fraud and – still a teenager – on the brink of a life of permanent failure, incarceration, familial exile and squalid ignominy. He managed somehow to extricate himself from all this and acquire academic qualifications and a scholarship to Cambridge University. Well, he did not ‘manage somehow’, but broke through thanks to the combined wonders of flawlessly kind parents and his own late discovery that he enjoyed academic work very, very much and could not bear the idea of missing out on a real education, especially amongst the stones and towers and courts of Cambridge, where heroes like E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth had pursued their silly games, rigorous work, lyrical sodalities, sentimental friendships and semi-serious sacra conversazione – reading earnest and intellectually powerful papers from hearthrugs while nibbling anchovies or sardines on toast and being touched up by dons recruiting for MI6 or the KGB.
That Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook of Beyond the Fringe and John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle of Monty Python and Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie of The Goodies , let alone Germaine Greer, Clive James, Douglas Adams, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Nicholas Hytner and so on, had also been at that same university, eating up the stage generations before me, was a less self-conscious inducement, although I suppose if I am honest, a small part inside of me did somewhere dream of fame and recognition in an as yet inchoate form.
You do not, I believe, grow up, even if you are Stanislavsky, Brando or Olivier, knowing that you are a great actor. Much less do you grow up believing that you have it in you to make any kind of a career out of performance on stage or screen. Everyone has always known that it’s ‘an overcrowded profession’. We are most of us these days I suppose familiar with the tenets of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success , which quite cogently argues that no one ever made a success of themselves without having put in at least 10,000 hours of practice before breaking through. No one, not Mozart, not Dickens, not Bill Gates, not The Beatles. Most of us have instead put in 10,000 hours of wishing, and certainly as far as acting was concerned I had long thought I would like to take a stab at it but hadn’t gone much further than that. I think my first print review, ‘Young Stephen Fry as Mrs Higgins would grace any Belgravia drawing-room’, went to my head when I was about eleven years old.
‘Oooh,’ whistling intakes of breath. ‘Nine hundred and ninety-nine actors unemployed for every one with a job, young fellow.’ How often would I hear this at drinks parties when I was a boy, such remarks always accompanied by the merest flash of a look acutely designed to assure me that with a face and string-bean body like mine I would never make a handsome leading man and should perhaps think of some other career.
‘Being a barrister is a little like being an actor,’ became my beaming mother’s comforting and hopeful mantra. For a while I went along with this and between the ages of twelve and fifteen would tell the Norfolk landowners and their wives to whose parties we came and went that I was all set to make it to the Bar. Norman Birkett’s Six Great Advocates was now my constant companion, and with all the repulsive self-confidence of the lonely geek I would bore my family with stories of the great forensic triumphs of Marshall Hall (my especial hero) and Rufus Isaacs, a great role model for any Jewish boy, since he rose to become Marquess of Reading and Viceroy of India. From a fruit market in Spitalfields to being curtseyed and bowed at and called Your Highness in the viceregal Palace of New Delhi. Imagine! And unlike Disraeli, a practising Jew. Not that I was ever that; nor were any of my mother’s immediate family. We were, in Jonathan Miller’s
That Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook of Beyond the Fringe and John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle of Monty Python and Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie of The Goodies , let alone Germaine Greer, Clive James, Douglas Adams, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Nicholas Hytner and so on, had also been at that same university, eating up the stage generations before me, was a less self-conscious inducement, although I suppose if I am honest, a small part inside of me did somewhere dream of fame and recognition in an as yet inchoate form.
You do not, I believe, grow up, even if you are Stanislavsky, Brando or Olivier, knowing that you are a great actor. Much less do you grow up believing that you have it in you to make any kind of a career out of performance on stage or screen. Everyone has always known that it’s ‘an overcrowded profession’. We are most of us these days I suppose familiar with the tenets of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success , which quite cogently argues that no one ever made a success of themselves without having put in at least 10,000 hours of practice before breaking through. No one, not Mozart, not Dickens, not Bill Gates, not The Beatles. Most of us have instead put in 10,000 hours of wishing, and certainly as far as acting was concerned I had long thought I would like to take a stab at it but hadn’t gone much further than that. I think my first print review, ‘Young Stephen Fry as Mrs Higgins would grace any Belgravia drawing-room’, went to my head when I was about eleven years old.
‘Oooh,’ whistling intakes of breath. ‘Nine hundred and ninety-nine actors unemployed for every one with a job, young fellow.’ How often would I hear this at drinks parties when I was a boy, such remarks always accompanied by the merest flash of a look acutely designed to assure me that with a face and string-bean body like mine I would never make a handsome leading man and should perhaps think of some other career.
‘Being a barrister is a little like being an actor,’ became my beaming mother’s comforting and hopeful mantra. For a while I went along with this and between the ages of twelve and fifteen would tell the Norfolk landowners and their wives to whose parties we came and went that I was all set to make it to the Bar. Norman Birkett’s Six Great Advocates was now my constant companion, and with all the repulsive self-confidence of the lonely geek I would bore my family with stories of the great forensic triumphs of Marshall Hall (my especial hero) and Rufus Isaacs, a great role model for any Jewish boy, since he rose to become Marquess of Reading and Viceroy of India. From a fruit market in Spitalfields to being curtseyed and bowed at and called Your Highness in the viceregal Palace of New Delhi. Imagine! And unlike Disraeli, a practising Jew. Not that I was ever that; nor were any of my mother’s immediate family. We were, in Jonathan Miller’s