Stephen Fry
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2015
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Stephen Fry.
Comedian, actor, writer, director, presenter & award-ceremony host - his list of accomplishments is long, varied and impressive. His younger years were troubled and with a propensity for stealing and lying, he was expelled from two schools and imprisoned for credit card fraud. The turning point came when he knuckled down and won a scholarship to Queens' College, Cambridge, where he read English and joined the Cambridge Footlights, becoming lifelong friends with Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie.
His career highlights include the fruits of his collaborative work with Laurie - from A Bit of Fry and Laurie to Jeeves and Wooster, he played Lord Melchett in Blackadder and Oscar Wilde on the big screen. He is a best-selling author of fiction and three volumes of autobiography, is the voice of the Harry Potter audio books and presents BBC Two's QI. He has also spoken of his experience of mental health issues and in 2006 he made a documentary exploring the effects of living with Bipolar - it won an Emmy Award.
Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:10.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. My customers. My cast away this week is Stephen Fry. It's tempting to unabashedly embrace |
| 0:38.6 | the cliche he needs no introduction. Seems almost redundant to list his endless credits and |
| 0:43.8 | achievements on TV, stage, film, radio and paper because well because he's |
| 0:48.8 | Stephen Fry and we've been watching reading and listening to him for three |
| 0:52.3 | decades marveling at his highly impressive |
| 0:55.4 | but lightly worn intellectual capacity, savouring his knowing and often frisky prolicity, |
| 1:01.6 | and admiring his untypical candor and then there's the voice a pitch |
| 1:06.7 | perfect cocktail of Englishness erudition mischief and warmth a few of his triumphs include A Bit of Fry and Lorry, his highly acclaimed film |
| 1:15.4 | performance as Oscar Wilde, his best-selling series of memoirs, and his long-running |
| 1:20.0 | chairmanship of the TV show QI. His troubles include falling on his face in the |
| 1:24.6 | playground and breaking his nose, an early spell in prison for credit card fraud, |
| 1:28.8 | coping with depression and kicking a 20-year-long cocaine habit. |
| 1:33.0 | These days, it's impossible to ignore just how dashed happy he looks. |
| 1:37.0 | He recently married. |
| 1:39.0 | He says, if you talk about something, it gets it out and like a wound once you start getting the oxygen on it, |
| 1:46.1 | it starts to heal. And so Stephen Fry, welcome to Desert Island discs. |
| 1:50.4 | Thank you, Kirstie. Healing and talking then, we know you're very good at talking more than any other |
| 1:55.4 | castaway I think I've spoken to. Your life is out there. You have written so much about it in |
| 2:00.7 | quite a revelatory way. Has all that made you feel better? |
... |
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