Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life” | E201

I was lost in a drift. [music] And really what I first wanted to do was to take my life. Steven, he's a comedian, an actor, and a national treasure. He's a director. He's a writer. I I'll probably miss things out. Master of language, and for nights, my night. I was a deeply difficult child. My parents sent me to 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, Steven Fry. I want to please people and if I don't please them, I get upset. [music] I I've done it wrong. Age 37, you star in a play. The play gets some pretty harsh reviews. I [music] was lost in a drift and really what I first wanted to do was to take my life. Steven vanished on Monday, leaving a number of letters for friends. [music] That started my journey into my mental health. When you were 55, it was your third suicide attempt, afraid. So, that's right. Can you take me back [music] to that moment? Before this episode starts, I have a small favor to ask from you. 2 months ago, 74% of people that watch this channel didn't subscribe. We're now down to 69%. My goal is 50%. So, if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted, if you like this channel, can you do me a quick favor and hit the subscribe button? Thank you and enjoy this episode. [music] [singing] [music] I'm I'm so fascinated by um 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 it was an unthinkable roller coaster ride of twists and turns. But what do I need to know about about Steven 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 [snorts] difficult to keep still and I found it hard to focus. I was I'll say um vain as it may sound I think um intellectually advanced for my age. I was very quick with language and with speech um 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 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. [laughter] And the cry of uncleo would follow me, short for uncoordinated and worse. kind of words we certainly don't use now to describe a shall [snorts] we say a dyspraxic um 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. Um and I wasn't musically very gifted particularly. [snorts] Uh and I couldn't draw. So all I had was my passion for language and 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 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 though. My parents were in Norfolk on the east coast and I was sent to Gstershare on the west um uh to a 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 bought it since she was four. Um uh but that was because she was a Jewish refugee in in in England and her father wanted to hide her away from the impending Nazi invasion. And so that that that was a particular reason. [snorts] 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 2 and 3 in the afternoon and um shout at them through the keyhole every day, they'll just think, "Oh, that's what happens." [laughter] You know, and then you welcome them out and give them a big hug and say, "That was your cupboard time." [laughter] You know what I mean? Anything you do to a child regularly is the normal world essentially. Uh 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 down to 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. Um and it was deep in the countryside and the other boys that I knew very few girls but I did 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 Stevens I go when I'm seven and they go very good 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. Um it 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. [snorts] And through most of my prep school time, age 7 to 13 is a prep school in 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 all 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 and was just so vile. [snorts] Um I wanted to sit and read a book, you know, [laughter] by the side of the field and humor 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 it's 600 boys um rather than the prep school's 90s. So, it's a much less of a little nest and much more of a who but I was 13. And so, when you're 13, as you know too well, chemicals starts start to boil and bubble inside you and things begin to happen in your mind and soul. And um I was not prepared for the astonishing cataclysm, the catastrophe, the glorious catastrophe of love. It had never occurred to me that it was 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 me and and money come by love and hold my hand and 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 [snorts] of course I was in love with another boy and I was aware that that was probably not the right thing. And it it threw me out of everything really. I I just stopped being able even to pretend to be a normal well- behaved school boy. I I started doing weird things like climbing the roofs of all the buildings, the big chapels and churches and uh classrooms. And 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 the [clears throat] 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, buying things, and traveling and so on. In those days, they didn't even have magnetic strips on the back of credit cards for for you know that you just have to roll them on a piece of carbon to to to take an imprint. So there was it was very easy to use them fraudulently as long as you looked vaguely convincing. I I was aware because my father had once lost his Barkley 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, you know. Um [snorts] Eventually I ended up in Swindon of all unlikely towns. I think I was going to meet a school friend and the idea we was going to go to the Reading Festival. Um so I stayed in the hotel in Swindon and that's when uh a couple of I got back to my room having been shopping. There were a couple of men in the room which I thought was rather weird. Uh 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 then then said my name only not my name the name that was the name of the fellow whose credit cards I had stolen. Let's say his name is Smith. So they said Mr. Smith and I went yes and they said Wiltshire CD held up there. [laughter] Jesus. And suddenly I realized the the jig was on. I was sent to prison uh 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 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 at the so it was interesting because I was reading about your as [clears throat] 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 um and is that and I couldn't quite figure out why but I'm what what am I 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 I I my parents did send me to a psychiatrist when I was 14 15. He [snorts] was oddly enough a member of parliament and a junior health minister as well as a psychiatrist. Um so a very grand Harley Street office, you know, with one of those enormous mlong fountain pens the size of a small submarine with which it slowly writes things down. and uh he was slightly annoyed my parents weren't uh in the diplomatic service because the apparently the way I behaved and the and the things I did were very typical of people from unsettled families. Yeah. Um and you know constantly moving and and so on. But he 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 school master. He had a copy of a letter from that psychiatrist in which the psychiatrist had written bipolar question mark uh 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. [snorts] 100 years earlier it would have been called a moral kink. Basically they're just saying he's 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 of my love of literature and stories and wanting to be involved in the in the world of ideas desperately to learn more and to understand more and to share ideas. Um, uh, a cheap wish watching Parkinson every Saturday night to be famous, but not sure how how that could happen. It seemed absurd. And [snorts] a deep deep like a like hot lead leaking in the stomach whenever I contemplated my sexuality. this feeling because all I I read and read and read around it. You know, you go to a library in those days, of course, there was no worldwide web. So, you use what was known as the bibliography at the 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 of so I read a biography of Oscar Wild 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 um who were who were queer as we'd say now. And of course the ones I was reading about were were were born in 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. uh uh but the average person, you know, who was born queer uh had a a miserable outcome. It was illegal and you [snorts] police would uh treat you dreadfully and newspaper articles and and so I saw ahead of me a life of shame and secrecy and all abstinence and you know sorrow and just you know 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' I'd given them. And so I uh 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 there was a suicide attempt after an argument with your father. That's right. 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. [laughter] It doesn't seem like that. didn't seem normal. And while I was at Cambridge for the first year, I was on probation still. Jesus. I remember saying to to to one of my tutors or supervisors, I I said, "Oh, look at the date." I said, "Uh, 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 am." [laughter] I told him, he said, "What the hell?" kick out. Why didn't you tell us? I said, well, why didn't you ask me? [laughter] 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 undergraduate 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 [snorts] called Latin. It was a a comedy and that went to Edinburgh and it won a prize and and Emma um came to see it and brought someone along to watch it that she thought um might enjoy it. And I didn't remember this experience, but that person was Hugh Lori and he apparently came and watched the play and 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." Um, 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 the verse of the song and I said, "Oh, it's fabulous." And I sat down next to him. We started to work on on the lyrics of it and I added some ideas and then we'd you built it up into three or four verses in 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, 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 there to give an example. Um it it was I I described it as like falling in love but a platonic comedy love. Um we just seemed to gel straight away. It was most extraordinary. So from that moment on, we started writing stuff together um for our show and 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 [snorts] spears and um bellow speeches. Uh, and now there was this strange possibility of using comedy as a as a 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? [sighs] I I s I sat here with Maisie Williams, who's the the young Game of Thrones actress. Indeed. I know who you mean. Yeah. Yeah. And I I find, you know, and then I read this book called um the body holds the score and it talks about six ways that we can help our mental health and things like yoga and all these kinds of things, but one of them is acting. And it talks about the role that act, you know, this kind of separation from identity and how that can be liberating and wonderful. And when I when I heard you describe your first acting experiences, you use words like blissful and amazing [clears throat] and and as if you'd found your place in the world. 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. And we both had the same parents. We both have the same DNA, more or less. Not identical. We're not identical twins, but I mean really, we're pretty similar in terms of our birth and and our parentage and 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 yet too young to be self-conscious to have if you like those kind of issues of selfworth and uh um you know wanting to lose myself somewhere else. It was just a a young showoffy 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 the mental health aspect is true, but it is also the case and I'm sure you've [snorts] 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, there is you are 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 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. Um the comparison, and it's not a comparison of quality or value, is with an RAF pilot. every day they they're they're flying up like that and and it's they love it. They just made for it. I mean, it's frightening and they hate to see their companions killed and and 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 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 and relationships that that are also common in the acting world. I mean it may be [snorts] 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 of a of a happier and better kind than than other groups of people. Um so so you know it's it's it's a complicated story really isn't it? It's so interesting that that sort of anti-limax I think we've referred to that before as like gold medal depression. We [snorts] we tend to set ourselves goals of if only I could live in that kind of a village in you know in the south of England like a quite near a station and nice little house but not too expensive and yeah and then you get it and so yeah you live in the suburbs. Hooray. Um, oh, oh, maybe that car, that that new one there, that Tesla or whatever, I'll get a then I'll be happy. That you don't literally say then I'll be happy, but there's a kind of sense of that's all I really want. [snorts] And each of these goals is met and it isn't it as the the line of TS Elliot, that's not it. That's not it at all. And 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 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 you you know, you call it a full and achieved life um of of friendship and you know, elements of sacrifice and so on. But you know, you know that there's a hope for it. But but if you 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 resourced art. That's where you get your happiness. We know there's fake happiness from a a blow of a drug or something like that. And that couldn't be a more fake happiness. Um, 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 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 Willy Wonker and Goldfinger and a lot of great songs. He was an amazing songwriter [snorts] and uh and I remembered I had this diary entry when I was just getting to know him where they there was a party. I think it was his birthday and it was full of people, some of whom super famous and extraordinary people. But [snorts] he 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 and we chase we chase things that give us less time to see our friends. We we we we we chase work targets and we chase journeys and holidays and things with individuals and so on. But and I think we grow away from it. I think the older you get the the the less you appreciate friendship, which is really sad. When you're in your 20ies, 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 one of the jobs of getting older, well, I'm convinced that one of the jobs of getting older is not to become nullled, you know, like a tree. When a tree is young, you can bend it. It's, you know, a green stick as they call it. You can bend it and shape it and so on. But once 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 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 I 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 their heating and their mortgage and all all the rest of it. And I'm obviously not suggesting that that's valless 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, um, [snorts] 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 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 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 and because I wanted my own way there? Um and 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 deentological voice. This sense of obligation that is a peculiarity it seems of our species as far as we know. The image I always used 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 has tried, people have tried to explain it in different ways. Obviously, the genesis myth is that it we at a fruit. It gave us the knowledge of good and evil and the sense of shame of our physical selves. or or all those things that separate us from animals. Because humans since we were cognitively 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. [snorts] 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 play things of gods? A cruel kind of, you know, little as flies to wanting boys to the gods are we? They kill us for their sport as Webster put it. And you know so and and those that's those oldest questions still still really obsess us particularly [clears throat] now of course because in the age of AI we we are able to be gods ourselves. We we 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 um 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? Try my best. Yeah, I fail. Yeah, you fail. It's right. And and 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 and and um as I say I'm you know I'm I'm not a moral I'm not a model of [snorts] moral property and uh um rectitude of any kind but I do have a that loud voice and I've always had it I when I was a when my grandfather died and this is [laughter] 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 and making you self-conscious and you're holding back from your true nature because oh I can't do that in front [laughter] of God, you know, and um 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 a, you know, very tempting to be more like, you know, 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 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 that that really there is no free will. I I mean the most extreme examples are in a sense the easiest to see it. What a psychopath is 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 we must 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, [snorts] you know, it's this I don't really 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, good question. Past the age of, you know, 18, you know, the 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? That's such a good point. I mean we are in in that sense we are a story and a story is a is um a mixture of 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 the novel Harrari that wonderful chapter where he just he sort of proves that Peugeot 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 Peugeot car, but that's not Peugeot. And and and so on. And similarly, there is us. Um now, if I cut my toe off, I'm still Steven. I'm just Steven when I'm missing a toe. If I cut my head off, I'm dead. So, obviously, you know, I'm the remains of Steven. But if uh if I start cutting more and more bits, when do I stop being myself? It it's it's it's such a an extraordinary idea. We're aware of our own self and unless we have particular problems on the neurodiversity scale, for example, uh 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 eaten for a day and someone brings in a tray and there's a 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, theory of mind, you know, shows us that. Um, but uh [gasps] what that self is, how it can be in any way [snorts] 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's ever been done. Um, 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 sets or or or Jimmyi Hendris or John Lennon does. Who whoever you know 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 and 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 there is a way that we communicate beyond language. um the the actual sound in the throat of 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 is reading characters on a page uh uh um and writing them. Uh but the but the other way is is more is harder to understand, isn't it? But we do connect with people who are dead, who are away from us, um whom we remember. And there are 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 and if they die then the 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 and I 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 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 um a kind of permanent love. I kind of that's very ungracious, but I got married nearly eight years ago. Um, and that that has changed things to be married, especially talking about that child early on who knew he was gay and and saw ahead of him only a life of exile and shame. The the the prospect that I could ever actually be married and live happily and 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 bump 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 to be in a film. And I'm 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. Um, and otherwise I, 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 slight I 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. 15 years. 15 years of that. You've done far too much research, haven't you? But yeah, and and I mean I look back at it and I think I I cannot believe I was such an ass. But on the other hand, there are friendships I made that I don't 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 um I realized that I am a very very quiet domestic soul. I don't like going out. I don't like parties. I I I I said I said to my husband a couple of 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 [laughter] said, "That's a bit strong. Do you hate parties more than you hate Hitler?" I said, "Well, suppose [laughter] that was just a sort of weird moment." And 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 tell you another secret which you may have uncovered but it's an embarrassing one is that I have a condition called proopagnosia. 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 recognize you I'm afraid. And 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 the other way round. They Yeah. Remember faces but not names. But I and it it is I I have a little card in my wallet that says, you know, proopagnosia society and I give it to people. I say, "Oh god, I'm so sorry." But look, believe me, um, 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 the mental health charity and I I was thinking in the cab 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 and you know you teach yourself various things like the color of what someone's wearing on a particular day or if they have a you know you know earring or some sort of jewelry or something external to the face but it's a it's a a very odd one. So that makes parties even more difficult. As you know, Intel are now sponsoring this podcast. 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So, head over to john lewis.com to check out the Intel Evo designs and get your 15% off. Terms and conditions apply. See more details in the description box. Age 37, you star in a play, which again is called Cellmates, I believe. That's right. Um, the play gets some pretty harsh reviews to to say to say the least from a lot of the big newspapers as such. Um, and that's another real low mo moment in [snorts] your life where hugely so. [clears throat] Can you take me back to that moment? Yeah, it was pretty grim. I mean, I I we we'd done previews of it in Guilford and maybe what Guilford and Richmond I think before coming into the West End into the Nelcow Theater as it is now, the Aubry as it was I think. And I was with Rick Male whom I loved and was sweet and funny man and he was brilliant and 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, uh, who was sent to Wormwood Scrubs and then amazingly escaped. Um, I was never comfortable in the play and I was beginning to feel lost in a drift and deeply unhappy and I couldn't understand why the play wasn't that much of a disaster. I mean, the 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 lot, you know, it wasn't an absolute catastrophe, shall we say? At this point, because it's important context, you you're well established. Yes. In your in in writing in Yes. things like Black Adder and Jeeps and Worcester and and Fry Lori had happened and and and my books had been selling. So I was you know in in the public eye was well known. Um and anyway Saturday there was a Saturday night uh 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 [snorts] uh and that that did make a difference. I mean I I've said I didn't go just cuz I didn't like the reviews. It wasn't wasn't entirely that that would have been a bit weak and and certainly was a weak thing to have done anyway. But uh 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. Uh, and really what I first wanted to do was to take my life. And I I did run the car engine in the lockup garage of of the flat where I was in London and then realized it was a catalytic converter and 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 and um uh and and 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 and if it was nowhere that would be that would be at 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 ideiation as it's known in the trade as it 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, or no, Folkston, and got on a a ferry to Zbrugger in in Belgium and then ended up in Bruge in Bruge like uh [laughter] like Colin Farrell Brendan. And um I uh then wandered a little further east into Holland and then into Germany and Hanover and Hamburg. And you didn't tell anybody you you No. No. And this was 93 or so. There was no worldwide web as such. It was just beginning to happen. Tim Bernersley in Switzerland was beginning to develop the the the worldwide web. There were these things [snorts] these these things called commercial online servers like CompuServe and America Online rather than direct kind of internet connections and [gasps] I had been connected to those for for some time and I'd 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." Um, be in touch at least. And so I kind of sent him an email on this computer thing and [gasps and sighs] I agreed that the it was nonsense. I had this in my head this idea that I would go up from Hamburg and Hanover up Schlloik 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 to to Danes and be forgotten you know and just live the rest of my life there. Total fantasy. [snorts] Um, but no, Hugh Hugh said, "Come on, it's fine. Come home. We really want to see you. Everyone wants to." Uh, and so I I drove back overnight to to Amsterdam and my father had had got a flight to Skipol and we we met in a hotel in in in Skipol 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 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 um absence. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I watched it upstairs before we had this conversation of the I think it was maybe BBC News or one of the big stations reporting that you had uh you you were basically missing a big picture of you on the screen and saying that you had you know the way that they had framed it obviously is they said you did this play they showed some of the headlines some of the reviews and they said he's Steven Fry's vanished. Oh my god. Um and everyone was very 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 and which was slightly disturbing looking for signs of me and obviously feeling the worst. [sighs] Ah, it was a strange event, but in some ways it was a a cleansing or a a necessary step, I suppose. Uh, because as a result of it, I went to see psychiatrists and started to try and work out why why my mind was taking me into such impossible dark places or um, 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. Um what why should I come to such a crisis just because someone didn't like my performance in that play is not really good enough. Um and and I'm not that hyper sensitive. Um, so I that started what I suppose we have to call my journey into my mental health and um, and a few years later, can't remember when, well, quite a few years later, probably about eight or nine if not 10 years later, I made a program at the BBC or two two uh, episodes I think it was called The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive uh, in which I tried to explore this this peculiarity of this darkness that can shroud her mind so completely, but also that it's part of a 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. Um, manic depression is is two illnesses. Depression, which is a dark depressed, lowered, as in depressed state. And mania is is an elevated state of energy and and full of full of bounce and vigor and and a desire to communicate with people. And depression is the exact opposite. You just want to line bend, pull the duvet over your head and never speak to anybody. [snorts] 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 the the one pole of of of mania, hyper mania, and the other pole of a 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 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. Um, do you want to press the button?" And almost none of them wanted to press the button. And it and and it it reminded me of a thing that WHord, the poet, had written about, don't take my devils away or my angels will fly away too. And 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 like manic depression and how serious it can be is part of us and and gives us a 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, pe people especially if it's undiagnosed. If you start finding that you're crashing in moods and becoming miserable and and and everyone's finding you a pain in the ass or you're absolutely wild and full of crazy plans and, you know, buying things, you know, going on shopping sprees or being sexually exhibitionist or inappropriate and 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 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, leave their families, their families can no longer tolerate their their substance abuse, for example, and they 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 and then to face the problem and and it's a really as we know now a huge endemic problem it seems in in in our culture and country amongst young people. It's expressed with a rash of self harm that is is just so so upsetting to see [snorts] children hurting themselves and and and if you ask them why they do it it's always the same answer is it's to dis 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 is just heartbreaking to imagine post diagnosis of um manic 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 uh exploratory journey of of medication. Um, my psychiatrist tried me on a number of things. Um, sodium valprate, which has since become somewhat somewhat [snorts] of a of a disgraced pharmaceutical, particularly when when it's been given to people with um various forms of epilepsy. Um, and then lithium, and I was on lithium for for quite a number of years. and and then slowly I became aware of some [snorts] 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. Um there certain kinds of people who if they hear someone's depressed say well go 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 uh a chronic condition i.e bit like asthma or 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 [snorts] also believing in a future. It's incredibly important. 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 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 is not a rogue that will look 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, [snorts] captain of my soul, master of my destiny, and all of that. So, yes, I started walking every morning, uh, you know, when I was in London, go around Regent's Park and listen to audio books, 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 Dstoyki or Agatha Christie. It wasn't about uh high literature necessarily. It was about just having a story in my head and walking and walking and looking and saying, "Wow, I did 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 to to be who I am and not to fight for my place at the table. I I suppose I've accepted that um 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 the, you know, to to myself to to have to work all the time. Um, and so I am sometimes capable of saying looking to myself in the mirror and saying, "You you're quite happy today, aren't you, Stephen?" And then I'll go, "No, don't say that. It's the worst thing you could say." [snorts] You've got almost 13 million followers on Twitter. M what's your relationship been with social media because you know up and down I mean Twitter really is a cesspool at the best of times just 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 not a great place to be if you want No indeed it isn't I mean it is supportive too 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 yeah you call it a cesspool and and I've used similar images in the early days it was like a lovely swimming hole in the in a in a in a in a in a glade in a in a lovely wood somewhere where people of good will and from from around swim about and you'd bump into them and go hi how are you and you just chat and then suddenly you notice oh there's a turd floating on it [laughter] what the hell's that doing there and then suddenly there'd be a bit of broken glass when you put your foot down and or an old rusty pram or something and you realize that it had become as you say a kind of sispool and 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 by tweeting about them and it will reach a bigger audience than if I spend four hours doing a profile with a journalist who who always want to get under my skin and ask annoying questions. So, it's a lazy good publicity uh tool. Um I'm I'm slightly worried uh that 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. Um, I I mean I'll consider I might just simply stop using it in any other way except to post things for charities or or work that that you know, but rather than engaging in people, I just I'm not sure I want to see some of the tweets that float up from the kind of people that [laughter] Musk encourages. I mean that I may be wrong it and it's not that I want it to be a left-wing thing, not a right-wing thing. I mean, I'm fully um, of course, aware that it should reflect society. uh as much as possible. But uh um you know what I wanted to do in sort of way is go on one of those. Doesn't Pierers 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 want to go. Hello. How are you? You old [ __ ] It's [ __ ] great to see you [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] And him to go you can't say that. Oh, I [laughter] thought this was the home of free speech. Isn't it? I thought I thought this is the [ __ ] home of [ __ ] 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, cuz that's that's the point. I mean, free speech is of course important, but it's not 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 and or starvation and poverty and all those sort of things. That 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. Doesn't matter if people are starving and the gap between rich and poor is wider than it's ever been. Uh the only thing that matters is I can say what I want. Well, that's that. I just don't think that's what John Stewart Mill and all the [snorts] 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 the you know the be all and end all but um 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 and indeed anti-feminist on the other side and all kinds of other nastiness will prevail and Musk will go yeah that's that's That's what we call free speech. I'm a free speech absolutist. He called himself. It is. It I mean it is concerning. It is concerning generally. I I've made the decision that I just don't I 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 [ __ ] floating past in the in the once lovely lake and then a piece of glass. I'll end up having an argument with a piece of [ __ ] and I don't or a piece of glass and I just don't want to. I I think what what what I think of is like if if at school you're um 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 ch Oh, what's he put that up for? He's a wanker, isn't he? And all that, you know, I mean, just put your notice up and walk away. Yeah. And now to the credit of Twitter, you can have settings where one of the settings I have on my Twitter feed is that I can't see any tweets person 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 I don't get many tweets because, you know, it filters out a lot of the the stuff. So my my notifications are are [clears throat] 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. Um, exactly. With this journey of mental health, I know you're you're the president of Mind, I believe, which is a phenomenal charity that everybody um everybody probably knows for 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. Um 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. you know, the ways that I react to certain thing, my triggers, maybe they'll never be cured. Um, 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. Yeah. 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 life. Yes, afraid so. 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, when 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 know what I mean. And and it's a bit like that with with with you know you you at your peril do you think you've conquered it. [snorts] You you living with it and coping with it and managing it. And most of the time one manages it. But sometimes you you hear it the the the the you know the the hoof beatats uh back 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 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, oh, Tom, hey, have a look at my blond feet." they would go shut up. Similarly, you wouldn't show it to your mother, you know, or to your sister, [laughter] 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? And they 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 and they'll be upset nearly always when when you have a crisis if it it gets as far as suicide obviously even more so. But any 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 I was a general water in my mind as it were and and you just feel and [snorts] you have to try and overcome that. But yes, it it I have to be aware it won't necessarily go away. It's it's um the the other thing I often say is it's like the weather and and and um the weather is real. You know, 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-sh t-shirt." You 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. It's it and and nor do you have to sort of welter in the problem of thinking, well, that's it. It's snowing now. 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 it's 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 under your control. Those are three things. They're not absolutely hoay, but they're just enough if you cling on to them to make you realize 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 is there words associated with with those moments? Is because you said earlier on about what's the point? What are the narrative? That is often the one. What is the point? And it's also just a it's like I mean all of us who who have had it and I'm sure many of the people listening will have different you know metaphors and comparisons. It's it is like something being sucked out of your sort of energy suck and 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 that you're utterly white and people who love you and know you well see it in your eyes straight away. So, 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 he would have seen it instantly. And I look at them myself in the mirror and think, "What what is he seeing?" It is a common thing. And I noticed this during the um during the uh the documentary. uh if you take a magazine and you know 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 with in that way and then look it it's amazing how I found people with who have had mental health histories that have not been happy have a often have a more extreme difference in their left and right eye that if you look at my left and right eye one is rather cold and calculating and one is warm 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 it's anyone's ever ever [clears throat] done any research onto it, but there are, you know, there are signs and signals that come. Um, uh, it's, you know, like some people get I get itchy under the chin when I'm going to have an asthma attack, for example. Get unmistakably itchy under the chin. But with with mania, which is often worse, I mean, I interviewed someone who with with mania, you want to concentrate, you want new projects, you've got amazing ideas in your head, you're risktaking and entrepreneurial and grandiose. Um and and I interviewed someone in America who who I interviewed the wife that the 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 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. That but when someone's manic they are just out of control. They are so embarrassing. They would do such weird things. She said, she said, "You'll laugh, but it was awful at the time." He had a car, a nice car. It's like a 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 he, you know, he the pencil or 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 the all the engine parts were out and then he had a change of state uh 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 you know that that that's the problem. But when I've had mania, I had a a manic episode right in the middle of someone's memorial. It was quite extraordinary. And and it frightened me because the power of it was so intense. And I I I ran home and I called my doctor, my psychiatrist, Billy, and I said, "Billy, I'm I have to tell you, I've had visions and I feel the closest I can describe it to is like Jon of Arc. I feel irradiated by some extraordinary power and light. It's the most extraordinary thing and I I just don't know what I'm going to do. He said, "I'm coming around." [laughter] He came around and he said, "This is a very dangerous day." he could see me and I had I had done I'd started cooking and I'd started um tidying the I' done three different jobs and the cooking thing I'd done a plate with quail's eggs halved um so elegantly around the edge of the plate and it was so beautiful everything's amazing I said I don't know why you've come 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 your eyes are absolutely kind of off the scale and I want you just to take this and he gave me some uh what was it called? Um it'll it'll come to me it and it sort of calms you down. It's an antiscychotic essentially I suppose or an anxolytic or something like that. That was that was one of the more extreme manic moments I'd had and and actually was pretty frightening because it took me a long time to get down from it and and I am the last person in the world to say that I feel like Jonavar, [laughter] you know, like someone who has had some extraordinary transcendent, you know, religious experience. Um, but that's that's how I felt. You've you've accomplished so many unbelievable things in your career in spite of all of these struggles that that we've talked about. Um, the list is actually too long for me to 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 the scripts you've written, etc. Why? Why and how? Why and how you you know and it's always a difficult question because and it requires us to abandon humility for a second potentially and and say something nice about oneself but why 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 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 as with Hugh and on my own to write monologues and sketches to perform and because I'd written them I I sort of wrote them for myself to perform but the writing was at the bottom of it all. Um, 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 whoever they write their music doesn't matter how fantastic their voices are. Yes, we love Nack 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 he 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 audio books and and things like that. Immense fun, but the real work is always sitting in front of the blinking cursor and and and and writing things. Um, and everything else is is gravy and fantastic gravy at that. Not because it's easier. Um, and and you know, I'm not sort of saying acting is easy. It's just for some reason in my head, you know, the Protestant work ethic, the Jewish work ethic, call it what you like, is the one that says, you know, sitting alone, concentrating until bubbles of blood fall 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 I I was very friendly in their heyday. Well, I still am uh uh with for example Damian Hurst in in in the ' 90s. I was very much an obituary as a Groucho Club and uh and and and you know the Tracy Emmens and the um and the Damian Hurst would come in along with the Oasises and the Blurs and and so on. It was very much the the the place where those incredibly energetic and and new kinds of artists were would assemble. And you know, I'd get drunk with uh Damian a lot. And I would sometimes say, I want to be an artist. And he'd say, "You are an artist. Anybody could be an artist." I said, "No, they can't." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "And I would say, I'm an I'm an entertainer. I'm frankly a bit bourgeoa. I I want to please people, and if I don't please them, I get upset. I' I've done it wrong. For 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 can 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. 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 Hamling is a wonderful [snorts] painter uh in Suffuk and she's done my portrait several times or 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. Uh if a, you know, a commissioner wants me to do something, I'll ask him how how he'd like it done. I'll try and put my 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. Um, and that's why they're so unpopular with the Daily Mails and the bourgeoa people because they don't please. They don't provide what is comfortable or easy and what people would like or pretty or you know it's always oh doesn't disgusting of throwing a pot of paint into the public's face that was said 150 years ago. Um you know it's always been thus and artists are special I think. Um, I [snorts] mean I like makers or craftsmen, artisans, you know, that that who who make beautiful things, whether it's shoes or, you know, Tom Daily 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 part of the kind of education I've had and that has privileged art above all things, but art is special to me and it has a special place and does special things. Um it usually very simple and and that's the 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 Go with showing the petals falling off the sunflower, there's death in there. And as for Francis Bacon and indeed uh uh Damian Hurst and 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 to Shakespeare's sonets. 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 of the universe that that drag us down. You know, my nipples are dropping two inches every year as as gravity takes hold and it will for all of us [laughter] and and art keeps them propped up, if you like. [snorts] I I very much I've been going back and forth about this point about art because I've realized as probably as I've got older that um expression in some artistic form whether it's knitting that jumper like Tom Daly does is so great for our mind. Absolutely. and and um you know you've talked about a few things there even when you're talking about social prescribing just some way to express oursel through the medium of music or painting or creation seems to be it seems to be so human and so innately um important to to all of us um 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 I guess maybe the difference there is that's a being a great artist. [laughter] Yes, I think it's true. Yeah, there are there are qualities and degrees. There's a spectrum of I mean there are there people have tried to define I mean an artisan, a craftsman can make the same thing again and again identically and it's genius, you know, they're making four chairs. Each chair is is the same. An artist never does the same thing again. They they might have a theme that they do. So you you know you can get a lot of artists who you know uh who who who who like to paint a particular subject. Um whether it's Bedlingfield terriers famous Scottish artists used to do Craig Herson um um he liked to do little Bedlington Terriers and he liked there's usually a star somewhere but everyone is different. everyone is a is a variation on a theme whereas an artisan is happy to make things that are perfect and the same each time. Uh a craftsman and but they're both good for the mind. In fact, probably being a craftsman is better for the mind. [snorts] There's I remember Rowan Atkinson said to me once years ago, he's a very wise man indeed and thinks a lot, very [snorts] very very thoughtful and 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. Um, and and it's immensely important uh 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 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 can, as I say, it could be knitting, carpet making, it can 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 that you've listened to the radio or or the television's on in the corner or you've got a playlist going and it's it's a it's a magical thing. flow state. And and and if if anyone's thinking of how they might do that, one of my favorite films is a film called Running on Empty, a Sydney LT film with River Phoenix and Jud Hirs and various others in it. And uh it 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 didn't. They tried to do it when it was empty. So, they've been on the lamb from the FBI for like 15 20 years. That's the backstory. [snorts] Anyway, that means that they're they they don't have much and they're constantly having to go on the move when the FBI might be close. And uh the River Phoenix's character is a musical genius as it happens. Not 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 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 found or made." And so he'd found this stone and this piece of wood or whatever, driftwood, 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 of 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 [snorts] you 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 or you know that's all I'm saying. It sounds so cheesy. No, it's be 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 indeed 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 [clears throat] 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 your if your 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 going to ask a variation of it to you was a recipe constituting of a bunch of different ingredients. M 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 timed things right and might have had children and and that's an experience that an enormous number of my fellow humans undergo and it clearly gives pleasure. I have many godchildren and now [snorts] nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews. Um, and but I've I'll never experience the the a child growing up and and and and that I mean it's slight certainness. It's um it allows me fantastic um ironic sarcastic in fact conversations with people sometimes where someone goes all this nonsense about global warming and I mean, you know, 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." [laughter] 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 I mean, yeah, that's fine. And they'll go, "Oh, look, don't be stupid." And I go, "Well, that's [laughter] very silly of me, but but it um yeah, I mean, that's probably the biggest hole in my 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 that just unbelievable really. And [snorts] of course I've had opportunities I suppose to have had children. I I mean you know I could have sorted something out. I could have and you know Elliot and I could you know we we we talked about it a bit but we never we never talked about to the extent of right so we're going to a clinic tomorrow to talk this through to some expert you know we never quite got that far. It was always just yeah, it would be nice, wouldn't it? Um [snorts] and uh so that's probably the I mean otherwise of course there are there are regrets in life because um as you get to 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 because it was my 65th birthday on the 24th of August. So a [snorts] as you move towards uh uh the seer the yellow leaf as Shakespeare put it. Oh so so embarrassed. Shakespeare calling saying [clears throat] could you stop quoting me? Oh it's my sister. It might be important Joe. Yes. Sorry I'm still at the um Oh god. Am I late? Sorry. [ __ ] I am. Yes you're quite right. The driver the driver is saying at the moment he's worried about getting you back. The driver is worried about getting me back in time. I understand. He's right outside. 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. [laughter] Joe loves you, Bartlett. You're the Butler pair. The juicy Butler pair. [laughter] Yeah. Please apologize for me interrupting. I know. I know you 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 I'll text them when I'm in the cab on the way there. Gosh, I'm sorry. No worries at all. No worries. Listen, Stephen, 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? Already had it. Ah, 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 had achieved so much, most people would be satisfied with retirement and wrapping it all in. What then became your motivation in your life? This the 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 um program, I'm doing dinos. Yeah. Uh living, you know, doing this new technology, being with the dinosaurs. so exciting. It was just a whole new thing for me. And and I'd never done anything like it. And so I just said yes. And even though it meant like am I going to get how 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 turned out to be a wonderful program and unique kind of technology demonstrating these dinos. So 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 which is good fun and uh you know 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 [ __ ] piece of uh uh TV or film with big stars in it uh feeling like, "Ooh, I'm in Hollywood." You know, it's [snorts] not that I'm calling the morning show [ __ ] because that's the least [ __ ] thing I've ever done. I've actually had the privilege of seeing all of the above other than your upcoming movie, which which hasn't been shot yet. But when I saw dinosaurs, it was um 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 to to a place in in our history. Thank you so much for your time, Stephen. I really appreciate it. You're someone real pleasure. And do I have to leave a question for your next question? If you could, that would be amazing. going to give you the book that I oversee you. Thank you, Stephen. Quick word from one of our sponsors. I've got a tip for all of you that will make your virtual meeting experiences, I think, 10 times better. As some of you may know by now, Blue Jeans by Verizon offers seamless, highquality video conferencing. But the reason why I use Blue Jeans versus other video conferencing tools is because of immersion. Their tools make you feel more connected to the employees or customers you're trying to engage with. And now they're launching one of their biggest feature enhancements to impact virtual events so far called Blue Jean Studio. Actually used it the other day. I did a virtual event using the studio which I think about 700 of you came to. TV level production quality all done by one person with very little technical experience on a laptop. 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