Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘Sir, Fry’s mucking about!’

The boiling flood that rose to my face then is rising again now. It is of that heat and fever that can only be caused by injustice – rank, wicked, obscene, unpardonable injustice.

Hemuss stopped playing, a hundred voices trailed off into silence, a hundred faces turned to look at me.

‘On your own then, Fry,’ said Hemuss, ‘and two and three and…’

And…

… silence.

My mouth rounded in the shape of the words, a small husky breath may or may not have hissed from my throat, but the school heard nothing and saw nothing, save a crimson straining face and eyes screwed shut in shame.

‘This isn’t a game, Fry! And two, three and…’

This time I tried. I really tried. Words did emerge.

I had got no further than’… with milk and honey blest’ before, within seconds of each other, Hemuss stopped playing, Kirk hissed, ‘God you’re completely flat!’ and the whole hall exploded with hooting, braying laughter.

Since that time I have been to weddings and to the funerals of deeply loved friends and been entirely unable to do anything but mime the words of the hymns I have so desperately wanted to sing. I have felt guilty for paying nothing but literal lip service to those for whom I care. Since I have a certain facility with words and with performance I am often asked to give speeches on such occasions and this I can manage. But I don’t want that. All I have ever wanted is to be part of the chorus, to be able to join in.

Is that true?

I’ve just written it, but is it true?

An odd thing is this. I had no memory at all of the Cong Prac hooting braying incident until I went to see a hypnotist nearly twenty years later.

Oh, hello…, a hypnotist now, is it?

Actually, this was a completely practical visit to a hypnotist.

Hugh Laurie and I used to write and perform material of a more or less comedic nature in a 1980s Channel 4 comedy and music show called Saturday Live. It was the programme that notably launched Ben Elton and Harry Enfield into public fame.

‘One week Hugh and I had some sketch or other which involved an ending in which I needed to sing. Not a complicated song, some sort of R amp;B verse, nothing more. Harry Enfield was to conduct a band wearing amusing headphones and a pleasing Ronnie Hazlehurst grin and Hugh, I suppose, was to play the guitar or piano. I can’t remember why I had to sing and why Hugh couldn’t have looked after the vocal department as he usually did. Perhaps he had a mouth organ to deal with too. Hugh can sing splendidly, and play any musical instrument you throw at him, the son of a son of a son of a son of a son of a bitch.

I said to Hugh, as I say to everyone who will listen, ‘But this is mad! You know I can’t sing…’

Hugh, either out of exasperation or a cunningly laid plan to force me to wrestle my musical demons to the ground, said that I would just plain have to and that was that. I suppose this would have been a Wednesday: the programme, as the title suggested, was transmitted live on Saturday evenings.

By Thursday morning I was all but a puddle on the floor.

How could I possibly sing live on television?

The problem was, even if I spoke the lines, I wouldn’t be able to do so in rhythm. The musical intro would begin and I would be unable to come in on the right beat of the right bar. The very oddity of my performance would detract from the point of the sketch. The whole thing would become a number about a person making an appalling noise for no apparent reason.

Many people get stage fright: the moment they have to speak or act in public their voices tighten, their legs wobble and the saliva turns to alum powder in their mouths. That doesn’t happen to me with speech, only with music. Alone or in the shower, I can soap myself in strict tempo if there is music playing on my Sony Bathmaster. But if I think so much as a house-fly is eavesdropping, everything goes hot, bothered and bastardly: I lose the ability even to count the number of beats to a bar.

It occurred to me, therefore, the Thursday prior to this programme, that a hypnotist might perhaps be able somehow to cure me of this self-consciousness and allow me to kid myself, when the moment came round on Saturday in front of cameras and studio audience, that I was alone and unwitnessed.

The more I thought about it, the more logical it seemed. A hypnotist couldn’t turn me into Mozart or Muddy Waters, but he might be able to remove the psychological obstacles that froze me whenever music and I met in public.

I let my fingers do the initial walking and then followed them all the way to Maddox Street, W1 where a hypnotherapist calling himself Michael Joseph had a little surgery. He came complete with a soothing manner and a most reassuring Hungarian voice. The matey, disc-jockey tones of a Paul McKenna would have sent me scuttling, but a rich middle-European accent seemed just what was required. Aside from anything else, it reminded me of my grandfather.

I explained the nature of my problem.

‘I see,’ said Mr Joseph, folding his hands together, like Sherlock Holmes at the commencement of a consultancy. ‘And what is dee… how you say?… dee cue that comes before you must start singing for diss programme?’

I had to explain that the words that immediately preceded my singing were in fact ‘Hit it, bitch…’

‘So. Your friend, he is saying “Hit it, bitch"… and next music is starting and you must be singing? Yes?’

‘Yes.’

The business of being put in a trance seemed childishly simple and disappointingly banal. No pocket watches were swung before me, no mood music or whale song played in the background, no mesmeric eyes bored into my soul. I was simply told to put my hands on my knees and to feel the palms melt down into the flesh of the knees. After a short time it became impossible to feel what was hand and what was knee, while miles away in the distance rich, sonorous Hungarian tones told me how pleasantly relaxed I was beginning to feel and how leaden and heavy my eyelids had become. It was a little like being lowered down a well, with the hypnotist’s voice as the rope that kept me from any feeling of abandonment or panic.

Once I was in what I might as well call a trance, I was asked for all memories and thoughts connected to singing. It was at this point that every detail of Kirk and the humiliation that attended my attempt at a solo ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ flooded unbidden into my mind.

So that was it! That was what had been holding me back all these years. A memory of childish public humiliation that had convinced me that I never could and never would sing in public.

The hypnotist’s voice, at once both far away and incredibly close, made the suggestion that when I heard the words ‘Hit it, bitch…’ I would feel totally relaxed and confident, as if alone in the bath, unjudged, unselfconscious and unembarrassed. I would sing the verse I had to sing on Saturday lustily, forcefully, amusingly and with all the relish, gusto and self-pleasure of a group of Welshmen in the back seat of a rugby coach. Not his simile, but that is what he meant.

I assimilated this suggestion and made a strange, echoey interior note to myself that it was all quite true and that it was absurd that Saturday’s gig had ever held any terrors for me, while my voice murmured assent.

After counting me backwards into consciousness and telling me how refreshed and splendid I would feel for the rest of the day, the hypnotist tried to sell me the inevitable Smoking, Dieting and Insomnia tapes that lined his bookshelves and sent me on my way, my wallet lighter by fifty or so pounds and my heart by a million kilos.