Afternoon Play: I Love Stephen Fry - (2008) BBC Radio (MP3 192kbps) - dearleuk

Afternoon Play: I Love Stephen Fry

By Jon Canter.

A woman escapes the monotony of her stale marriage by dreaming she's in love with Stephen Fry. Fry, a bona-fide national treasure, is everything her husband is not: eloquent, metropolitan, learned and gay.

Comedy drama, with Lesley Sharp and Phil Davis co-starring with Fry himself.

Stephen Fry .............................. Himself
Jackie .............................. Lesley Sharp
Terry ................................. Phil Davis
Margaret ......................... Carolyn Pickles
Ron ..................................... Ron Cook
Chloe ............................ Sinead Matthews
Carl ............................... Karl Theobald

Producer/Director Fiona McAlpine.


FRY'S A DREAM DATE

The radio and television comedy scriptwriter Jon Canter on creating a new piece for a national treasure tephen Fry.

You can't get away from him and you don't even want to. I certainly don't.

I've known him for 20 years and was script editor on two series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Mostly, this involved my saying: "Yeah, er, these scripts are great. Coffee?"

Do I really know him, though? What do we mean by "know"? What do we mean by "Stephen Fry"? Those are just some of the questions asked but not answered-in I Love Stephen Fry. It's a comedy about Jackie, an unfulfilled Suffolk woman, and her taciturn butcher husband, Terry, consummately played by those gifted truthmongers Lesley Sharp and Phil Davis. So why isn't it called Jackie, an Unfulfilled Suffolk Woman, and Her Taciturn Butcher Husband Terry? Am I nakedly exploiting Stephen's fame to try and get more listeners? The short answer's yes. The long answer's no: Jackie does indeed fall in love, from a distance, dreaming about Stephen constantly. Then the distance gets alarmingly short when her daughter bumps into him in a curry house in Norwich and tells him her mother loves him. This leads, inevitably, to Jackie meeting the man of her dreams.
Stephen (played -phew! -by Stephen Fry) is everything her husband isn't: erudite, metropolitan, famous and gay. Fiona McAlpine, the producer, kept asking me who else might play the part if Stephen weren't available. In my opinion, no-one else would do. Not only, for comic purposes. did Jackie's dream man have to be famous and gay, he also had to be a national treasure, someone about whom she'd instinctively dream, in the same way we all dream about the Queen. That's why I didn't end up writing I Love Dale Winton.

Astonishingly. the great man was available from ten o'clock on Thursday 8 May, for quite a few minutes. (It would definitely have been easier to get the Queen.) He'd got up at four that morning to finish a book, which, being Stephen, he was writing not reading. He turned up for the recording in an "I Love SF" T-shirt, bought in San Francisco. This was a high-risk strategy, but somehow it had none of the embarrassing effect of Lesley Ash wearing a T-shirt saying "I Love LA". He was genial, relaxed and uninhibited, relishing his nude dream scene (really). When you hear him slapping his naked torso-in a vain quest to find his car keys that's his own naked torso you're hearing. The pictures aren't always better on radio. Sometimes, you have to be there. After our recording, he was off to make an appeal on behalf of the victims of the Burma cyclone; then he was due to make a speech lauding the BBC.

Everyone wants him. Later that day, for all I know, he was having tea with Richard Dawkins, followed by supper with God. God, you feel, would be the one to ask for the other's autograph, with that old it's-not-for-me-it's-for-my-son excuse.
The man's unstoppable. Catch him while you can.





Type : mpeg 1 layer III
Bitrate : 192
Mode : stereo
Frequency : 48000 Hz
Length : 00:44:04
Encoder : Lame 3.97
Source : Freeview