Stephen Fry's Blog, page 9

Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn

Professor Higgins opens the My Fair Lady Song, "I've Thrown A Custard in her Face" with a long string of Damns, which I am in a mood to repeat. I have a ten-ton deadline hanging over me suspended by a single human hair. If I don't stay and stare at my screen all day every day until I have bled out a screenplay I will have my nipples torn from me like medals from the tunic of a disgraced officer and Shame will know me for her own.

Douglas Adams liked deadlines: "I love the loud whooshing noise the

Servers With A Smile

Nothing more than a housekeeping miniblog today, I'm afraid, but it might interest those of you who like contemplating the astonishing power of volume.

I have for some time now been very wary of tweeting or retweeting URLs, however worthy the cause. The high (and entirely gratifying) number of followers that I have accumulated on Twitter means that when I point them towards a site it can often get almost instantly stampeded and flattened, swamped and strangulated. Only news pages and similar big

Office Slavery

I don't think I need explain how much I love the world of tech. I love the software and hardware and firmware and wares of all gradations on the digital Moh Scale in between. I love smartphones and watches and ebooks and media players and social networking services and maxiblogs and miniblogs and microblogs. I love audioboo and audiobooks. I love earphones and earplugs and visors and touchscreens and MUDs and HUDs and apps and apple and applets.

And yet. Oh and yet…

Most mornings I have to get up

Confession

When Auden and Isherwood left Britain for America in 1939 they attracted much opprobrium and many brickbats. Evelyn Waugh portrayed them as Parsnip and Pimpernel, lily-livered pansy traitors who left their country in its hour of greatest need (though how exactly Great Britain needed two literary types like Wystan and Christopher he didn't quite explain) and many red-blooded patriots to this day still shake their heads at the mere mention of their names.

So now I have a monstrous confession to mak

Glory Be

There is a quality in human affairs, so rare, so fleeting and so intense that to invoke its name in any context risks derision. To invoke its name in the context of sport must seem especially perverse, pretentious, preposterous and pathetic. I have always flirted with those four mockable Ps and nothing can stop me now. Even a reasonable night's sleep hasn't diminished the euphoria that sees me now unleashing a peal of eulogistic superlatives and hyperbolic encomia that can only bring me taunts,

The test

No, not the 5th and Final Test. Although I am on my way there as I type this. I am thinking about the tests undergone by today's A level students.

I'm not saying I wasn't nervous about my A level results way back when. I was. Very. I had been in prison, was less than half way through my probation and could only be keenly aware that A levels and University were the last best hope for Our Hero.

My generation (I am going back 32 years to the summer of 77) had certain advantages of course. Neither we

Pointless babble

The clue's in the name of the service: Twitter. It's not called Roar, Assert, Debate or Reason, it's called Twitter. As in the chirruping of birds. Apparently, according to Pears (the soapmakers presumably – certainly their "study" is froth and bubble) 40% of Twitter is "pointless babble", (http://is.gd/2mKSg) which means of course that a full 60% of Twitter discourse is NOT pointless babble, which is disappointing. Very disappointing. I would have hoped 100% of Twitter was fully free of earnest

Not too big, not too small…

God's biscuits, but I'm knackered. My gym has taken a two week holiday and I've found myself the guest of a neighbouring health and fitness centre. They have unfamiliar machines. One styles itself The Adductor, which sounds rather He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I have been stretched, strangled and constricted and pulled, pinched and pinioned like a medieval heretic. The strange, the obscene, the perverted and the peculiar thing about it all is that I seem to enjoy it. To need it. My you

Series 2 Episode 4, iTunes Live Festival

Stephen Fry speaks on the history of copyright, his thoughts on file sharing and the future of entertainment.

Cricket Speech Presented at Lord's 14th July 2009

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed.  It is an honour to stand before so many cricketing heroes from England and from Australia and at this, my favourite time of year. The time when that magical summer sound comes to our ears and gladdens our old hearts, the welcome sound of leather on Graham Swann.

I have been asked to say a few words - well more than a few. "You've twenty minutes to fill," I was firmly told by the organisers. 20 minutes. Not sure how I'll use all that tim