Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1988, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a funny man, a writer and a performer.

His pedigree is of the best.

He was in the Cambridge footlights,

and is he would claim a typical product, sarcastic,

cruelly rational and very tall.

You've seen him in the young ones, Blackadder,

and on Saturday Night Live,

and most recently as television's spoof investigative reporter, David Lander,

this is Stephen Fry.

Stephen, you are very tall, aren't you?

I mean, how tall?

Six foot four and a little bit,

which is the approved Cambridge comedian height

roughly, Douglas Adams, Graham Chapman.

John Cleese actually has a few extra inches

in the same way. He has a few extra laugh glands as well.

It's a serious point is that all Cambridge men are lanky?

They seem to be, Virginia Woolf made the point about tall languid, lanky, Cambridge people.

And Oxford people seem to be rather short and darkened, partly because of their Welsh element, I suppose.

It's always, you know, the Welsh mine always goes to Oxford, because it's a bit nearer.

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