Stephen Fry has now attained the status of a national treasure. Actor, writer, comedy performer, presenter, novelist, broadcaster ... there seems no limit to his talent.
In this one-hour profile he looks back at his career from his troubled childhood through his time at Cambridge University Footlights and the beginning of a television career that started extremely young when the Cambridge revue transferred to television. After that Fry never looked back: A BIT OF FRY AND LAURIE, JEEVES AND WOOSTER, BLACKADDER, not to mention numerous ancillary appearances. In the mid-Nineties his career underwent a severe blip when he was forced to withdraw from a West End play CELLMATES and disappeared for a period of time, suffering from depression. It was at that point he recognized - perhaps for the first time - that he was suffering from bipolar disorder.
Since then Fry's career has continued to bloom, with films and documentaries that have explored serious issues such as depression with himself as the subject. He has just completed a thirteen-year stint as quiz-master for the series Q1 and his career shows no sign of flagging.
Liberally laced with tributes from colleagues including Hugh Laurie, John Lloyd, Alan Davies, and Michael Sheen, this was an affectionate tribute to a memorable figure with plenty of archive material to entertain us.
Yet despite Fry's televisual honesty in talking about depression for a documentary, this profile proved strangely unrevealing. Fry seemed content to tell anecdote after anecdote; whenever the subjects were too close to the emotional bone, he laughed them off with a nervous giggle. There seemed to be a certain paradox at work here - a personality who believed it was important to be honest in public yet strangely reluctant to reveal his feelings; a truthful person in some ways, yet strangely self-delusive. That contradiction would have proved fascinating material for exploration ... but not in a celebrity profile.
