I'm a big fan of Stephen Fry. I like his books, comedy, films, TV programmes. He was a great Jeeves and Hippopotomus is a good read (even, or perhaps especially, the part where the fourteen-year-old hero shags a horse). Hell, my daring pseudonymous surname is even taken from a character he played (who indulges in entertaining, if not excessively erotic, on-screen sex with a washer woman though not, to be fair, for the entire film and whilst a horse plays a significant role, it maintains its on-screen virginity).
So I did want to like his latest outing, Stephen Fry in America, in which he tours all fifty States. And it wasn't bad. Fry is his affable, charming self as he meets lobster fisherman, noisome deer hunters, painfully unfunny DC satirists and several others. It would have been fascinating if he had spent thirty minutes or an hour with any one of them, finding out more about their worlds and lives. Unfortunately, the format - covering the whole of the USA in one series - meant about five minutes per stop and it wasn't nearly enough. Stephen has a quick go at making ice cream, or a brief chat with a Harvard professor and then we're off a few hundred miles down the road.
It was travel supplement TV: a few vignettes, a brief glimpse and nothing more. Shame.
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Cameron turns both ways
15 minutes ago
2 comments:
I felt exactly the same way - surely he might have spent more than 5 minutes in New Jersey? The historic states of New England were dispensed with in 15 minutes before Mr. Fry trundled his taxicab off to D.C. to trade iPhone hacking warez with Jimmy Wales.
When I saw that Stephen was going to visit all 50 states I imagined that he was going to serve up an almost Michael-Palinesque travelogue of epic proportions in which he served up America's soul for us lazy brits... instead it's like a compressed issue of one of those 80's travel shows.
I suppose we should blame the TV execs as much as Stephen - who thought it was possible to cover the USA in 12 hours. Madness.
I imagine the BBC would have found it too terrifying to commit to a 25-part series to do it justice (still more a full 50 hours).
I was most disappointed, I think, that we didn’t get any real idea of his ice cream flavour, and that the QI alarms didn’t go off with an ‘Awwooga, awwooga’ on his visit to Salem. Surely if Stephen had been asking the questions in his studio rather than going on vacation, he’d have pointed out that the community so mutilated by the Salem Witch Trials was the old Salem Village, now called Danvers and marked only by a very sober and respectful memorial, while it’s only the larger neighbouring town that retains the name of Salem and makes lots of Halloween money from cash-in tat, having not been the place that suffered by it.
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