Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Over the next year at Uppingham I bought their other albums, Gorilla, A Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse, Keynsham and finally Let’s Make Up and Be Friendly, their last, which contained Stanshall’s short story, ‘Rawlinson End’ which I can still recite by heart and which he went on to develop into that outré film masterpiece, Sir Henry At Rawlinson End starring Trevor Howard as Sir Henry and J. G. Devlin as his butler, Old Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer. When I first heard the joke, ‘Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer,’ I laughed so much I honestly thought I might die of suffocation.

Oh, very well, it isn’t Alexander Pope or Oscar Wilde, but for me it was as delicious as anything could be delicious. With Stanshall, it was as if a new world had exploded in my head, a world where delight in language for the sake of its own textures, beauties and sounds, and where the absurd, the shocking and the deeply English jostled about in mad jamboree.

It was Stanshall’s voice, I think, that delighted me more than anything. It had two registers, one light and dotty, with the timbre almost of a 19205 crooner, and capable of very high pitch indeed, as when he sang songs like the Broadway standard ‘By A Waterfall’; the other was a Dundee cake of a voice, astoundingly deep, rich and fruity, capable of Elvis impersonations (the song ‘Death Cab for Cutie’ for example) as well as great gutsy trombone blasts of larynx-lazy British sottery, to use a Stanshally sort of phase.

Most people will know his voice from the instruments he vocally introduces on Mike Oldfield’s otherwise entirely instrumental album Tubular Bells, which sold in its millions and millions in the early 19705 and founded the fortune of Richard Branson.

The Bonzos were my bridge between rock music and comedy, but comedy was more important to me by far than rock music. I did eventually buy an Incredible String Band album called, it grieves me to relate, Liquid Acrobat As Regards The Air as well as Meddle, Obscured By Clouds and other early Pink Floyd, but my heart wasn’t really in them. It was comedy for me. Not just the modern comedy of the Bonzos and Monty Python, nor the slightly older comedy of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, much as I adored those geniuses. I also collected records with titles like The Golden Days of Radio Comedy and Legends of the Halls and learned by heart the routines of comics like Max Miller, Sandy Powell, Sid Field, Billy ‘Almost a Gentleman’ Bennett, Mabel Constandouros, Gert and Daisy, Tommy Handley, Jack Warner and most especially, Robb Wilton.

Perhaps we’re getting back to that ‘can’t sing, can’t dance: won’t sing, won’t dance’ subject. If I learned all the comedy, I could repeat it, perform it, which was as close as I could come to singing or dancing. I’m not a bad mimic, no Rory Bremner or Mike Yarwood, but not bad, and I could repeat back the comedy I had learned, word for word, intonation for intonation, pause for pause. Then I might be able to try out some of my own.

I was not alone in this. Richard Fawcett, a boy of my term, shared this love of comedy. He was a fine mimic too, and an astoundingly brave and brilliant actor. He and I would listen to comedy records together, pointing out to each other why this was funny, what made that even funnier, trying hard to get to the bottom of it all, penetrating our passion, wanting to hug it all to us in heaping armfuls, as teenagers will.

Fawcett had a collection which included routines by Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd, as well as an extraordinary song called ‘The Ballad of Bethnal Green’ by someone whose name I fear I have forgotten, (I think his first name was Paddy, I expect someone will write to me and let me know) and which included delightfully weird lyrics like:

And somewhere in this ballad came the splendid phrase,

Fawcett also shared with me a passion for words and we would trawl the dictionary together and simply howl and wriggle with delight at the existence of such splendours as ‘strobile’ and ‘magniloquent’, daring and double-daring each other to use them to masters in lessons without giggling. ‘Strobile’ was a tricky one to insert naturally into conversation, since it means a kind of fir-cone, but magniloquent I did manage.

I, being I, went always that little bit too far of course. There was one master who had berated me in a lesson for some tautology or other. He, as what human being wouldn’t when confronted with a lippy verbal show-off like me, delighted in seizing on opportunities to put me down. He was not, however, an English teacher, nor was he necessarily the brightest man in the world.

‘So, Fry. “A lemon yellow colour” is precipitated in your test tube is it? I think you will find, Fry, that we all know that lemons are yellow and that yellow is a colour. Try not to use thee words where one will do. Hm?’

I smarted under this, but got my revenge a week or so later.

‘Well, Fry? It’s a simple enough question. What is titration?’

‘Well, sir…, it’s a process whereby…’

‘Come on, come on. Either you know or you don’t.’

‘Sorry sir, I am anxious to avoid pleonasm, but I think…’

‘Anxious to avoid what?’

‘Pleonasm, sir.’

‘And what do you mean by that?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I meant that I had no wish to be sesquipedalian.’

‘What?’

‘Sesquipedalian, sir.’

‘What are you talking about?’

I allowed a note of confusion and bewilderment to enter my voice. ‘I didn’t want to be sesquipedalian, sir! You know, pleonastic.’

‘Look, if you’ve got something to say to me, say it. What is this pleonastic nonsense?’

‘It means sir, using more words in a sentence than are necessary. I was anxious to avoid being tautologous, repetitive or superfluous.’

‘Well why on earth didn’t you say so?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ll remember in future, sir.’ I stood up and turned round to face the whole form, my hand on my heart. ‘I solemnly promise in future to help sir out by using seven words where one will do. I solemnly promise to be as pleonastic, prolix and sesquipedalian as he could possibly wish.’

It is a mark of the man’s fundamental good nature that he didn’t whip out a knife there and then, slit my throat from ear to ear and trample on my body in hobnailed boots. The look he gave me showed that he came damned close to considering the idea.

Christ, I could be a cheeky, cocky little runt. I gave the character of Adrian in my novel The Liar some of the lines I liked to use to infuriate schoolmasters.

‘Late, Fry?’

‘Really, sir? So am I.’

‘Don’t try to be clever, boy.’

‘Very good, sir. How stupid would you like me to be? Very stupid or only slightly stupid?’

I regret that I cut such an odious, punchable figure sometimes, but I don’t ever regret those hours spent alone or with Richard Fawcett trawling the dictionary or playing over and over again comedy record after comedy record.

Whether we are the sum of influences or the sum of influences added to the sum of genes, I know that the way I express myself, the words I choose, my tone, my style, my language is a compound which would be utterly different, utterly, utterly different if I had never been exposed to any one of Vivian Stanshall,

P. G. Wodehouse or Conan Doyle. Later on the cadences, tropes, excellences and defects of other writers and their rhetorical tricks, Dickens, Wilde, Firbank, Waugh and Benson, may have entered in and joined the mix, but those primal three had much to do with the way I spoke and therefore, how I thought. Not how I felt but how I thought, if indeed I ever thought outside of language.