Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Since April the committee has had the power to prevent cinema licensees from showing a film. “The Exorcist” was the first film they had viewed and they did so after receiving three complaints about it.

Three co-opted members of the committee also saw the film – Canon Denis Rutt, vicar of St Margaret’s Church, Dr M. D. O’Brien, a Consultant Psychiatrist at Lynn Hospital, and Stephen Fry, representing the Student’s Union.

Canon Rutt said he saw no reason why the film should be banned on ethical grounds.

Dr O’Brien said: “It is a film which would worry susceptible people – but you cannot protect the susceptible. A proportion of hysterical girls will faint and be carried out but it will not kill them. Presumably they want the thrill of being frightened and I would not regard this as serious.

Mr Fry said: “Far from being disturbing, it made me more appreciative of goodness, I am not in favour of even considering banning it.”

But committee chairman Mr H. K. Rose who did not vote, disagreed with their views. “I would have thought it was very offensive to the good taste of many people, I was horrified, but I am obviously in the minority.

CRITERIA

“If we approve of a film like this I see no point in having any censorship at all. If people are titillated it makes them go and see something to see if we are right or wrong,” Mr Rose said.

Canon Rutt commented: “This whole operation is giving the film the wrong sort of publicity.”

The committee’s decision is based on the question of whether the film is offensive, is against good taste and decency and whether it could lead to crime or disorder.

With its X certificate the film can only be seen by adults."

Still a self-righteous little prig. I must have been jeeyust seventeen when I was co-opted on to this committee. Why they felt a seventeen-year-old would make a good judge of a film which was legally available only to those aged eighteen and upwards, I have no idea. My role on the Students’ Union was Officer in charge of Films. This was in the days before video cassettes and it was my job to order reels of film from Rank and show them in the assembly hall of the college. I suppose that’s why I was chosen to represent the students for the Great Exorcist Debate. I remember the screening well. I had already managed to see the film twice before in London, so it hardly came as a surprise. The expression on Councillor H. K. Rose’s face when the possessed child played by Linda Blair growled to the priest in a voice like a cappuccino machine running dry, ‘Your mother sucks cocks in hell, Karras,’ was wonderful to behold. His hand was still shaking as he dunked ginger nuts into his coffee in the committee room for the discussion afterwards, poor old buster. What he would have made of Crash or Reservoir Dogs one can only guess at…

At this time at King’s Lynn I began to dress, in accordance with the latest vogue, in suits with very baggy trousers, their cut inspired by the Robert Redford version of The Great Gatsby which had just been released. I wore stiff detachable collars and silk ties, well-polished shoes and, occasionally, a hat of some description. I must have looked like a cross between James Caan in The Godfather and a poovey Chelsea sipper of crème de menthe and snapper up of unconsidered rent.

Drama was taken care of at Norcat by a talented enthusiast called Robert Pols. He cast me as Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Creon m a double bill of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. Somewhere inside of me, I was still certain that I was going to be an actor. My mother used to explain to me that really I wanted to be a barrister, which, as she pointed out, is much the same thing and I had played along with this idea. In my heart of hearts however, and in hers too I suspect, it was acting that mattered. My writing I considered infinitely more important, but so private as to be impossible to show or publish. I thought that acting was simple showing off and that writing was a private basin in which one could wash one’s sins away.

It is strange that although I spent two whole academic years at Norcat my memories of it are so much more vague than my memories of Uppingham at which I spent only a month or so longer.

By that second year at King’s Lynn I reached a terrible low. I was seventeen now, no longer anything like the youngest in my class, no longer the fast stream clever boy, no longer the complex but amusing rogue, no longer the sly yet fascinating villain, no longer in some people’s eyes excusable through adolescence. Seventeen is as good as grown up.

Everything and everyone I cared about was growing away from me. Jo Wood was bound for Cambridge, Matthew would be trying for there the following year. Richard Fawcett was going up to St Andrews, my brother was going to an officer's training course in the Army. I was a failure and I knew it.

Some argument with my father in the holidays between the fifth and sixth and final terms at Norcat resulted in an attempt at suicide. I cannot recall the reason for the argument, but I determined absolutely that it was the end of everything. I had nothing to get up for in the morning, nothing at all. Besides, what pleasure, what exquisite, shivering delight, to picture my father’s devastation when my body was discovered and he and everyone would know that it was his fault.

I took a huge selection of pills, principally Paracetamol but also Intal. Intal was an encapsulated powder that was supposed to be ‘spinhaled’ into the lungs to help prevent asthma. I reckoned the devastating admixture of those two, with a little aspirin and codeine thrown in, would do the job. I can’t remember if I wrote a note or not, knowing me I must have done, a note filled with hatred and blame and self-righteous misery.

If ever I have been a total prick, a loveless, unlovable prick in my life, this was the time. I was horrid to look upon, to listen to, to know. I didn’t wash, I didn’t take interest in others, I was argumentative with the two people who were most unconditionally prepared to show me their love – my mother and my sister, crushing their every enthusiasm with cynicism, arrogance and pride; I was rude and insulting to my brother, to everyone around me. I was the cunt of the world, filled with self-loathing and world-loathing.

I missed Matthew, I wanted him and I knew he had gone. He had literally gone, that was the Pelion on Ossa, madness on madness that tipped me over the edge. My Matthew had disappeared, Matteo was no more.

I saw a photograph of him in a school magazine in Roger’s bedroom. Matthew’s face in a cricket photograph, a hockey photograph and a photograph taken from the school play. Three pieces of evidence to prove irrefutably that he had gone. The features had coarsened, he had grown in height and build and stockiness. He was now descending from the peak which, while I had known him he had always still miraculously been making towards. Maybe that late afternoon in the field outside the Middle, in his cricket whites, rolling and panting and fiercely jerking with me. Maybe that had been the summit. For us both.

Now the only Matthew who really existed, existed in my mind. Which left me nothing, nothing but a burst wound of bitterness, disappointment and hatred and a deep, deep sickness with myself and the world.

Any argument on any subject with my father, therefore, could have caused me to make this geste fou. Anything from a refusal on my part to pump up the water when it was my turn, to a solemn talk about ‘attitude’.

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.