The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life”

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

To call Stephen Fry a national treasure would be underselling him. One of the hardest working names in British media, you name it and Stephen has done it; writer, actor, director and comedian. The size of his contribution to British culture in over four decades as a public figure is staggering. However, behind this mountain of work and out of the spotlight is a side of Stephen Fry that many people will be completely unaware of, from a childhood of crime and loneliness, to severe mental health struggles and attempts at suicide. In this honest and revealing conversation Stephen discusses the scars he carries within him and which affect him to this day. But despite this he is constantly reinventing himself and striving to find joy in the smaller things in life, all the while spreading happiness and wonder with his work. Stephen: Instagram - https://bit.ly/3un1E3d Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to amazon music who when they heard that we were expanding to the united states and i'd be recording a lot more over in the states they put a massive billboard in time square um for the show so thank you so much amazon music um thank you to our team and thank you to all of you

that listen to this show let's continue i was lost and adrift and really what I first wanted to do was to take my life. Stephen Fry! He's a comedian, an actor, and a national treasure. He's a director, he's a writer. I'll probably miss things out. He's a master of language. And tonight's my night. I was a deeply difficult child. My parents turned me into a psychiatrist when I was 14. I started doing weird things.

I was sent to prison. So the best I could do after a disastrous childhood, I decided, was now concentrate on getting into Cambridge. That changed everything. Ladies and gentlemen, Stephen Fry. I want to please people. And if I don't please them, I get upset. I've done it wrong.

Age 37, you star in a play. The play gets some pretty harsh reviews. I was lost and adrift. And really what I first wanted to do was to take my life. Stephen vanished on Monday, leaving a number of letters for friends. That started my journey into my mental health. When you were 55, it was your third suicide attempt. Fred Tome, that's right. Can you take me back to that moment? I'm so fascinated by people's foundations, their earliest years, their context, because

it seems so apparent that that ends up shaping who we are and who we become and our orientation in life. So as I read through your story in your earliest years, it was an unthinkable rollercoaster ride of twists and turns. But what do I need to know about Stephen Fry's earliest years to understand the man that sat in front of me? Well, to use the language of the time, I was a disruptive, deeply difficult, screwed-up child. That's kind of the language they used then. And I think, to give myself some, I won't say credit, I would probably

in later years have been diagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I was extremely difficult to keep still and I found it hard to focus. I was, I'll say, vain as it may sound, I think, intellectually advanced for my age. I was very quick with language and with speech and just seeing things and remembering things in particular. So I never had to revise. And so in that sense, I had a lot of spare time but on the other hand socially and where it matters to a child i i never fitted in or felt fitted in because i was bad at all the things that are valued when you're a child i couldn't catch a ball you know i sort of did the the sort of uncoordinated hand clapping method of trying to catch which is always mocked like just as you've done. The cry of unco would follow me, short for uncoordinated,

and worse, the kind of words we certainly don't use now to describe her. Shall we say a dyspraxic figure in terms of, you know, physicality. I was just, you know, I was growing too fast and too tall and very thin, hard to imagine now. And I wasn't musically very gifted, particularly. And I couldn't draw so all I had was my passion for language and I loved it and I played with it and I told stories and I tried to make myself less unpopular put it that way by by it was a boarding school I was sent away at the age of seven in Britain, which is not a huge country.

It's about as far as you can be from home there. My parents were in Norfolk on the east coast, and I was sent to Gloucestershire on the west to a prep school from the age of, as I say, seven, which to some people sounds a bit cruel and weird to send a seven-year-old boy 200 miles from home and just have them there. But you have to remember two things one

that was what happened as far as i was concerned my father had gone to a similar school my mother had boarded since she was four um but that was because she was a jewish refugee in in england and her father wanted to hide her away from the impending Nazi invasion. And so that was a particular reason. But my brother had gone at that age. And of course, by definition, everyone at the school was in the same boat. So you just thought that's what happened. I mean, if you take a child and put them in a cupboard between half past two and three in the afternoon, and shout at them through the keyhole every day they'll just think oh that's what happens you know and then you welcome them out and give them a big hug and say

that was your cupboard time you know what I mean anything you do to a child regularly is the normal world essentially until they see other children having a different experience. But so class-locked, I guess I was, without really noticing it, grew up in the countryside in a large house, not Downton Abbey, but, you know, we had gardeners and people coming in to clean and that sort of thing, servants, I suppose, staff, whatever word you want to use. And it was deep in the countryside, and the other boys that I knew, very few girls, but I did know girls, and even they went away to school.

So all the boys I knew were going away to school. And the parents you met say, when are you going off to prep school then, Stephen? I go, when I'm seven. And they go, there you go. And that was it because I didn't know any other children. I mean, that sounds monstrous, but that's just the way things were. You stuck to your own.

It wasn't outright snobbery or anything. It just was this was the world into which I was born. So you don't really question it particularly. And through most of my prep school time, age 7 to 13 is a prep school in Britain, I was very disruptive. I passed exams very easily. I tried as hard as I could to get out of any form of physical activity. I gave myself asthma attacks and the rest of it in order to be put off games because I just hated the particularly rugby and the muddy, cold, horrible things,

running and the collision of bodies and bones. It was just so vile. I wanted to sit and read a book by the side of the field. And humour, particularly then as I moved to 13 and went to the big school, you know, the public school as it's known, though of course they're not anything but public they're private um and that that was scary because that's 600 boys um rather than the prep school's 90 so it's a much less of a little nest and much more of a but i was 13 and so when you're 13 as you know too well, chemicals start to boil and bubble inside you

and things begin to happen in your mind and soul. And I was not prepared for the astonishing cataclysm, the catastrophe, the glorious catastrophe of love. It had never occurred to me that it would be what it was, which is silly because we grow up hearing nothing but love songs. What did the Beatles do? Go on about love me do and please please me and money can't buy you love and hold my hand. Everything's a love song. And suddenly, when you fall in love, all those lyrics make sense. And you realize there's nothing else in the world. And nothing else is even slightly as important.

And of course, I was in love with another boy. And I was aware that that was probably not the right thing. And it threw me out of everything, really. I just stopped being able even to pretend to be a normal, well-behaved schoolboy. I started doing weird things like climbing the roofs of all the buildings, the big chapels and churches and classrooms. So that was the first school from which I was expelled. I'm going to compress the story because it gets kind of, goes on and on and on. I was then expelled from another one and then kind of another one. And then I left and

went to London, left home, went to London. And the major problem there was I was in a pub. It was getting a bit chilly. I saw a coat, liked the look of it, half-inched it, stole it, and left the pub. And then discovered there was a wallet in it. Oh, my goodness. And two credit cards. So I went absolutely nuts around Britain with these credit cards, staying in grand hotels and buying things and travelling and so on.

In those days, they didn't even have magnetic strips on the back of credit cards for, you know, you just had to roll them on a piece of carbon to take an imprint. So it was very easy to use them fraudulently as long as you looked vaguely convincing. I was aware, because my father had once lost his Berkeley card, that it was the bank that paid, not the poor fellow whose cards I'd stolen. So I didn't feel guilty in that rather pathetic way we do when we try and square our dishonesty. Eventually I ended up in Swindon, of all unlikely towns. I think I was going to meet a school friend

and the idea was I was going to go to the Reading Festival. So I stayed in a hotel in Swindon and that's when I got back to my room, having been shopping, and there were a couple of men in the room, which I thought was rather weird. And being used to hotels by this time, I assumed they were like cleaning or maintenance people. I said, no, it's all right, don't need anything. And then said my name, only not my name,

the name of the fellow whose credit cards I had stolen. Let's say his name was Smith. So they said, Mr. Smith. And I went, yes. And they said mr smith and i went yes and they said wiltshire cid held up and suddenly i realized that the jig was up i was sent to prison on remand i was sent to a young person's institution on remand while they waited there were seven counties i think that had paperwork that i'd traveled in with these cards that had to be caught up with um you're 18 uh 17 just turning 18 that's right yeah by this time

so it was interesting because i was reading about your as i read through those first 18 years of your life i saw someone with clearly huge intellectual potential but also which doesn't seem to be very common with someone who exhibits those qualities, someone who was kind of like rebelling against society had this sort of, I think, in your own words, an addiction to stealing things. And is that and I couldn't quite figure out why. But what I'm understanding now is because it comes back to that feeling of being an outsider and kind of rebelling against the society that you weren't able to fit into. I think that's exactly right. And my parents did send me to a psychiatrist when I was 14, 15. He was, oddly enough, a member of parliament and a junior health minister, as well as a psychiatrist.

So a very grand Harley Street office, you know, with one of those enormous Mont Blanc fountain pens the size of a small submarine with which he slowly writes things down and uh he was slightly annoyed my parents weren't uh in the diplomatic service because apparently the way I behaved and the and the things I did were very typical of people from unsettled families um and you know with constantly moving and so on. But he prescribed me something. And later I found out when I was doing a documentary about mental health and I went all the way back to my school and spoke to my old schoolmaster, he had a copy of a letter from that psychiatrist in which the psychiatrist had written bipolar question mark, which I knew nothing about at the time that was

when i was 15 so there was clearly some mental they recognized there was a mental kink if you like a hundred years earlier would have been called a moral kink basically they're just saying he's a bad lot you know but uh we were on our way to being more understanding about children's behavior but yeah it's that whole mixture. My love of literature and stories and wanting to be involved in the world of ideas desperately to learn more and to understand more and to share ideas. A cheap wish, watching Parkinson every Saturday night to be famous, but not sure how that could happen.

It seemed absurd. And a deep, deep, like a hot lead leaking in the stomach whenever I contemplated my sexuality, this feeling. Because I read and read and read around it. You know, you go to a library in those days, of course, there was no World Wide Web, so you used what was known as the bibliography at the back of a book, which would recommend other books that were sources for that book.

And so you would build a web of connections. So I read a biography of Oscar Wilde, and that led me to biographies of other figures in his circle and other figures later and so on. And I saw there was this extraordinary tradition of literary, artistic people who were queer, as we'd say now. And of course, the ones I was reading about were born mostly into an elite part of the society that allowed them to go and live in North Africa or Italy or Greece or somewhere where it wasn't quite so dark and, you know, oppressive.

But the average person, you know, who was born queer had a miserable outcome. It was illegal and the police would treat you dreadfully and newspaper articles. And so I saw ahead of me a life of shame and secrecy and all abstinence and, you know, sorrow. And there was no possible way the world would be open and free for me. It would just be the best I could do after a disastrous childhood,

I decided in prison, was now concentrate on getting into Cambridge, become an academic, forget anything about the world because the world wasn't for me. And that would be enough. And it would also repay my parents for the extraordinary stress and distress I'd given them. And so when I was put on probation, finally at the end of the prison thing,

having served quite a bit in remand, I was just put on two years probation, went home, told my parents I would look after myself entirely, got jobs, got myself a moped went into norwich did a course and amazingly got a scholarship to cambridge austria yeah so that changed everything it is the most remarkable turn i think that i've ever I've ever seen in someone's life I think I've never seen someone who has a series of sort of criminal um engagements gets expelled from school multiple times I read at 17 there was a suicide attempt after you had an argument with your father which led you to be

in hospital as well that's right you end up in jail and then from jail you go to Cambridge it doesn't seem like the part. It doesn't seem normal. And while I was at Cambridge for the first year, I was on probation still. Jesus. I remember saying to one of my tutors or supervisors, I said, oh, look at the date. I said, I'm no longer on probation.

And he said, you weren't on probation, thinking I meant some sort of academic probation you know that i hadn't done good enough essays and that i was being given a warning that i better work harder he said you're not on probation i said well actually i i told him he said what the hell why didn't you tell us i said well why didn't you ask me they never they never asked so but it is extraordinary how everything turned because, you know, in the first kind of week I met Emma Thompson who was an undergrad reading the same subject, English,

and I then saw her in a play and I was just knocked out. I couldn't believe it. I had considered maybe I should do some acting at Cambridge. I started doing that and really enjoyed it, but did lots of other plays as well. And I wrote a play called Latin. It was a comedy. And that went to Edinburgh.

And it won a prize. And Emma came to see it and brought someone along to watch it that she thought might enjoy it. And I didn't remember this experience. But that person was Hugh Laurie, and he apparently came and watched the play and said hello briefly. Then at the end of my second year, I was approached by Emma, who said, I'm going to come around and introduce you to Hugh. There you have met him. And I said, no, I haven't. And she said, yes, you have. Anyway,

she took me over to his college and knocked on the door, and the door opened. He was sitting on the bed with a guitar in his lap, and he said, hello. And I said, hello. And his girlfriend was there making a cup of tea, and he said, I'm just writing a song. And he started to play a bit of the verse of the song.

And I said, oh, it's fabulous. And I sat down next to him. We started to work on the lyrics of it, and I added added some ideas and then we built it up into three or four verses and the choruses and the song was finished. And then he picked up a piece of paper and we started to write a sketch. And Emma and Katie were just staring at us and said, what's happened? We didn't, you know, we barely didn't ask each other our names. We just immediately just fitted.

I'm sliding my fingers into each other to give an example. I describe it as like falling in love, but a platonic comedy love. We just seemed to gel straight away. It was most extraordinary. So from that moment on, we started writing stuff together for our show. And I i thinking that either i was going to stay at cambridge to be an academic or maybe i was going to go to a drama school afterwards and join the royal shakespeare society and hold spears and bellow speeches

and now there was this strange possibility of using comedy as a as a way of going forward and maybe not staying at Cambridge at all, but trying to, you know, tread the boards in an amusing way. Why acting? I sat here with Maisie Williams, who's the young Game of Thrones actress. Indeed, I know who you mean, yeah. Yeah, and I find, you know,

and then I read this book called The Body Holds the Score, and it talks about six ways that we can help our mental health in things like yoga and all these kinds of things. But one of them is acting. And it talks about the role that, you know, this kind of separation from identity and how that can be liberating and wonderful. And when I heard you describe your first acting experiences,

you used words like blissful and amazing and as if you'd found your place in the world it's true i mean it is also it is the acknowledgement the the love or the sense of attention you get from an audience that you're uh it's not i mean of course it's a kind of vanity but it's not that you want to be praised exactly it's just you want to experience that moment and keep experiencing it it's not oh look you must write marvelous things about me or come up after the show and tell me i'm a genius that's all embarrassing what but but the moment you're on stage and you feel that people are looking at

you and not admiring you steven but that they are you have won them over they are following the story of the character you are and they are sucked up into it and you've made it. It's a wonderful feeling. But something even more primal than that, because I can remember when I was very young, five maybe, and my brother was seven, going to a pantomime in Norfolk. And the usual thing happened, Buttons comes out and goes,

hello, boys and girls, who'd like to come up on stage with me now and sing a song? My brother dived under the seat and made noises like a piece of dust so that no one would notice him. Like most children, he was damned if he was going to get up and make an exhibition of himself in public. But I stood on my tiptoes with my arm up so high that I nearly split the membranes of my underarm. You know,

going, me, me, me, me. And we both had the same parents. We both had the same DNA, more or less, not identical twins. But, I mean, really, we're pretty similar in terms of our birth and our parentage and environmental upbringing. And yet he would rather have cut his arm off than go on stage, and I would cut my arm off in order to go on stage. And that's just something that was built in.

And that was when I was too young to be self-conscious, to have, if you like, those kind of issues of self-worth and wanting to lose myself somewhere else. It was just a young show-offy, I want to be up there. That's, you know, you see a stage, you want to be on it. Much of what you say about the mental health aspect is true, but it is also the case, and I'm sure you've sort of heard stories about this,

that even when you're in a very long-running play, when you're in the wings for the first night, you know, you are trembling trembling you are white your heart rate is really up and and you step on stage and you do it but the weird thing is six months later if it's a long run you're standing in the wings you're talking to the stage management people like that you're going yeah oh yeah yeah i'll see you after this scene and you go on doctors have done this they've wired people up your heart rate is as high on that night as it would have been on the first night.

It's just you've got used to it. The comparison, and it's not a comparison of quality or value, is with an RAF pilot. Every day they're flying up like that, and they love it. They're just made for it. I mean, it's frightening, and they hate to see their companions killed and so on. But the awful thing is when it stops, suddenly the war's over.

Every single day you were in a spitfire, you were facing death, you were doing such amazing things and now there's nothing. And similarly, you're in a long play. Of course, it's nothing like being in the Air Force. It's of no importance to anybody except other people. But nonetheless, it does cause the similar kind of shakes in your body and the excitement. And then that's the end of the run. Stop. And it does explain, I think, a lot of the substance abuse you know the addictions and the

kind of unhappinesses and breakdowns and short-term marriages and and relationships that that are also common in the acting world i mean it may be true that there is something good for mental health but i don't think anybody would say that as a group, actors exhibit mental health of a happier and better kind than other groups of people. So, you know, it's a complicated story really, isn't it? It's so interesting that that sort of anti-climax, I think we've referred to that before as like gold medal depression. We tend to set ourselves goals of, if only I could live in that kind of a village in the south of England,

like quite near a station and nice little house, but not too expensive. Yeah, and then you get it. And so, yeah, you live in the suburbs. Hooray. Oh, maybe that car, that new one there, that Tesla or whatever. Then I'll be happy. You don't literally say then I'll be happy,

but there's a kind of sense of that's all I really want. And each of these goals is met and it isn't it. As the line of T.S. Eliot, that's not it. That's not it at all. And we go through life thinking that's not it. That's not it at all. There is something in all of us, a whole, a need for connection and love and truth and a sense of something beautiful beyond. And we can, if you're religious, you call it heaven.

And if you're a humanist, you call it a full and achieved life of friendship and elements of sacrifice and so on. But you know that there's a hope for it. But if you mislabel it and think that it's connected with money or cars or mortgages or jobs or status you're never happy because of your status because of things you've achieved you happiness comes from somewhere else and of course i've yet to meet anyone who can tell you where it comes from regularly, where it can be tapped like some resource. Ah, that's where you get your happiness.

We know there's fake happiness from a blow of a drug or something like that. And that couldn't be a more fake happiness. And there's the happiness of sitting around a table with friends that's beautiful fleeting moments with friends and family where it's all working and people aren't shouting at each other and you can just look at each other i i was at a memorial service and for a very dear friend the composer leslie brickus you know who wrote feeling good and uh pure imagination for willie wonka and Goldfinger and a lot of great songs. He was an amazing songwriter.

And I remembered I had this diary entry, which is just getting to know him, where there was a party, I think it was his birthday, and it was full of people, some of whom were super famous and extraordinary people. But I remember just catching sight of him and thinking he looked so like a Persian cat, just looking from one friend to another with this huge smile on his face,

just being happy to have his friends around him. It's a simple thing, and yet it's the best thing. And we chase things that give us less time to see our friends. We chase work targets and we chase journeys and holidays and things with individuals and so on. But I think we grow away from it. I think the older you get, the less you appreciate friendship, which is really sad. When you're in your 20s, you tend to do things as a group. You go on holidays as a group because you haven't yet got married and partnered off and paired off.

So I don't know if you agree with me, but I do think maybe that one of the jobs of getting older, well, I'm convinced it when the job is getting older, is not to become gnarled, you know, like a tree. When the tree is young, you can bend it. It's a green stick, as they call it. You can bend it and shape it and so on. But it gets old you know and it starts getting that bark and if you tried to bend it it would snap and and we become a bit like that coming back to the the

first point you said there about the goals we should be striving for i found that really interesting if not if not striving for a gold medal, or this thing or that thing, how does someone you know, listening to this now, what kind of goals do you think would protect them against that gold medal depression? What kind of orientation? It's an interesting point. And of course, I, you know, obviously understand that there are people who need to meet goals in order to pay debts. And you know, that there are certain amounts of money they have to have to pay for the heating and their mortgage and all the rest of it. And I'm obviously not suggesting that that's valueless because you need to keep a roof over your head and everything else.

But in terms of one's own personal sense of fulfillment and self-worth and achievement, I'm more and more convinced that it comes from how you treat people and how they treat you back and how you how you would try to be a better person i know it sounds really silly i'm not a religious figure at all um but but i'm very interested in religions um and i can understand that in some cases religions help cement a sense of community i where I don't like it is where it's exclusive, of course, where you have to buy into a certain set of ideas

and so-called truths in order to be part of that community. But I can understand how looking at a wider sense of life and it's really about when you're falling asleep at night and this may just be me can i fall asleep at night and feel i've been a reasonably okay person that day is this someone i have to apologize to next morning did i was i short and sharp with someone was i a bit mean was i lazy did i did i lie lie because I wanted my own way there? And it's not suggesting I'm a saint and I always manage it to, but I do have a very loud voice in my head. Philosophers call it a deontic or deontological voice, this sense of obligation that is a peculiarity, it seems,

of our species. As far as we know, the image I was using, because they look so cheerful, an Amazonian tree frog perched on a branch with its big grin isn't thinking, oh, God, I was a terrible Amazonian tree frog yesterday. I really let myself down. I was mean. I was unkind.

I must try to be a better Amazonian tree frog. What we admire about animals is they spend 100% of every day being themselves. And we as humans are fully aware that we don't. We are not fully ourselves. We lie, we hide behind, we pretend, we fail, and we judge ourselves. Now, that peculiarity of humanity is tried. People have tried to explain it in different ways. Obviously, the Genesis myth is that we ate a fruit. It gave us the knowledge of good and evil and the sense of shame of our physical selves,

all those things that separate us from animals. Because humans, since we were cognitivelyly conscious have been aware that we're animals because we can see that we defecate and eat and sleep and mate just like other animals and sometimes very quite close to the other animals if we depending what part of the world we live but we can also see that we have these other things that animals don't who gave them to us where did they come from? What do they mean? And how do we live up to them?

Are they a curse or a blessing? Do they make us mini gods? Or do they make us the playthings of gods, a cruel kind of, you know, little, as flies to wanton boys to the gods are we, they kill us for their sport, as Webster put it. And, you know, it. And those oldest questions still really obsess us, particularly now, of course, because in the age of AI, we are able to be gods ourselves. We are making sentient beings, and we will have to decide whether, like the Greek gods, we give them fire or deny them fire and maybe they'll kill us.

But will they have what we have, this sense of I try to be good? I mean, you try to be good, don't you? I try my best. I fail. Yeah, you fail. It's right. And we all like that, but we don't pay much attention to that and yet it's the most extraordinary thing about us. It's right. And we all like that, but we don't pay much attention to that, and yet it's the most extraordinary thing about us. It really is. And as I say, I'm not a model of moral probity and rectitude of any kind,

but I do have that loud voice, and I've always had it. And when my grandfather died died and this is very but and I first learned to play with myself I was terrified that he was watching me because he died and I thought I can't do this because my granddad is watching me and it's just awful and in a sense that in there you have it in one image That's what humanity has been cursed with since our birth. The big daddy in the sky is watching you and is making you self-conscious and you're holding back from your true nature because, oh, I can't do that in front of God, you know.

And somehow we have to square that and give ourselves permission to be who we were born to be and allow ourselves to live the full lives that we feel that we're on a journey to, but accept also that we will feel that we let ourselves down and that we're guilty of this and guilty of that. It's very tempting to be more like someone like Samuel Beckett and the absurdists and just say there is no meaning to any of this. It's absurd. Life is absurd and meaningless.

I know very well that in philosophy there are very, very few professional philosophers who believe in free will. But we all live as if free will exists and we all have to live as if we are accountable for our actions. Otherwise, society falls apart. But if deep down we know that really there is no free will, I mean, the most extreme examples are,

in a sense, the easiest to see it. A psychopath is not just a murderer, but it's a murderer who is cunning and who plans coldly their killing. They choose to kill. So you may say they're the most evil kind. But no one on this earth has ever chosen to be a psychopath. It's a condition. You don't, it's like saying, oh, he's an asthmatic. We must lock him up. Well, you don't choose to be asthmatic. You don't choose to be psychopathic.

The case of psychopathic, you're harming a lot of people and causing misery so clearly we've got to find a way of removing them from from the natural orbit of humanity but you know it's this i don't know i don't really know what i'm talking about but i'm having fun on that point on that point of the psychopath how how possible do you think it is to really change um who we are? It's a bit of a strange question, but at our very core, past the age of, you know, 18, you know, the imprints have been made

into our character, our identity, our sense of being, our search for validation, as you've described and I've seen through your story and mine. How possible is it to change who we are? And are we anybody? Or are we just a byproduct

of our sort of DNA and our experiences experiences that's such a good point i mean we are in that sense we are a story and the story is a it is um a mixture of of different elements um and a story is a myth it's it doesn't happen you know it's a bit i'm sure you've read the noel uval harari yeah that wonderful chapter where he just sort of proves that persia doesn't exist it's a myth you know it has a symbol it has a people working for it but there is no such thing as persia there's a persia car but that's not persia and and so on and similarly there is us um now if i cut my toe off i'm still steven i'm just even i'm missing Now, if I cut my toe off, I'm still Stephen. I'm just Stephen.

I'm missing a toe. If I cut my head off, I'm dead. So obviously, you know, I'm the remains of Stephen. But if I start cutting more and more bits, when do I stop being myself? It's such an extraordinary idea. We're aware of our own self. And unless we have particular problems on the neurodiversity scale, for example, we also fully understand other people's selves and that they have a self

and that therefore they have their own will and their own desire. And the chances are their appetites will be similar to ours. So, you know, if we're both not eating for a day and someone brings in a tray and there's a cake on it, we'll look at each other and we'll know we each want that cake. You know, we've projected into the other's mind. I mean, in the most simple way, the theory of mind kind of shows us that.

But what that self is, how it can be in any way quantified, it can't be removed from the body as far as we know. I mean, obviously there are superstitions and people talk about astral projection and so on, but there's no evidence that it's ever been done. You can, in a metaphysical way, reach yourself into other people's selves even after you're dead. Shakespeare does that every day to different people reading his sonnets or Jimmy Hendrix or John Lennon does, whoever.

I'm reached by David Bowie when I turn on Starman. I feel his self is connecting with me. His art, yes, his poetry, his vision, but also the self. He talks to you. That's what art does. And in that sense, you are immortal. Indeed, that was Shakespeare's obsession. So long as men can live and eyes can see,

so long lives this, and this gives life to thee. You know, he was aware that there is a way that we communicate beyond language. The actual sound in the throat of words being said, vibrating the ear is one way for language to get into us. The other, a very recent invention, only 5,000 years, is reading characters on a page and writing them. But the other way is harder to understand, isn't it?

But we do connect with people who are dead, who are away from us, whom we remember. And their self is as real without a body as the self of someone who has a body. So in that sense, there is an immortality, but it's held together by communal memory and by means of communication like print. And if they die, then the selves of the past die as well, don't they?

Since you were a young man, at the core of you, what do you think has actually changed? If I went to the very core of you and i could i could see it i don't know hold it in my hand what would be different at the very core of you between the age of you know 20 25 and today let's say i think i'm much calmer i think i'm more accepting of of things um i feel less need to prove myself it may not sound like that the way i've been rattling on um i i of course have found a kind of permanent love i kind of that's very ungracious but i got married nearly eight years ago um and that's changed things, to be married, especially talking about that child early on who knew he was gay and saw ahead of him only a life of exile and shame,

the prospect that I could ever actually be married and live happily and for it to be of no big deal to anybody. I mean, there must be people, I suppose, in the world who think it's disgusting, but you don't often into them um so that that's made a big difference and uh i'm ambitious only for an ex if there's an exciting project like this film i told you i'm learning polish uh at the moment to to to to be in a. And I'm very excited and ambitious about the film, not because I want it to win awards and be a huge success, but because I really am,

I haven't done anything quite like it for a very long time. And so that's a thrill. And otherwise, you know, I suppose I just, I don't need, I don't need to connect to people in the way I used to. I used to be really shy enough to need cocaine to stay up at night and to go to parties. There was, you know, quite a few years of that.

Fifteen years? Fifteen years. You've done far too much research, haven't you? But, yeah, and I mean, I look back at it and I think, I cannot believe I was such an arse. But on the other hand, there are friendships I made that I don't necessarily regret and things I discovered and learned about myself and so on.

But mostly, of course, it was a very, very wrong course. Fortunately, not a fatally wrong course, either in literal terms or in terms of career. But I realised that I am am a very very quiet domestic soul i don't like going out i don't like parties i i said i said to my husband a couple years ago i said i don't think i've ever met a person or read about a person that i hate as much as I hate parties. He said, that's a bit strong. Do you hate parties more than you hate Hitler? I said, well, I suppose. That was just a sort of weird moment.

I do go to parties, but I don't. Standing up, talking to people with a drink in my hand is just my idea of agony. Because I'll tell you another secret, which you may have uncovered, but it's an embarrassing one, is that I have a condition called prosopagnosia. It means face blindness. It means I will see you in the street two days' time and I will blank you because I won't recognise you, I'm afraid. And it's absolutely heart and gut-wrenching

because you are convinced that people think you're looking down at them and you don't care about them. You haven't bothered to remember them because they're unimportant to you. And it really isn't that. I remember names all the time. Most people are the other way around. I'm the other way around. Yeah, I remember faces but not names.

And I have a little card in my wallet that says, you know, Proso-Pagnosia Society. I give it to people. I say, oh, God, I'm so sorry. But look, believe me. You know, like so I did an event for mind last night and there were some wonderful people in it i was moderating it the the mental health charity and i was thinking in the cam on the way home i said if i see any one of those people and we had this wonderful conversation the chances of my recognizing their faces are so low. It's awful. And, you know, you teach yourself various things,

like the colour of what someone's wearing on a particular day, or if they have a, you know, earring or some sort of jewellery or something external to the face. But it's a very odd one. So that makes parties even more difficult. Age 37, you star in a play, which again is called Cellmates, I believe. That's right. The play gets some pretty harsh reviews, to say the least,

from a lot of the big newspapers as such. And that's another real low moment in your life. Hugely so. Can you take me back to that moment? Yeah, it was pretty grim. I mean, we'd done previews of it in Guildford and maybe what? Guildford and Richmond, I think, before coming into the West End, into the Noel Coward Theatre, as it is now, the Albury, as it was, I think.

And I was with Rick Mayall, whom I loved, and sweet, funny man. He was brilliant and charming as always. The rest of the cast were nice. It was written by Simon Gray, a British playwright, and he also directed it. And I was playing George Blake, the spy, the British spy, who was sent to Wyrmwood Scrubs and then amazingly escaped. I was never comfortable in the play

and I was beginning to feel lost and adrift and deeply unhappy and I couldn't understand why the play wasn't that much of a disaster I mean they had good audiences and they applauded at the end and some people said yeah I don't think it's his best play but it was a lot you know it wasn't an absolute catastrophe choice at this point, because this is important context, you're well established. Yes, yes. In writing. Yes, things like Blackadder and Jeeves and Worcester and Fry and Laurie had happened and my books had been selling.

So I was, you know, in the public eye, I was well known. Anyway, there was a Saturday night. I guess the press night had been on Friday or something like that. So we then had a Saturday night. I guess the press night had been on Friday or something like that. So we then had a Saturday night. And then on Sunday, there were the Sunday papers, of which I saw some. Some of which were deeply unkind to me. And that did make a difference. I mean, I've said I didn't go just because I didn't like the reviews.

It wasn't entirely that. That would have been a bit weak. And certainly it was a weak thing to have done anyway. But it was a whole concatenation of something wrong in my head. I just suddenly saw myself as in the wrong place, doing the wrong things. And I wanted to get away from everything I knew. And really, what I first wanted to do was to take my life. And I did run the car engine in the lockup garage of the flat where I was in London, and then realized it was a catalytic converter, that it wasn't really going to do much harm to me. And then there was stuff of it, and I was just coughing a bit. That's quite a significant decision to make following i know i know i just

wanted out really that's it i just wherever i was i wanted to be somewhere else and if it was nowhere that would be that would be a first that was the most perfect place to be i just didn't see the as anybody listening who's had the misfortune and the terror of considering taking their life suicidal ideation as it's known in the trade as they will probably concur with me that there comes a moment where you just start saying to yourself what's the point it's a strange phrase because you know you could say anyone could say it at any point but there's some moments when when you say it it seems so truthful there is simply no point in anything around oneself and that's how it seems uh anyway so i got in the car and drove to the south coast to dover i think it was, no, Folkestone, and got on a ferry to Zebrugge in Belgium

and then ended up in Bruges, in Bruges, like Colin Farrell and Brendan. And I then wandered a little further east into Holland and then into Germany and Hanover and Hamburg. And you didn't tell anybody you were coming? No, no. And this was 93 or so. There was no World Wide Web as such.

It was just beginning to happen. Tim Berners-Lee in Switzerland was beginning to develop the World Wide Web. But there were these things called commercial online servers like CompuServe and America Online rather than direct kind of internet connections. And I had been connected to those for some time and had taken my computer with me, I guess. So I was in a hotel in Hamburg and then I got a message from my friend Hugh

who said, old fellow, you must come home. Be in touch at least. And so I kind of sent him an email on this CompuServe thing and I agreed that it was nonsense. I had this, in my head, this idea that I would go up from Hamburg and Hanover up Schleswig-Holstein, which is the border with Denmark, and go up into Denmark. And somehow in the north of Denmark, I would sit on a rock in a thick white pullover with a pipe clenched between my teeth,

writing impossible poetry and teaching English to Danes and be forgotten, you know, and just live the rest of my life there. Total fantasy. But no, Hugh said, come on, it's fine, fine come home we really want to see you everyone wants to uh and so I drove back overnight to to Amsterdam and my father had got a flight to Schiphol and we met in a hotel in Schiphol and um then got a flight little little airplane back to to South End. What did you say to your father that day in Amsterdam when you met him? I said you you've spent your life getting me out of terrible and embarrassing holes and this is probably the worst of them and he said no it isn't

it's fine it's all okay and he was just wonderful. I watched a news report of your absence. Really? Yeah I watched it upstairs before we had this conversation. I think it was maybe BBC News or one of the big stations reporting that. You were basically missing. Yeah. A big picture of you on the screen and saying that you had, you know. The way that they'd framed it, obviously, is they said, you did this play. They showed some of the headlines, some of the reviews, and they said Stephen Fry's vanished.

Oh, my God. And everyone was very... Of course, I never saw any of that. I did see a photograph someone sent me years later of police on the roof of my house in Norfolk, which was slightly disturbing, looking for signs of me and obviously feeling the worst. Oh, it was a strange event.

But in some ways, it was a cleansing or a necessary step, I suppose, because as a result of it, I went to see psychiatrists and started to try and work out why my mind was taking me into such impossible dark places. Or, you know, when I had so much to be thankful for i mean what the hell you know i i had enough money i was well regarded in my profession and um why should i have come to such a crisis just because someone didn't like my performance in that play it's not really good enough um and i'm not that hypersensitive. So that started what I suppose we have to call my journey into my mental health.

And a few years later, I can't remember when, well, quite a few years later, probably about eight or nine, if not ten years later, I made a program at the BBC, two episodes I think it was, called The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, in which I tried to explore this peculiarity of this darkness that can shroud a mind so completely, but also that is part of an illness that I hadn't really understood. I'd heard the phrase manic depression, and I'd never really heard the word manic. Manic depression is two illnesses. Depression, which is a dark, depressed, lowered, as in depressed, state. And mania is an elevated state of energy and full of bounce and vigor and a desire to communicate with people.

And depression is the exact opposite. You just want to line bed, pull the duvet over your head and never speak to anybody. Whereas when you're in a manic state, you're always on the phone boring people. So there are two poles and hence it's also known bipolar. There's the one pole of mania, hypermania and the other pole of a depressed state. And so I wanted to find out more about it. And that's where I went back to school and discovered that the psychiatrist when I was a boy had written bipolar question mark. And I discovered that so many people lived with this problem. And I also discovered something

quite extraordinary, because I asked everyone I spoke to, I did a little button with my finger, I said, I'm drawing a button on this table with my finger. If you press this button, you will never get a depressed episode again, one of those awful, terrible, depressed episodes. But nor will you get a manic episode, one of those heightened, elevated, jubilant episodes. Do you want to press the button? And almost none of them wanted to press the button. And it reminded me of a thing that W.H. Auden, the poet, had written, but don't take my devils away or my angels will fly away too. And I don't know whether that's a true thing, but it's a fear that we have inside us

that even an illness like manic depression and how serious it can be is part of us and gives us a secret power gives us something extra um it's dangerous because because it is um highly the word doctors uses is morbidity in in other words you know people especially if it's undiagnosed if you start finding that you're crashing in moods and becoming miserable and and everyone's finding your pain in the ass or you're absolutely wild and full of crazy plans and you know buying things you're going on shopping sprees or being sexually exhibitionist or inappropriate

and but people find that even more annoying um and if you don't know that it's actually an illness, then you just mask it with alcohol and narcotics of one kind or another. And they mask it pretty successfully, but they have their own problems, to say the least. And people can then slide down and leave their families. Their families can no longer tolerate their substance abuse, for example, and they end up on the streets. And then there's a lot of discovery for them to know that they first have to get off the

substances that have been masking the problem, then to face the problem. And it's a really, as we know now, a huge endemic problem, it seems, in our culture and country. Amongst young people, it's expressed with a rash of self-harm that is just so, so upsetting to see children hurting themselves. And if you ask them why they do it, it's always the same answer. It's to displace the other pain inside them. It's because the pain in there is worse. So you do that to take away from it. And that, for a child, is just heartbreaking to imagine.

Post-diagnosis of manic depression, what were you advised to do and what did you do to make life better with the understanding now and the awareness that you had this condition? Well, firstly, I went on a sort of exploratory journey of medication. So, Carch has tried me on a number of things. Sodium valproate, which has since become somewhat of a disgraced pharmaceutical, particularly when it's been given to people with various forms of epilepsy. And then lithium, and I was on lithium for quite a number of years. And then slowly I became aware of some of the kind of folk wisdom that has been around in our species for a very long time,

but which was initially very irritating. I'll give you an example. There are certain kinds of people who, if they hear someone's depressed, say, well, go and walk it off, you know, just go for a nice walk. And you think, hang on, this is an illness, just saying go and walk it off. And yet, once you've confronted it, and once you've tried to control it, once you've understood what it is, a chronic condition, i.e. a bit like asthma or diabetes, something that's with you and that may not go away and may come back again and isn't necessarily under your control, you then do discover that there are therapies in life like exercise, gardening, making music, knitting. I mean, it doesn't almost matter what it is. It is like, as I say, a folk wisdom of

taking yourself out of yourself and also believing in a future. It's incredibly important. The first thing I did, I think, that was a breakthrough for me was that I lost some weight. I mean, I'm always fighting weight, but I was really pretty big back then. And I managed to lose about four stone. Now, it's not that losing four stone is in itself a vast achievement, but it tells me that I can control some part of myself. My physical body is not a rogue that will just do whatever it wants to do. I can say, no, I'm going to make you a bit sleeker. And if I can do that with my body, maybe I can do things with my mind.

Maybe I am, you know, captain of my body, maybe I can do things in my mind. Maybe I am, you know, captain of my soul, master of my destiny, and all of that. So, yes, I started walking every morning, you know, when I was in London, go around Regent's Park and listen to audiobooks, just choose all kinds of books that either I hadn't read for years, or I'd always meant to read, you know, whether it was Dostoevsky or Agatha Christie. It wasn't about high literature necessarily. It was about just having a story in my head and walking and walking and looking and saying,

wow, I've had seven miles this morning. That's amazing. You feel you're doing something. So it's really been a slow process of allowing myself, I suppose, to be who I am and not to fight for my place at the table. I suppose I've accepted that through immense good fortune, I am where I am. I don't need to say yes to everything that I'm asked to do.

I don't owe it to myself to have to work all the time. And so I am sometimes capable of looking to myself all the time um and so i am sometimes capable of saying looking to myself in the mirror and saying you're quite happy today aren't you steven and then i'll go no don't say that that's the worst thing you could say you've got almost 13 million followers on twitter what's your relationship with been with social media because you, you know, up and down, I mean, Twitter, it really is accessible at the best of times, negativity and abuse and trolls. So reflecting on the, you know, the experience you had when you were 37 with that critical feedback, I mean, Twitter is not a great place to be if you want. No, indeed, it isn't. I mean, it is supportive to I mean, I, I've learned how to use it in a way

that is not likely ever to upset me anymore. There was a time when I was fully engaged with it and, you know, you call it accessible and I've used similar images in the early days. It was like a lovely swimming hole in a glade in a lovely wood somewhere where people of goodwill and from around would swim about and you'd bump into them and go, hi, how are you?

And you'd just chat. And then suddenly you notice, oh, there's a turd floating on it. What the hell is that doing there? And then suddenly there'd be a bit of broken glass when you put your foot down or an old rusty pram or something. And you realize that it had become, as you say, a kind of cesspool. And that's a terrible shame. It's immensely useful to have that many followers because it means, you know,

I can satisfy a few publicity requirements with one stroke of the pen, as it were, just by tweeting about them. And it will reach a bigger audience than if I spend four hours doing a profile with a journalist who will always want to get under my skin and ask annoying questions. So it's a lazy, good publicity tool. I'm slightly worried that, I don't know,

that I may have to leave it if Elon Musk takes over. I'm not sure that I want to be involved in his Twitter. It doesn't sound like a nice, happy place. I mean, I'll consider, I might just simply stop using it in any other way except to post things for charities or work. But rather than engaging people, I just, I'm not sure I want to see some of the tweets that float up from the kind of people that Musk encourages.

I mean, I may be wrong. And it's not that I want it to be a left-wing thing, not a right-wing thing. I mean, I'm fully, of course, aware that it should reflect society as much as possible. But do you know what I wanted to do in this sort of way, is go on one of those. Doesn't Piers Morgan do something? Is it GB News he go on one of those doesn't piers morgan do something is it gb

news he does or one of those things yes um and i've sort of wanted to go on now you'll have to hold your ears now sort of let's go hello how are you you old cunt it's fucking great to see you cunty cunty cunt cunt and him to go you can't say that oh i thought this was the home of free speech isn't it i thought i thought this was the fucking home of counting free speech. But it isn't. Oh, so free speech is negotiable. There are bits that you can't say and bits that you can. You know, because that's the point.

I mean, free speech is, of course, important, but it's not the end point. The end point is human beings living together in peace and harmony and happiness as much as possible without war and violence and envy and resentment and bitterness or starvation and poverty and all those sort of things. That's the end point. And it's probable that that end point is better arrived at if we live in a society where you're free to speak and share ideas and think freely and you're not told what to say. So in that sense, free speech is very much one of the key things on the way to it. But for some people, key speech has become the end point. I want to live in a society where I can say anything. It doesn't matter if people are

starving and the gap between rich and poor is wider than it's ever been. The only thing that matters is I can say what I want. Well, I just don't think that's what John Stuart Mill and all the original figures who wrote on liberty and free speech, I don't think that's quite what they meant, and I don't think it's what I see as the be-all and end-all. But so, you know, I'm worried that there will be a rise in the kinds of anti, you know, kind of racist and transphobic and indeed anti-feminist on the other side and all kinds of other nastiness will prevail. And Musk will go, yeah, that's what we call free speech.

I'm a free speech absolutist, he called himself. I mean, it is concerning. It is concerning generally. I've made the decision that I just don't tweet. So I just post the podcast when it comes out and that's it. Because, you know, it's a losing battle. You referred to like pieces of shit floating past in the once lovely lake and then a piece of glass. I'll end up having an argument with a piece of shit

or a piece of glass and I just don't want to. I think what I think of is like if at school you're captain of the chess club and you put the team up on the notice board and you pin it up on the notice board and you then go away. What you don't do is put the notice up and then hide behind a pillar and listen to how people respond to it oh i see the oh what's he put that up for he's a wanker isn't he and all that i mean just put your notice up and walk away

yeah and now to the credit you can have settings where one of the settings i have on my twitter feed is that i can't see any tweets, tweets directed at me from anybody who hasn't got an email address verified, hasn't got a phone number verified, doesn't have a profile picture. Brilliant. So I don't get many tweets because, you know, it filters out a lot of the stuff. So my notifications are pretty nice. You know, they're pretty straightforward. And it's because in the past, it has been a distraction.

I don't want to fall into holes, you know, and spend hours of my life wasted trying to chase down a troll. Yeah, exactly. With this journey of mental health, I know you're the president of MIND, I believe, which is a phenomenal charity that everybody, everybody probably knows for the work they've done and the important work they've done over the last decade

is mental health has risen in public sort of consciousness. I, one of the things that I think about a lot is how the battles we fight for our entire lives there's sometimes a frustration around our inability to cure ourself of those things so you know i sit here with people or i speak to young people and even in my own life i've come to realize that a lot of my like real deep battles maybe they'll never come a day where they're cured with my traumas, these, you know, the ways that I react to something, my triggers, maybe they'll never be cured. And as I read through your story, even up until 10 years ago, I could see that you were still having moments of real lows,

real depressive lows. You know, I listened to, i think a podcast episode you did where you said when you were 55 it was your i believe your third suicide attempt in your yes red zone that's right yeah no no i think i mean it is in that sense what doctors call chronic like asthma you you can you know have an inhaler on you and usually be sort of safe and you know what you're allergic to what triggers an asthma attack but you never stop being an asthmatic. And the day could come when you least expect it. Of course, it's always the day you've forgotten your inhaler, where suddenly you just get this enormous attack and you can barely breathe.

And it might have been 10 years since you last had such one. I'm sure anyone listening who has lived with asthma will know what I mean. And it's a bit like that. At your peril, do you think you've conquered it? You're living with it and coping with it and managing it. And most of the time one manages it, but sometimes you hear the hoofbeats back in in the in your brain of of the coming storm and you do everything you can to avoid it and tell friends now i mean that's it's so much easier said than done i i i have a theory

i call it my genital wart theory is we we all say how important friends are gosh we need friends friends are the people you can say anything to aren't they but actually they're not if you had a genital wart um you wouldn't show it to your best friend you say oh tom hey have a look at my blonde teeth they would go shut up similarly you wouldn't show it to your mother you know or to your sister you know and that's family but you show it to a stranger a doctor so can you look at this and tell me if it's normal or all right they'll go oh that's fine don't worry and you feel okay so if that's true of some little physical part of yourself it's also true of the mental part of yourself that although

you have family and friends who are supposed to be there for you it's actually very difficult even though you know it's the right thing to do to share with them what you're thinking. It's very hard. They'd be upset nearly always when you have a crisis. It gets as far as suicide, obviously, even more so. But they say, why didn't you come and tell me? They're actually angry with you. You know I'm there for you. Why didn't you come?

Well, because it was a general water in my mind, as it were. And you just feel, and you have to try and overcome that. But yes, I have to be aware it won't necessarily go away. The other thing I often say is it's like the weather, and the weather is real. You can't ever say, so I'm going out, it's not really snowing, and it's not a blizzard outside, I'm going to wear a T-shirt. You have to accept that the weather is real.

But you also have to accept that you didn't cause it. I didn't make it snow. And nor do you have to sort of welter in the problem of thinking, well, that's it. It's snowing now. It's going to snow for the rest of my life. It's always going to be cold. It will actually pass.

Again, nothing to do with you. You can't make it pass. And those are the storms in your head. The mistake is not to think it's real. I'm just imagining it. No, it's really raining in your head. It is. Oh, what did I do to make it do this?

You didn't make it rain. It's not your fault. And oh, it'll never go now. It will. Some will come out. You don't know when. It's not your fault. And oh, it'll never go now. It will. Some will come out. You don't know when. It's not under your control. Those are three things.

They're not absolutely hooray, but they're just enough, if you cling on to them, to make you realise sort of what's going on. That it's out of your control, that it's real, and that it will pass. And what is the mind,

you talked about the hooves of the horse coming, is there words associated with those moments? Because you said earlier on about what's the point? Yes, that is often the one, what is the point? And it's also just a, it's like, I mean, all of us who have had it, and I'm sure many of the people listening will have different metaphors and comparisons. It is like something being sucked out of you, a sort of energy sucked out of it,

and that you feel drained, and you're convinced your face has gone white. And sometimes you look in the mirror, and it has gone white. There has been a physical response to it. Utterly white. And people who love you and know you well see it in your eyes straight away. So my husband will say, whoa, what's the matter? I'll go, I don't know. I don't know. I'm just going to go and lie down. I just don't know. And he'll say, he would have seen it instantly. And I look at them myself in the mirror and think, what is he seeing? It is a common thing. And I noticed this during the documentary. If you take a magazine and cover half your face and look at your right eye and then cover the other half and look at your left eye, or even take a photograph in that way and then look, it's amazing how I found people who've had mental health histories that have not been happy often have a more extreme difference in their left and

right eye than if you look at my left and right eye one is rather cold and calculating and one is warmer and friendlier that's usual with people i think i don't know any empirical science behind it but i did notice that almost everybody I interviewed had an extreme version of that. And I don't know what that means or whether anyone's ever done any research onto it. But there are signs and signals that come. It's like some people get – I get itchy under the chin when I'm going to have an asthma attack, for example. Unmistakably itchy under the chin when I'm going to have an asthma attack, for example. I get unmistakably itchy under the chin. But with mania, which is often worse, I mean, I interviewed someone who – with mania, you want to concentrate, you want new projects,

you've got amazing ideas in your head, you're risk-taking and entrepreneurial and grandiose. And I interviewed someone in America who's i interviewed the wife that the husband sadly did take his own life and so i was talking about life with him and she said it's a terrible thing to say she said but i was always happier when he was depressed than when he was manic when he's depressed he's just you know lying curled up in a ball obviously i didn't realize he was going to take his life to go that far. But when someone's manic, they're just out of control. They're so embarrassing. They would do such weird things.

She said, you'll laugh, but it was awful at the time. He had a car, a nice car. It was like one of the original Mustangs or something. And he took it apart piece by piece on a large piece of cloth in his garage, as an American would say. And each piece, you know, the pencil or a marker, he did a little mark for where that piece goes and he wrote what the name of the piece was. So the whole thing, and he started chroming all the bright work and making it all perfect and all the engine parts were out.

And then he had a change of state. And it moved away from this optimistic, bright mania, and he just kicked the cloth and all the pieces and everything just piled into a heap of junk and the car couldn't be rescued. And there's a sort of metaphor for something there. I don't know what it is, but she said that's the problem. But when I've had mania, I had a manic episode

right in the middle of someone's memorial. It was quite extraordinary. And it frightened me because the power of it was so intense. And I ran home and I called my doctor, my psychiatrist, Billy. I said, Billy, I have to tell you, I've had visions. And I feel the closest I can describe it to is like Joan of Arc. I feel irradiated by some extraordinary power and light. It's the most extraordinary thing.

And I just don't know what I'm going to do. He said, I'm coming around. He came around and he said, this is very dangerous. He could see me. And I had started cooking and I'd started tidying. I'd done three different jobs. And the cooking thing, I'd done a plate with quail's eggs, halved, so elegantly around the edge of the plate.

It was so beautiful. Everything was amazing. I said, I don't know why you've come, Billy. I have never been happier and more in charge of myself. He said, no, you're not well. You are really not well. I can see you. He said, no, you're not well. You are really not well. I can see you. He said, your eyes are absolutely kind of off the scale.

And I want you just to take this. And he gave me some, what was it called? It'll come to me. And it sort of calms you down. It's an antipsychotic, essentially, I suppose, or an anxiolytic or something like that. That was one of the more extreme manic moments I'd had and actually was pretty frightening

because it took me a long time to get down from it. And I am the last person in the world to say that they feel like Joan of Arc. Like someone who has had some extraordinary transcendent religious experience. But that's how I felt. You've accomplished so many unbelievable things in your career in spite of all of these struggles that we've talked about um the list is actually too long for me to even i wouldn't know where to start um as i look down onto this little ipad in front of me at all of the milestones the the books the the roles you've played, the scripts you've written, etc. Why and how? Why and how you?

You know, it's always a difficult question because it requires us to abandon humility for a second, potentially, and say something nice about oneself. But why you? I think the first reason, and it would be the same if you spoke to a certain kind of musician, is because I write. And I have always written.

Since I was a little boy, I used to write stories. And when I then was at Cambridge and there was this thing of comedy, it was natural with Hugh and on my own to write monologues and sketches to perform. And because I'd written them, I sort of wrote them for myself to perform. But the writing was at the bottom of it all. And then acting jobs on their own came along, which I didn't write or other people wrote or I could just sort of add bits of writing to. But I was always a writer.

And if you look at musicians, the reason we venerate Bowie and Elton John and, you know, Lennon Cohen, it is they write their music doesn't matter how fantastic their voices are yes we love Nat King Cole or someone who is just a beautiful voice but the pantheon of great artists are those who create their own work by they write it they write the songs they last forever if you write the song Paul McCartney or whatever you know I mean you just think even something like when you see that postcode lottery and that, who's that knocking at my door? And you think that's Paul McCartney when he wrote that, cannot have been thinking. But he wrote and every day he writes to this day because it's, that's what he is, that somehow that's the voice in him

telling him that's what real work is is the writing and the creating and i love acting and i love presenting and um reading audiobooks and and things like that immense fun but the real work is always sitting in front of the blinking cursor and and and writing things um and everything else is is gravy and fantastic gravy at that. Not because it's easier. I'm not sort of saying acting is easier. It's just for some reason in my head, the Protestant work ethic, the Jewish work ethic,

call it what you like, is the one that says sitting alone, concentrating until bubbles of blood come out of your ears. That's work. Acting, as Shakespeare called it, is play. He was a playwright and he called actors players. Do you think we're all artists? This is a really good question.

And I always used to say no. I was very friendly in the heyday. Well, I still am with, for example, Damien Hirst. In the 90s, I was very much an obituary of the Groucho Club and, you know, the Tracey Emmons and Damien Hirst would come in along with the Oasis's and the Blurs and so on. It was very much the place where those incredibly energetic

and new kinds of artists would assemble. And, you know, I'd get drunk with Damien a lot. And I would sometimes say, I want to be an artist. And he'd say, you are an artist. Anybody can be an artist. I said, no, they can't. He said, what do you mean? I said, and I would say, I'm an entertainer.

I'm frankly a bit bourgeois. I want to please people. And if I don't please them, I get upset. I've done it wrong. For me, the aim is to see delight in the face. But for you, it's to make something that matters to you. And if it disgusts people or horrifies them, you're often full of glee it's not you deliberately make them to hate it there are enough people who love it to make you extremely rich at the time he was only slightly rich but now of course he's worth a huge amount uh and i said that's what a real artist is and my other artist friends not not all from that same generation maggie hambling is a wonderful painter uh in suffolk come on and she's done my portrait several times whatever and she's a real artist there's a toughness about her, a refusal to compromise, an absolute, what's central is her and her work. And that's true of artists. Artists are bloody minded. They bite the hand that feeds them. I'm pretty easygoing. If, you know, a commissioner wants me to do something, I'll ask him how he'd like it done. I'll try and put my own voice into it, my own tone into it.

But I don't have the artistic drive to make it something out of me. There's a fantastic confidence and supreme almost contempt for society that artists have. And that's why they're so unpopular with the Daily Males and the bourgeois people because they don't please, they don't provide what is comfortable or easy and what people would like or pretty. It's always, oh, it's disgusting of throwing a pot of paint into the public's face.

That was said 150 years ago. It's always been thus. And artists are special i think um i mean i like makers or craftsmen artisans you know that who make beautiful things whether it's shoes or you know tom daly knitting a nice pullover whatever it might be is is a beautiful thing to see but art is to me at least and it may be a part of the kind of education I've had that has privileged art above all things, but art is special to me. It has a special place and does special things. Usually very simple, and that's the genius of an artist.

We die. We, the flesh, this case we have, dies and rots. And we know this. And mostly we don't particularly like to be reminded of it artists find it the most fascinating thing in the world so even if it's van gogh with showing the petals falling off the sunflower there's death in there and as for francis bacon and indeed uh damien hurst and and and almost all painters, they paint death. They paint the truth about what we are becoming. And painting is sometimes the last bastion against death. I'm going to make something permanent because everything else dies.

That's, again, Shakespeare's sonnets, you know. This will last. Everything else will die, but this poem will stay here. I made something permanent against death, decay, entropy, all the horrors of the universe that drag us down. You know, my nipples are dropping two inches every year as gravity takes hold, and it will for all of us. And art keeps them propped up, if you like. I've been going back and forward about this point about art, all of us and, and art keeps them propped up if you like. I, I very much,

I've been going back and forward about this point about art because I've realised as probably as I've got older, that expression in some artistic form, whether it's knitting that jumper, like Tom Daley does, it's so great for our mind. Absolutely. And, and, you know, you've talked about a few things there, even when you're talking about social prescribing, just some way to express ourself through the medium of music or painting or creation seems to be,

it seems to be so human and so innately important to all of us. But at the same time, I hear what you're saying regarding artists and their conviction to create from their own perspective versus to conform. I guess maybe the difference there is that's being a great artist. Yes, I think it's true. Yeah, there are qualities and degrees. Yeah, there's a spectrum of... I mean, there are people who have tried to define.

I mean, an artisan, a craftsman, can make the same thing again and again identically, and it's genius. They're making four chairs. Each chair is the same. An artist never does the same thing again. They might have a theme that they do, so you can get a lot of artists who like to paint a particular subject,

whether it's Bedlingfield Terriers, a famous Scottish artist used to do Craigie Aitchison he liked to do little Bedlington Terriers and he liked there's usually a star somewhere but everyone is different, everyone is a variation on a theme

whereas an artisan is happy to make things that are perfect and the same each time a craftsman but they're both good for the mind in each time, a craftsman. But they're both good for the mind. In fact, probably being a craftsman is better for the mind. I remember Rowan Atkinson said to me once years ago,

he's a very wise man indeed and thinks a lot, very thoughtful. And he said, and I'm sure he wasn't the first to say it and there are many different names for this. He said, but it only ever works on stage if you are relaxed but it only ever works on stage if you are concentrating if you concentrate without being relaxed you're just stiff

and you're trying too hard if you relax without concentrating you're all over the place but when both happen at once you are master of time and space and you are in control. You're concentrating on every detail and every second of the audience's response and your timing is perfect

and yet you are relaxed enough to allow them to enjoy it without feeling any strain. Sportsmen call that being in the zone. And it's immensely important to get that blend. And one of the ways to create it is, I think, not to do art, because that's just too frightening, but to do crafts. And that can include painting. It can be painting by numbers.

It can be just a general sketch where you're not trying to make it art. But once your tongue is stuck out, you know, you've got that concentrated but relaxed on you. And it could, as I say, it could be knitting, carpet making, it could be anything you choose, but something, or a jigsaw even, but something where you've made a change to what was there before. You've brought materials together that weren't there before and you've done it in a way that has just given you,

you've listened to the radio or the television's on in the corner or you've got a playlist going, and it's a magical thing. It's a flow state, as you describe it. Yeah, and if anyone's thinking of how they might do that, one of my favourite films is a film called Running On Empty, a Sidney Lumet film with River Phoenix and Judd Hirsch and various others in it. And it's about this family that are on the run because they attacked a weapons laboratory during the Vietnam War.

And unfortunately, there was a security guard in there who got killed, although they tried to do it when it was empty. So they've been on the lam from the FBI for like 15, 20 years. That's the backstory. Anyway, that means that they don't have much and they're constantly having to go on the move when the FBI might be close. And River Phoenix's character is a musical genius as it happens, not as relevant to this story.

But he meets this girl and they start to fall for each other. And at one point they're walking along the beach and he's picking things up and says, oh, this might do. And she says, what's that? And he says in our family for christmas or birthdays we're only allowed to give something we've found or made

and i i almost wept at how beautiful an idea that was i know it's so obvious we live in a ridiculous crass commercial world where we score everything by its monetary value. But to say we're only allowed to give each other things we've found or made. And so he'd found this stone and this piece of wood or whatever, driftwood or whatever it was, and he was going to make something out of it. And his parents would be thrilled to have it because you've given them time and concentration. But you've also had the pleasure yourself of doing the making.

So maybe someone listening will say to their family, hey, Christmas is coming up. We're only allowed to give each other things we found and made. And especially at a time of, you know, financial crisis, who wants to go into this slightly sick-making nonsense of just going into shops and spending vast sums of money that, know on shiny things and uh when you might just find a piece of driftwood or something that looks like a hedgehog and turn it into a pipe holder or a soap dish you know that's all i'm saying it sounds so cheesy no it's beautiful it's a really really beautiful idea and it's very much aligned to to the relationship i have with my partner to be honest we you know i'm sure i'm sure everybody knows I have the means to buy whatever,

but I can't think of a recent Valentine's Day, birthday, just had my birthday, where anything has exceeded the £100 because it's all like scrapbooks and really sentimental personal stuff. And thankfully I'm with someone who wants that and would actually be probably disgusted if I got them a shiny thing I genuinely I've said this before my partner would be genuinely disgusted if I got a shiny thing or like a designer thing like the look I would get you know so I I

here's a question if you're if you're if the good life in your own subjective definition of whatever that means if the good life your best life was a i've asked this question but i'm gonna ask a variation of it to you was a recipe constituting of a bunch of different ingredients what do you think you need or is missing from that list of ingredients for you to have the dish of a good life wow that's an amazing thought i mean there is a part of me that obviously feels i say obviously that feels in another world if i'd timed things right i might have had children and and that's an experience that enormous number of my fellow humans undergo, and it clearly gives pleasure. I have many godchildren now, nieces and nephews, and great-nieces and great-nephews. But I'll never experience a child growing up.

And that, I mean, it's a slight sadness. It allows me fantastic, ironic sarcastic in fact conversations with people sometimes where someone goes oh this nonsense about global warming and i'll go no i'm with you i don't have children either so i don't care what happens to the world and they'll go well no i've got kids i said oh do you hate them then you hate your children so you don't want them to have a nice world. Oh, well, I don't know. I mean, yeah, that's fine.

And they'll go, oh, look, don't be stupid. And I go, well, that's very silly of me. But, yeah, I mean, that's probably the biggest hole in my life experience. I've been fortunate enough to have done so many things and to experience so much and met so many people I've been thrilled to meet and had opportunities that are just unbelievable, really. And, of course, I've had opportunities.

I suppose to have had children. I mean, you know, I could have sorted something out. I could have, you know, Elliot and I could, you know, we talked about it a bit, but we never talked about it to the extent of, right, so we're going to a clinic tomorrow to talk this through to some expert. We never quite got that far. It was always just, yeah, it would be nice, wouldn't it? And so that's probably the – I mean, otherwise, of course,

there are regrets in life because as you get – I'm now from the 25th of august nearly your birthday onwards i was my birth 24th of august so from that day onwards i was closer to 70 than 60 which was my 65th birthday on the 24th of august so as you move towards uh uh the seer the yellow leaf as shakespeare put it oh so embarrassed shakespeare calling saying could you stop quoting me oh it's my sister it might be important could joe yes sorry i'm still at the um oh god am i late shit i am yes you're quite right the driver is saying at the moment he's worried about getting you back the driver's worried about getting me back in time i understand thank you darling

bless you we're having such a good time. I had no idea how the time was passing. Please give my love to Mr. Bartlett. Hello, Joe. Joe loves you, Bartlett. You're the Bartlett pair, the juicy Bartlett pair. Yeah. Please apologise for me interrupting.

I know you sleep because you're having a nice time, but I felt I should do my duty you bet i really appreciate it thanks and i'll i'll text them in them in the cab on the way there gosh i'm sorry no worries at all yeah listen steven thank you thank you so much for your your time we do have a quick closing tradition just where the last guest asks a question for the next guest that's right so i'll just rattle this one off to you um and i absolutely can't read their writing what is it that motivated you once you do you have any idea what is it that motivate what is it that motivated you once you already had it oh do you mean once you've reached a goal why do you keep at it you got to the point in your

life where you would achieve so much most people would be satisfied with retirement and wrapping it all in what then became your motivation in your life just honestly pleasure the fact that i still enjoyed it so much that when i met new people who wanted me to do a new thing like this this dinosaur program. I'm doing dinos, yeah. Doing this new technology, being with the dinosaurs. So exciting. It was just a whole new thing for me.

And I'd never done anything like it. And so I just said yes. And even though it meant like, how am I going to get a week to be in that studio and do this and enough stuff and prepare for it and so on. It turned out to be a wonderful program and unique kind of technology demonstrating these dynos. So that is an example. It's just, and similarly doing this Apple TV show,

which I'm doing now in America, called The Morning Show, which is good fun. And just occasionally, it's it's the thrill of the variation you know so it's the variation between doing a documentary and then suddenly having to spend four or five months just working on a book and then uh then doing some slutty piece of uh tv or film with big stars in it, feeling like, ooh, I'm in Hollywood, you know? It's not that I'm calling the morning show slutty,

because that's the least slutty thing I've ever done. I've actually had the privilege of seeing all of the above other than your upcoming movie, which hasn't been shot yet. But when I saw Dinosaurs, it brought me right back to my childhood and watching Jurassic Park with awe and as if I was stepping back in time to a place in our history. Thank you so much for your time, Stephen. I really appreciate it. You're someone that I've admired. A real pleasure. And do I have to leave a question for your next guest? If you could, that would be amazing. I'm going to give you the book that I oversee here. Thank you,

Stephen. Thank you.