Chocks away and reach for the Fry

soulmate Hugh Laurie, doesn't miss its targets.

STEPHEN FRY, wearing a tweed jacket, a science-teacher shirt, and what

would appear to be cavalry twill trousers, is recalling the day he tried

to get away from his tweed jacket, science-teacher shirt, and cavalry

twill trousers image. He turned up for an interview (with one of those

awful female-with-attitude Sunday paper columnists) wearing black

leathers and a motor-cycle helmet.

''And you know, she still started her story by describing me as

'tweedy Stephen Fry','' he says, with more than a hint of resignation.

''Obviously my head is made of tweed,'' he adds. Point one: this man is

no slave to fashion.

Fry, of course, makes a virtue of the fact that he is celibate. Which,

to be honest, is just as well since he's perhaps the most unsexual

creature on God's earth. He has an awkward, gangling, ungainly body and

a great face for radio. But -- and here is his saving grace -- he has

more talent than you could shake a stick at.

For a start there's his voice. A deep, cultured baritone. Silky smooth

Cambridge. Then there's his intellect. His IQ, one imagines, must be

staggering. His breadth of knowledge awesome. Point two: this man is a

clevercloggs.

He can act. He can write plays. And books. And movies. And newspaper

columns. He is also computer literate. And he is one of the funniest men

in showbiz. Which is why we are meeting in London's Lansdowne Club with

his long-time workmate/soulmate Hugh Laurie. The pair have just

completed work on a new series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which starts

a seven-week run later this month.

The new show, ''a ruthless subversion of family values'' according to

them; ''sophisticated sketch comedy'' according to the publicists, will

be broadcast on BBC1 instead of the comics' former stamping ground,

BBC2.

''Ah yes,'' quips Fry. ''The ugly bird mainstream was flapping its

wings. It is a faster current, after all.''

The new series, to judge by the first show, is certainly wickedly

amusing. It is even laugh-out-loud stuff. The pair, who wrote the

scripts themselves, sail wonderfully close to the winds of bad taste

(scatology is a big thing, nasty smells are another). But is there

anything they wouldn't touch for a joke?

''What would we not do?'' Laurie ponders aloud. ''I don't know. We'd

really have to write them first to see what we wouldn't do. I don't

think either of us sees any virtue in just shocking people for the hell

of it. I'd like to think that there is no such thing as a taboo subject

but I don't think that's true.''

Laurie recalls seeing fellow comic Tony Slattery being attacked on

C4's The Right To Reply recently over a sketch he did about wartime air

ace Douglas Bader -- the joke, of course, was about his artificial legs.

''Now Bader was a great national hero and a very courageous man. I saw

Reach For The Sky and I know he was an extraordinary man but it must be

possible to take things seriously and laugh at them at the same time,''

he explains.

Fry agrees. ''Just because you make fun of his walk doesn't mean

you're trashing his reputation.'' The fact is, he argues, there is

absolutely nothing a writer can do to prevent someone somewhere getting

upset by something he writes.

''A character could say 'Gosh, you nearly gave me a heart attack!' And

someone watching it at home will get upset because his mother or father

has just died from a heart attack. Anything you do could be offensive to

some people,'' he says.

Which brings us round to Michael Portillo and the grounds of good

taste. There's a passing gag in the first programme about the

much-maligned Employment Minister smelling just a tad unpleasant when he

steps out of his Rover 200 after a long journey. ''Surely smelling any

man as he comes out of a car after a long journey must be unpleasant,''

explains Fry. ''And if politicians are not fair game then God knows what

is.''

Fry and Laurie have been muckers since university days. They've been

writing together off an on for the best part of 15 years. They socialise

a lot and Hugh ''often takes pity on a sad and lonely bachelor'' and

takes Stephen home and feeds him. So does the writing get any easier?

''It's never easy to write three-and-a-half-hours worth of what they

call these days 'broken comedy' or non-continuous narrative, whereas

with situation comedy you have a stable thing to work with. It is always

hard work but I suppose, subconsciously, there are certain shorthands

and things we know about each other which make it easier,'' explains

Fry.

Laurie explains that, while working, they seldom disagree. ''We thrash

things out and work until an agreement is reached. We usually know if

the other one doesn't think something is working. One of us will start

with an idea and, about halfway through, he will let the other one have

a look at it. And within a fiftieth of a second you know it's not right

because he says 'No. It's very interesting. Excellent. Eh, funny.' And

you just know then that it's an absolute dog.''

The new series opens with a sketch about depression; about how life is

grey and hopeless. Well, we've all had those kind of days, haven't we?''

says Fry. ''It's all part of getting older. Everyone says nowadays that

they're glad they're not 19 now. They never said that 15 years ago.

There is this whole Generation X thing, this idea that there is a

generation of people in their 20s who are worse off than their parents

were. It's the first time that's happened since the war.''

Fry admits he's always been a naturally ''old to middle-aged person''.

He smoked a pipe when he was a teenager. ''I think I will come in to my

own in my sixties. When I was 19 people thought I was pompous, but what

sounds pompous in a teenager doesn't sound pompous when you're 60,'' he

explains.

Though their respective careers have been wildly successful so far,

neither claims to have coldly calculated his respective direction. Fry

in particular is happy that his future has never really been in his own

hands. ''I've been blown by the wind in everything I've done. I like the

fact that I've lucked into this and then lucked into that,'' he says.

So what next? This is a cue for an in-joke from Laurie. ''Well, the

traditional pattern is that one of us goes to Hollywood and flukes his

way into a multi-million dollar film while the other sits at home and

gets sad and lonely. I want you to guess which one that might be.''

Sheepishly, Fry admits to having just made a big-bucks comedy movie in

America with Meg Ryan. In IQ he plays a professor of experimental

psychology who's engaged to a mathematician (Ryan) who just happens to

be Albert Einstein's niece.

''It is, I suppose, what you might call an unromantic lead part. I'm

an emotionally constipated cold fish. My fiancee falls for Tim Robbins,

who plays a motor mechanic. There is one scene where she tries to make

love to me,'' he explains.

Currently, Fry is preparing to take the West End stage alongside his

old chum Rik Mayall in Cell Mates, a new play by Simon Gray.

''I play the spy George Blake who was sprung from Wormwood Scrubs in

the sixties -- at that time it was quite rare for someone to walk out of

prison -- and everyone assumed it was the work of the KGB. But, of

course, it wasn't. It was masterminded by an Irish petty criminal called

Sean Bourke with the help of a couple of Aldermaston campaigners.

''Rik plays Bourke and the point of the play, which takes place mostly

in Moscow, is the fact that Blake completely betrayed him. It is sort of

funny-ish and serious-ish in spots,'' he says.

The timing of Cell Mates, which starts its West End run in two weeks,

has meant that Fry and Laurie have been forced to cancel a live show

they had lined up in Scotland to support the Student Hardship Fund at

Dundee University (where Fry is rector).

''I was terribly distraught at having to cancel but these things do

happen. We've promised to re-schedule the show and we will recompense

anyone who has lost out financially.

''The rectorship is a wonderful thing. It's a terrible shame that the

English universities do not have a similar institution. It is great to

have someone elected by the students who, in effect, gets a seat on the

board,'' he says.

Both Fry and Laurie are currently under commission to write

screenplays for feature films. Laurie, superstitious about such things,

is reluctant to discuss his but Fry is more forthcoming.

It is an adaptation for Paramount of John Kennedy Toole's masterly

1970s novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, which is set in New Orleans.

Toole's personal story is as interesting as the novel itself. He wrote

it as a young man and hawked it around the American publishing houses

with no success. Disillusioned, he took his own life, but his mother

eventually sold it and it was published to great acclaim several years

after his death.

* A Bit of Fry and Laurie starts on Sunday, February 12, on BBC1.