More Fool Me (8 page)

The magisterial bench, however, concluded that, since I had a solid family background (and perhaps came from the same class as them, I crimson at the thought), there was no need for a prison sentence, which would in those days and at my age have taken the form of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins’s ‘short sharp shock’, the notorious detention centre, which was all the rage at the time. I had been dreading this: fellow cons at Pucklechurch told me it was all about running around and gym and weights and eating standing up and running about again like someone in Olympic training. DC provided the world with marvellously fit villains, ideal candidates for posts like nightclub bouncers and drug dealers’ debt enforcers. Fortunately for me, taking into account the months I had already served (plus the other possible reasons I have indicated) I found myself sentenced to two years’ probation in the care of my parents.

We move then from the image of the wretch lying on the stone flags of the prison cell, shadows of the prison bars cast across his sobbing frame, rats squeaking, gibbering and weeing in the corner, we move from this unhappy (and wholly inaccurate) picture to the solemn silence of the journey home from Swindon Magistrate’s Court, father’s stern face at the wheel, jaw tightly clamped and eyes sternly on the road ahead.

I seem to be sketching the biography of a Cambridge spy, a whole genre of literature in itself, factual and fictional. But whenever Kim Philby or Guy Burgess and their circle are written about, or (spoiler averted) the mole in Le Carré’s
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
, for example, there is repeated (to the point of cliché) emphasis on how withdrawal of the parental presence at an early age, the very nature of an old-fashioned classical English education given to a certain kind of person equipped with charm, intelligence, duplicity, guile (I was always called Sly-Fry, from my earliest memories of my very first schools) who had an almost pathological need to prove himself, to
belong
, could provide all the ingredients of a five-star, twenty-four-carat traitor and spy. I was and am neither of course, but had I been at Cambridge in the ‘low dishonest decade’ of the 1930s, instead of at the beginning of Thatcherism – between the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and the Falklands War essentially – then perhaps I would have been drawn into the Ring of Five and made it a Ring of Six. I doubt it: I’m not sure that the SIS, or MI6 as it’s usually called these days, the most exclusive club there ever was in Great Britain, would have taken a Jew. Victor Rothschild came the closest, being a Cambridge Apostle like Burgess and Blunt, but even he, glamorous first-class cricketer, decorated war hero and Bugatti-riding adventurer that he was, was MI5, not 6. Some people still believe that Rothschild was the fifth man who closed the circle. We will probably never know. But there was a world of difference between the two services: 6 was pukka, 5 much less so. I am sure that is not so today, but what
is
true today is that I possess so many of the similar qualities, right down to a love of cricket, claret and clubland.

An upbringing that might under different circumstances have been used for a complex secret betrayal of my tribe became instead a simple public mockery of it in
Latin!
, my first piece of proper writing, followed by Cambridge Footlights sketches and, in the outside world,
Blackadder
,
Fry and Laurie
and so on. Like the satire of the 1930s Berlin cabarets that, as Peter Cook observed, ‘did so very much to prevent the rise of Adolph Hitler’, the satire in
A Bit of Fry and Laurie
such as it was – privatization, obsession with the free market and so forth – had the force and effectiveness of a kitten armed with a rubber bayonet, but we never expected anything else. We probably didn’t imagine, however, that Old Etonians would still be ruling the country a quarter of a century later. Or indeed that they would be ruling the American TV and movie box office in the form of Damian Lewis, Dominic West, Tom Hiddleston, Eddie Redmayne and – ahem – m’colleague Hugh himself.

Male writers in Britain between the wars, as Martin Green brilliantly observed in
Children of the Sun
, could be divided into two classes: those that went to Eton and wished they hadn’t, like George Orwell, and those that hadn’t and wished they had, like Evelyn Waugh. I certainly cannot convincingly deny that I fall into the second category. The great advantage of an Oxbridge education is not that some mafia pushes you up the ladder as soon as you leave, nor is it in the education and living standards that you enjoy at either university: the real advantage is that you never have to deal with the fact that you didn’t go there. Many genuinely never wanted to, many brush it all off with a ‘Yeah, I could have gone, but the course at Warwick was so much better’, others simmer in rage at the number of us in comedy, television, the law and all the other establishment trades. As would I, had I not got in. So it is with Eton. It would have been nice to have gone there, but on the other hand I would probably have been expelled even earlier, and who knows what criminal abominations I would have committed with an OE tie and that spy-like deceitful manner?

Where were we? Travelling with my parents in a silent journey from Pucklechurch Prison back home to Norfolk.

The twelve months between 1976 and 1977 followed. My first ever year of self-control. Possibly my first and
only
year of self-control. Every day I worked on the one-year course of A levels that I had managed to persuade Norwich City College to allow me to sit for. Aside from the syllabus, I read every Shakespeare play, writing synopses and notes on each character and scene. I devoured Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, Dryden, Pope and all the literary giants that I supposed I would have to be expert in before Cambridge would even look at me. I read
Ulysses
for the first time, with the help of a reading companion written by Anthony Burgess. I worked part-time in a department store in Norwich. I didn’t steal or transgress. I was, it must be said, quite extraordinarily focused, sober, clean and concentrated.

Fortune favoured me, and I won a scholarship to Queens’ College to read English Literature. If you have read
The Fry Chronicles
, you shouldn’t be here, you should still be descaling the rabbit or tread-milling in the gym to the varied stylings of Jack and Meg White. You already know all of this, so I shall steam through for the others, and you’ll find out where to pick up from where I last left off.

I performed in lots of plays when I got to Cambridge. I fell in love with and shared rooms with a brilliant classicist and chess player (and more importantly wonderful person) called Kim, as in Philby. I produced articles for university magazines. I wrote the aforementioned play
Latin! or Tobacco and Boys
, which was performed at Cambridge and then taken to the Edinburgh Festival. This led to my meeting a tall fellow with a red flush to each cheek and a rather endearing way of saying ‘Hullo!’ He was James Hugh Calum Laurie, a name which can be convincingly expressed sixteen ways.

‘Hi, I’m Calum Laurie Hugh James.’

‘Laurie James Hugh Calum, at your service.’

‘James Laurie Calum Hugh, how may I help?’

Et cetera. So many permutations, but he chose to call himself Hugh Laurie, which is how the little world of Cambridge then knew him and how the wider world of the … er … wider world now knows him.

Together with friends Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer and Penny Dwyer, we put on a show in our last year. It won a new award called the Perrier Prize, which resulted in us going to perform our show in London, then Australia, before coming back to record it for the BBC.

This is the linear bit and dull even if you haven’t read it before. Kim and I shared a flat in Chelsea, while Hugh, Emma, Paul and I started to do a show for Granada Television in Manchester. We were, as it were, boy-banded together with Ben Elton, Siobhan Redmond and Robbie Coltrane to create a new sketch comedy troupe. The resultant show,
Alfresco
, was not much of a success, but we liked each other’s company, and new opportunities arose.

Kim and I drifted apart, but are still the warmest and best of friends. My fifteen years of so-called ‘celibacy’ began. Work started to come in the form of newspaper and magazine articles, a West End play, a stage run of Alan Bennett’s
Forty Years On
, and then
Blackadder II
.

Noel Gay’s musical comedy
Me and My Girl
came next. I worked on the ‘book’, in other words the story, dialogue and some of the lyrics. ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’ was a charming number from Noel Gay’s back catalogue, and the director Mike Ockrent and I managed to make it a suitable opener for the second half of the show. The verse

He’s been roasting niggers

Out in Timbuktu

Now he’s coming back

To do the same to you

needed a little tweak, one could not but feel.
^*
With pulsating lyrical talent, Gilbertian wit and astounding geographical, agrarian and botanical understanding the verse now became, under my magical weaving fingers,

He’s been roasting peanuts

Out in Timbuktu

Now he’s coming back

To do the same to you

Nobody seemed to notice. No letters from outraged Malians denying that they had ever roasted a single peanut, not even in fun. No death threats from the guild of professional peanut roasters of Atlanta, Georgia. But the show was a success in the West End and then on Broadway. It made me money. I went mad buying classic cars, a country house, all kinds of things.

I filled every day with writing: book reviews for the now deceased
Listener
magazine, general articles for magazines like
Arena
and radio pieces for any number of programmes hosted by Ned Sherrin.

I became friends with Douglas Adams and began a lifelong love affair with all things to do with computing and the digital world.

In 1986, sharing a house with Hugh and others, just having finished recording the
Blackadder II
series, I was offered by an actor, who for obvious reasons shall remain nameless, a line of the illegal stimulant cocaine.

Right, all those who feel they absorbed
Moab is My Washpot
and
The Fry Chronicles
can come back in now. You will know from the latter that I seemed to have been born with a propensity to become addicted to things beginning with
c
. Sugar (C
₁₂
H
₂₂
O
₁₁
) – in the form of Candy, Confectionery and Chocolates – Cigarettes, Credit Cards (other people’s to begin with), Comedy, Cambridge, Classic Cars, Clubs and so on.

But Cocaine. Oh dear. This has to be played delicately. If I go on about it too much it will sound like repellent braggadocio: ‘Wow, what a wild crazy-head this guy Steve-o is. Taking blow like a crazy rock star. Cool.’

If I drown myself in pity it’s no better: ‘I was in the grip of a disease, and the name of that disease was addiction.’ There’s something po-faced, self-pitying and sanctimonious about that, true interpretation as many would insist that it is.

We have heard it all before. In short-form magazine articles, in long tearful confessionals. It is yesterday’s news. Kind of. But it was fifteen years of my life, so it would be wrong of me at least not to – as it were – give you a sniff of the coke years.

Moral or Medical?

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