen namic, I'm not evolving any moral nightmare. I'm not going to judge anything except how much I think I'm going to get to eat today. I feel like it's the gift and the curse that we carried

on exploring. We carry it on growing, we carried on expanding. This speech is that we are part of and there is great joy on that, and there is awfulness in that. It's the experience. It's the will cut idea of learning to love the questions. Yes, no, that's right. We made at some point in our history what's some people called the cognitive leap, which involves both behavioral modernity. I think

is the correct phrase for it, I tool making. So first, we started altering the environment around us to create objects and spaces that were useful to us in a way that was beyond animals. An animal might make a nest, but it's the same nest through the generations. That's how

bluebirds make their nest. Whereas two different humans in just two generations can say, no, I'm going to build my nest like this and I'm going to use this, and another one will say I'm going to repurpose this whole in the ere I'm going to that's behavioral modernity, which is one branch of our evolution, and another, of course

was language. But the big question, and part of the hard problem is did language come as a result of self consciousness or did self consciousness come as a result of language, which is what James would say, who wrote this fantastic Boo, which is a huge influence on me, called this is such a terrible title, that the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. I know it's an absurd title. I bet that doesn't come in a paperback. No, it's I think it's so inaudible. Okay,

are you reading it, because I'll get it if you are. No, I'm not. I'd love to if it's but I'd recommend anyone to read it. It's not too tougher. It's beautifully written, and I'm not saying I agree with all of it, but it probably expresses these questions I'm trying to articulate better than any book I've ever read. And, like all things to do with learning, the more you know, the more filled with wonder you are, not the less explanations don't close down beauty and miracle, they open them up.

That's my firm conviction. Another great here in mind, Richard Feynman had a fabulously famous not rant but sort of spiel about this where he's explaining to an artist why he finds a flower more beautiful than the artist does. And in fact, Fineman curse him was a wonderful draftsman that drew and painted fabulously, as well as getting a Nobel price physics and all the other things he did.

But he explained how he had the sense of the flowers fragility, the beauty, the shimmering of the color, the erotic quality like someone like Mattlethorpe found in flowers, you know, all these things he could see. But then he also knew enough biology to have an understanding of the sepals and stamens and all the other But he could go

deeper than that. He could look into the compillary system and see how the energy of the food and sugar and starches that were going from the ground, and how they were selected by the flowers roots and how they moved. And he could go deeper into that, and he could see the protons and the positives, and he could see the electrons. He see the whole miracle of the universe focusing its astonishing nature into the creation of a flower. And as he says, you know, we stop and look

at a red flower? How is it red? When it's all very well to say it's DNA tells it to go red, But how does it then do it? It has to select out of the chemicals that are in the earth, only the ones which, when put together in its little factory, make the color red. If I took a handful of earth, I couldn't make a red diet of it, not as red as a dahlia. And it's

two of the animals. All those colors come from the food and drink that they eat, energized by the sunlight, and and they can be that blue or that yellow, and they're just growing out of a garden in Dorking. You know, there's that color, and we don't even stop to think about where it actually comes from. It's fantastic. We are distracted. Yeah, And so I'd like to know why I'm aware of this. I'd like to know where

my awareness comes from. I'm just so fascinated by it because it's so possible to live fabulous lives as a tiger can without it. I like that. I like that very very very very much. Can you tell me about one particular thing that has grown out of a complete disaster. Well yeah, I mean my whole life. Alan Cumming. I asked Alan this question and I said, so, so can you tell me something that's growing out of personal disaster? And he was like yeah, me, Well, yes, I've read

his I read his incredible book about his father. I mean, the bottom man he is. He's such a fabulous Oh he's a man, amazing, he's amazing. But again, if you haven't read Alan Cumby's book, Not My Father's Son, heart wrenching and brilliant it is. And of course he's produced a line of fragrance. Yeah, of course he has. If your name was coming, you would want to advise people to spread coming all over their face when it's not

tell me about growth and personal disaster. One of my passions was Sherlock Holmes at school, and I had been the youngest member of the Sherlock Holmbs Society of London and I got this request, not request, It was an invitation to all members to go to a meeting in London of the Shallockomb Society. And I was going to present a paper. I was going to do a talk on the correlation between T. S Elliott and Mariarty. Oh my god, yes, It was the fact that mccavity the

Mystery Cat is directly based on Mariarty. A lot of not people hadn't noticed that, and I had. I didn't know that anyway, So so that was my big thing. And I got permission from my house master to go to London. People who read Harry Potter now what house masters are now, Thank goodness, they don't have to explain it's my Minerva McGonagle or whatever. My Severest Snape signed Maggie Smith. My Maggie Smith signed a chit so that

I could go to London anyway. The idea was I go for this event, stay overnight, and then come back the next day. Well, the next day I went to the cinema. And in those days you could go into a cinema and sit there all day, and they just want to show the same film again and again. And I saw the film Cabaret again and again and again. It was absolutely overwhelmed by it. And then I went to the Sea the Godfather, and then I went to see Fritz the Cat, which was an animated adult cartoon.

Rember that I was fifteen, but somehow I could pass his eighteen if I had quite my voice had just broken and it was quite deep. And anyway, I got expelled from the school. I was sent to another school, which I got expelled from, and then another one, and then I ran away to London, and then I stole some credit cards from a coach in a pub, and eventually I was caught by the police in Swindon, of all unromantic towns, and sent to a prison to await trial.

How old were you by this time? I had seventeen a baby, yeah, I know, and you were sent a proper prison. Yeah. And I had spent this credit card over so many different counties that it took about two and after three months for all the paperwork to be assembled by the police for me then to go to a court. Now, because I'd run away from home, I originally not told them who what my name was because I didn't want my parents to get involved because I'd

already called them enough trouble with all these expulsions. But eventually they found out who I was, and my parents got a friend of those who was a barrister to come and represent me when I was in court. And the fact that I've done three months in prison on remand, and that it was the first offense, and I guess that I had an expensive lawyer, which my parents tally

wasn't charging. He was being a friend. Meant that instead of going down for two years detention center or Boston or anything like that young Person's Offenders institution, I was put on two years probation. And you can imagine the car drive home from Wiltshire to Norfolk, and that's just I mean. And my parents, you know, they're just wonderful, supportive, lovely people, and my mother never doubted somehow everything would turn out right, and my father was more taciturn about it.

But they basically said it's up to me now. They put me through enough schools. And it was while I was in prison that something had snapped, and I think it was really that for about a month I was sharing a cell with this kid from Wales who was about sixteen and a half seventeen, was just a bit younger than me, and he couldn't read. He literally was illiterate. I had never seen anything. I just never occurred to

me that someone would be and I taught him. I taught him the alphabet, I taught him to write it out, and I taught him basic words in that time. It was an extraordinary experience, and it hammered home to me like a sledge Hammond extraordinary, just how I had wasted these golden opportunities. Because you know, I'm not painting myself as some Francis of ASSISI or some albich fights. So you know, I wasn't suddenly turned into this humanitarian philanthropist.

But I did see that my opportunities had been so much greater than anybody else's, and that it was a disgrace for me to moan inside and to think that the world was against me. I needed no more education than all of that, and so I said that if I get out, when I get out of this, I'm going to put myself through and get to university. And I'd always set my heart on Cambridge. A lot of my sort of hearers e m forced people like that. So I went to the library and took out past

papers on Oxbridge Entrance and paid someone. I took jobs in restaurants and bars and things, and paid someone to invigilate because they didn't at the local college do Oxbridge Entrance. I paid him to invigilate, so he get the papers and make sure I wasn't cheating, and I'd hand him them and he'd send them. And my parents knew I was doing this and they were very supportive. So I was still living at home. And then I got fed up waiting for the results to come through my camidg entrance.

So I went into Norwich one day and I was in a cafe and I told my mother, I said, I'm going in. If a letter comes for me and it looks as if it might be the results, you can open it and ring me at this cafe. And so she called. I was in the cafe with friends and I said, how did a letter I and she said no. I said, what are you calling me? She said no, it wasn't a letter. Was a telegram? Is

it a telegram? What? My immediately feeling guilty, I've been found out about something, EXTRA said no, it says congratulations awarded scholarship Queen's College admissions tutor. I said, read that again. She read it again and not just got in the scholarsh And I said, slightly, making me cry remembering it, because it was those moments that there were the pivot which my whole life turned from from what had been failure and disgrace and sliding down into a sort of

self pittying mess. I had just pulled myself up by by my fingernails in time, and then really going to Cambridge and as the same meeting Emma and then Hugh and loving it so much and feeling a part of it, feeling as if I belonged for the first time in a world where ideas were spoken about, and where I could perform and feel natural and be out. I could

be gay and nobody minded. And so it was that it was being it was I presented as a cartoon of me lying face down on stone flags with straw and the shadows of the prisoner and a rat crawling over my back. It wasn't quite that bad, but you know what I mean, From that low point, it was a miracle that I was able, and fully aware that a lot of it was the advantage of my upbringing. But but I just don't think you can have one

without the other. I just I don't think of it in terms of payment, that those hardships our payment for the good, but that they are inextricably linked. They are they are part of the same experience. I do wonder what happened to that Welshman who you taught to read. Yes, I lost touch with him. Of course, it must be funny for him to see you, because I'm sure that he's seeing you in his life. And yeah, they called

me in prison, they called me the professor. That was my nick because I'm sort of new things and had read books. And I'm imagining you rather like Hugh Grant and Paddington too. I'd love to think I was a stylish but there was an element of that. And I also played the piano of the Sunday there were hymns, voluntary hymns in the association room, and I used to play the piano. And I'm not at all good, but you know, I'm a typical show off, so I you know,

I learned these kind of our pagis and things. So I would end these ordinary hymns with this, these huge p edges, and then dumb, dumb the chaplain would look at me to check whether I'm finished. Very silly, but of course you know that fun in its way. So what would be your last meal? I love it because it's a pristing question, but it's also so fundamentally human. Yeah it is, isn't it. And I go two ways, and that strikes at the heart of what a lot

of us are like. I think is that one part of me wants to say he had to vote ala Veronique or whatever, you know, some fantastic meal that I once had at the water side or the fat duck or some you know. And I've been lucky enough to have some great food in my time. But another part of me wants to say, I want beans on toast with a couple of poached eggs. Yeah, I want that right now, And yeah, I think I would probably go

for that. And you know what once like that with music and literature, Do I want to listen to Wagner now or actually would just yeah exactly, with just some some silly, silly, charming music, do me quite happen it, but on the kinks, just for fun, you know. And the point is we're lucky because we can have both.

I remember Richard Curtis set saying this to me, you know, the great writer of so many popular British films and of course a colleague of Roan's in the early days, and the found of comic Relief, and much as he has a passion for pop music, and in his youth

he once it was possible. He recorded every single Top of the Pops and his close friend at Oxford with Rowan was Howard good All, the composer who wrote the Blackadder theme and the theme and other things that Richard had done, as well as many many other successful things. Is wonderful, talented manner, and of course he's also done documentaries about classical music for PBC two and Channel four.

And I remember sitting in I was a bit junior, because I was two years below then when I was at Cambridge, and I've only just got to know them, and Richard was saying, how you know he was going to send some singles to Howard, you know of this particular bands that he should listen to, and how had said, well, I'll send you some Marla then, and you listen to that, which had said, well, I'll try and listen to it. But I should warn you that my mind and soul

are not deep enough to appreciate it. I'm a very light fellow and all I need is light entertainment. And I remember thinking, how very charming to confess such a thing. This is a man who got a double First, he's no idiot, but also I wonder if that's true, I mean, I wonder if that is it, and I thought, well, maybe for him it is. Maybe also with Richard, he doesn't want to investigate shine tortures into dark and upsetting

parts of his mind. Maybe there have to be people who are the champions of the confection that makes us happy, of the things which allow us to just remain. I mean, I feel like his films, particularly just allow you to live in a place where it's clever and it's funny, and there's community and ship works out, which is why I dorepg Wood has as well. I love wood Has for that reason. It's always sunny, and but Whild is the same things work out in Wild, and things really

don't work out in Wild, I mean Wild. There's the nascent point of the Oscar, of course, put it very brilliantly into the mouth of Miss Prism in the Governors in the importance of being earnest, in a brilliant clever line, which she says, though she doesn't know how clever it is. As she says it, she's admitting to her pupil all sicily that she, in an earlier life, had written a three volume novel Do not speak slightingly of the three volume novels Cicily I myself in Happier Days wrote one,

and Cicily says, oh did it end happily? And Ms Prison says the good ended happily, the bad ended unhappily. That is what fiction means, which is really that, and that is it. That's brilliant. I remember when I first read say Evelyn War, and I was shocked and it didn't work out how many times cruel and dreadful things happened to people who don't deserve it. I felt the same way reading Graham Green. I agree, why the terrible things happen to lovely people and the awful people don't

get punished? And why the lovely things happened to terrible people? Exactly? I completely agree with you. And it used to make me crazy when I was a kid. That still does, by the way, and why Wild was pre figuring a twentieth century in which maybe the good wouldn't end happily and then and fiction wouldn't start to mean something else. But of course his joke of saying that's what fiction means is in other words, it's a lie. And so that's yeah, that's a very strong part of it. And

I had the pleasure. It's one of the great joys of marrying someone younger than yourself is you can very often introduce them to things that have somehow missed and that you, of course have caught. And I think everybody in the world had seen it, but he had never seen Singing in the Rain, and we watched it together. He's now seen it three times because he was so overwhelmed button as he said, he said, I've never seen anything that so radiates joy from start to finish. It

isn't joyful and iron thinking when he said it. Of course, that's right. That's what it is. To see Donald o'coma singing make them laugh, just fills you with joy. It is beautiful, every single number in that in that movie, In the way that it's working together, it is pure joy. And do you know, do you know the work of

Preston Sturgis that I'm sure you do. And he was a writer director for those who don't know who operated in the forties and fifties and wrote some extraordinary masterpieces of film at which he directed as well with furious pace. And one of them is called Sullivan's Travels. And you may know something about it because it was a huge influence on the Coen Brothers. It's about a film director

who's like Preston Sturgis and director of comedies. It's during the depression and he's determined that his next movie won't be a comedy because there are people out there suffering and you know, the bums on the trains a out of work. He's got to make a movie that is for them, and he's got the movie in his head. It's going to be called Oh Brother, were art Thou, which, if you remember, the camera went on to make as a fair. But that's the film he's going to make.

And his girlfriend is Veronica La and he's got these he's got butlers, and that's wonderful Beverly Hills lifestyle. He decides to become a bum. He throws away all his good clothes and puts on tramps clothes, gets in a box car on the train and goes through a series

of circumstances beyond his control. He gets accused of murder and no one believes that he's a film diriter, and he goes to a prisoner's hideous prison where he's chained up and he's beaten and he lives his terrible life, and the prisoners around him, of course, are absolutely at the lowest EBB, but human being can be in America chained together. And eventually he behaves well enough, he's tamed

so that he's allowed a privilege of going. And you don't know what it is is you're watching the film, you see suddenly this church, a black church, a black Baptist church, where all the worshippers have just finished singing him, and the preacher gets up and says to his flock that we, you know, we have our guests now, and

we're to treat them with great politeness. And someone is pulling a sheet down at the back of the hall and income chained all the listeners and they're welcomed by these church members and they're sat down and film begins and you see Joel McCrae, who plays Sullivan, sitting there looking angry, and all the prisoners around him, and they're miserable,

miserable men. And they start with this Disney cartoon, violent silly cartoon, and everyone starts laughing and laughing and laughing, and you see Joel McCray is the only one not laughing, a face like thunder and slowly his face cracks and he starts to laugh, and they're all laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing, and his transformation anyway, Then the plot carries on and finally someone sees his photograph who's the friendly warden or whoever it is, and he tells

the prison people and it's discovered who he is, and that the person he was accused of killing was himself. That was what he was trying to explain, that he was the one who was accused of killing. So it was all very complicated. He gets back to the studio and the producers, who so hated the idea of making her brother where up say, now you can make your brother where aren't you your world famous? You went down, you put the bum And John mccrazy is, no, I'm

not going to make her brother where up there? I'm going to make a comedy. And then the film ends with this speech laughter may not be much, but it's all some people have in this crazy caravan. Boy, that's it, And then the fade in to the site of all those prisoners with tears running down at their faces, laughing and laughing and laughing. So basically, you want to be eating beans on tasts with two poached eggs. Watching Sullivan's Travels. Yeah, I love that movie, but I would venture that The

Lady Eve is the beta film. I grant you, it's a must. It also made me feel, apart from that Henry Founder was was the most handsome person I was ever going to see in my life, unlovable. It made me believe that that odd people can find each other. And I knew I was odd, That's all I knew, and that just it always made me think that there was hope. And Barbara st Oh, my god, she's so divine. Was She really was clever and beauty when she trips

him up on the boat. So that's if you're listening and you don't know the work of Preston Sturgies, treat yourself this weekend to a box set of the genuinely cannot thank you enough. I mean, it's been such a pleasure that I've taken notes as you were speaking. There are books I'm going to read, there are words I'm going to look up, there are movies I'm going to watch, and there's beans on toasts to be made immediately. I just completely adore you, and I so appreciate what you

put out into the world. Genuinely, it's amazing thing. That is so sweet if you bless you, and I love you too, and thank you for inviting me onto your wonderful program and asking this question. Very very very welcome, so appreciative well. Stephen Fry's latest book, Troy, is out now from Chronicle Books in the US. It is the

brilliant conclusion to his best selling Mythos trilogy. Stephen's next book, Fries Ties is out in November in the UK, published by Penguin Michael Joseph, and it is a witty, illustrated ode to his decades long obsession with Ties. Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer Aaron Kaufman, Producer Morgan Levoy, 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 Annick Oppenheim at w kPr, de La Pescadore, Kate Driver and Jason Weinberg, and for constantly solicited Tex support. Henry Driver