Stephen Fry

This international bestseller is an “enormously entertaining” boyhood memoir by the British actor and comedian (The New York Times).
 
Since his PBS television debut in Blackadder, multitalented writer, actor, and comedian Stephen Fry has earned many fans with his idiosyncratic wit. In this memoir, a number-one bestseller in Britain, he shares the story of his youthful years in his typical frank, funny...

But when he arrived at Cambridge he was a convicted thief, an addict, and a failed suicide, convinced that he would be expelled. Instead, university life offered him love and the chance to entertain. He befriended bright young things like Hugh Laurie, now the star of House, and Emma Thompson. This is the hilarious and utterly compelling story of how the Stephen the world knows (or thinks it knows) took his first steps in the worlds of theater, radio,...

"I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn." So begins the story of Ted Wallace, unaffectionately known as the Hippopotamus. Failed poet, failed theater critic, failed father and husband, Ted is a shameless womanizer, drinks too much, and is at odds in his cranky but maddeningly logical way with most of modern life. Fired from his job at the newspaper, Ted seeks a few months' repose and free liquor at Swafford Hall, the country mansion of his...

Is English an innately playful language? Are word games good for you? Do we divide into number and word players? And could Scrabble have been invented in any other language?

In this special programme, Stephen examines many word games, and we'll hear some familiar voices playing unfamiliar games—Sheila Dillon from The Food Programme plays Font or Cheese against miscellanist Ben Schott. Phill Juptitus talks about his

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"By his early thirties, Stephen Fry--writer, comedian, star of stage and screen--had, as they say, "made it." Much loved on British television, author of a critically acclaimed and bestselling first novel, with a glamorous and glittering cast of friends, he had more work than was perhaps good for him. As the '80s drew to a close, he began to burn the candle at both ends. Writing and recording by day, and haunting a neverending series of celebrity...

Stephen Fry goes in search of the story behind the first media entrepreneur Johann Gutenberg, the man who invented the printing press, to find out why he did it and how.

Ten years after they were members of a music and comedy troupe at Cambridge University, a diverse group of friends in their early 30s gather at the expansive estate of Peter Morton. Various jealousies and fears are revealed between joyous feasts.

World-famous Dutch graphic artist M.C Escher (1898-1972) comes to life through history, psychology, and psychedelia, diary musings, excerpts from lectures, and correspondence. Escher's woodcuts, lithographs, and other printing techniques appear in both original and playfully altered form, and two of his sons, George (92) and Jan (80), reminisce about their parents while musician Graham Nash (Crosby, Stills & Nash) talks about Escher's rediscovery...