LUV & HAT

LUV - Imagine being Stephen Fry. Imagine being him. Imagine sitting up there, plumped on your celestial Ottoman, all velvet and omniscience and gently baroque benevolence, distractedly stroking Alan Davies’ bumhole as you regard humanity and flibble sorrowfully into your flopsywhoops.

And well might you flibble because, I mean, just look at humanity.

We’re awful. We’re animals. We’re wilfully animals. We’re all dirt under our fingernails and not knowing the capital of the Cayman Islands and those terrible clear plastic bra straps and ugly MDF furniture and lumbar tattoos and the wrong sort of teabag and Facebook and Jeremy Kyle and oafishness.

If you were Stephen Fry, how would you stand it? If you were Stephen Fry, what would you do?

Well, you’d probably try to improve things.

You’d probably start a quiz show about interestingness, where you’d chortlingly chide John Sessions and Rory McGrath for not knowing the exact circumference of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, then footle in disappointment when the whole thing slid into pantomime, with Alan Davies doing armpit-farts while shouting “IS IT A DUCK?”

You’d probably lend your mellifluous tones to J K Rowling and read us the Harry Potter books at bedtime - to facilitate inventive dreams - then be thwarted by the Appleton sisters referencing your efforts in the most offensively banal song the world has ever heard.

You’d probably file accessibly written weekly reports about gadgets for a national newspaper, then weep bitterly as mobile technology was hijacked not for the advancement of the species, but so that some little shits in bandanas could do over branches of JD Sports up and down the country.

What a catch-22. God, being Stephen Fry must be horrible. To love humanity’s tenacity and potential, but to be constantly let down by our determination to be awful.

In fact, being Stephen Fry must be a little like being Doctor Who.

Except instead of a Tardis he has a black cab, and instead of regenerating into a completely new person every few years he just fluctuates his body mass and sometimes wears a fez, and instead of being from Galifrey he went to Cambridge, and instead of being a Timelord he’s just sort of posh, and instead of having a sonic screwdriver he’s got HIS PENIS LOL LOL LOL. Oh dear. Sorry, Stephen Fry.

IS IT A DUCK?
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - I’ve got the bum deal here. You can’t hate Stephen Fry. It’s impossible. He’s like a cuddly old uncle, albeit a cuddly old uncle who sporadically goes “Oh fuck THIS, I HATE you, I’m LEAVING and I’m NEVER COMING BACK” when people don’t demonstrate a satisfactory level of admiration for his witty anecdotes about the etymology of the word castigate.

So, no, I don’t hate Stephen Fry. I do pity him, though.

Because he’s supposed to be the successful one, isn’t he? He’s supposed to be the clever one. He’s the one who was supposed to have taken America by storm, charming the wealthy elite at a succession of Manhattan cocktail parties with his dazzling wordplay and witty asides. But oh no. Hugh Laurie had to fuck that all up for him, didn’t he? Hugh Laurie had to end up getting paid several billion dollars to dress up like a doctor and reenact the precise same storyline on House every week for a million years, the dick.

Meanwhile, what’s Stephen Fry got, eh? I’ll tell you what he’s got - he’s got a recurring role as the voice of a jaunty telephone in a series of rubbish insurance adverts. True, there’s also QI, but if he’s anything like me he probably spends the duration of most episodes gritting his teeth and thinking “What the hell am I wearing? I look like a Turkish used car salesman who’s been dressed by his mum” and “Shut UP Rory McGrath, you tedious beardy cunt” as hard as he can.

And poor old Stephen Fry isn’t even that clever, either. I mean, obviously he’s cleverer than anyone here - that’s clear by the way he routinely uses 12 long words when three short ones would do - but he’s not exactly Einstein, is he? Put Stephen Fry in a room with the Enigma decoders and within an hour he’ll have whimpled and flarbulated them all into a stupefied coma. He just tries a bit too hard. He called his autobiography Moab Is My Washpot, for crying out loud. God knows why. I like to think that it’s because its an anagram of Bosomy Pasta Whim, which is a much better description of him.

Worst of all, though - the thing that I most pity about Stephen Fry - is that he might end up reading this. And everyone knows what’ll happen then - he’ll start storming about his house, shouting “No, it’s FINE. I’m not UPSET. It’s FINE. Everything’s FINE. God, why does ALL OF THIS HAS TO HAPPEN TO ME?” while jamming handfuls of clothes into a suitcase and booking a one-way flight to Albania. And if that happens, I’m truly sorry.

A bit.
- Stuart Heritage