The “horrible” TV show Stephen Fry hates with a passion: “Truth must out”
He quite sharply divides opinion, does Stephen Fry.
A lot of folk think he’s a cuddly kind of gentle professor figure, overflowing with whimsical knowledge and possessing a worldly smile for anyone he comes across. Then there are those who find him sanctimonious, patronising and more than willing to whore himself out to any supermarket that needs a mince pie voiceover. As with most things, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
But what you can’t knock him for, because I absolutely will not have it, is that he was anything other than a genius as General Melchett in Blackadder Goes Forth. I don’t care how many horrible things he’s said to Alan Davies on QI, or that ITV have cancelled Fry’s quiz show Jeopardy already, or how much he loves iPhones, he is genuinely hilarious for all six episodes of that series, and it is a perfected study in playing an upper-class buffoon.
Fry of course came out of Cambridge footlights along with many of the other Blackadder alumni including Hugh Laurie who he would go on to work with extensively, both on their own, quite good, sketch show and then also on the interminable Jeeves and Wooster, which was honestly the worst, like having smug, posh actors vomit their inconsequential, privileged upbringings onto a Sunday afternoon TV screen.
Given Fry appeared in that monstrosity and seemed more than happy to do so, it was quite strange to hear him take a pot shot at a thematically fairly similar show, albeit a much more globally successful one. Writing about British series gone by, especially those which happen to feature servants, Fry mentioned the 1971 drama Upstairs Downstairs as one he enjoyed, which was not something he could say about the more modern smash hit Downton Abbey.
He said: “The excellent balance of Upstairs Downstairs stands up very well against the ghastly snobbery and tacked-on noblesse oblige of that horrible Abbey programme. I say this guiltily, having actor friends I like very much who play in it, and play excellently, but truth must out.”
Well, as Fry tends to forget on a seemingly daily basis, opinion isn’t truth, and there has to be a reason tens of millions of people around the world love Downton Abbey, so he may well be wrong on that one, although if you apply that logic it would also mean Mrs Brown’s Boys has some merit, which it evidently does not.
Regardless, even though I have never watched a single minute of Downton Abbey in my life, my parents like it, so that’s reason enough for me to reject Fry’s invective and dismiss it as the incoherent ramblings of a former coke fiend, no matter how funny he was in the 1980s with Rowan Atkinson.
As a reminder to Fry, Downton Abbey, or just ‘Downton’ as us big fans of the show call it, ran for some fifty-two episodes over six seasons, had 69 Emmy nominations, winning 15 of them, 16 Bafta nominations, 11 Golden Globe nominations and spawned three stand alone movies, which together brought in almost half a billion dollars at the box office.
Fry, meanwhile, is going to have to find something else to do now that Jeopardy has been axed and Celebrity Traitors has finished, and it seems he’ll be doing some narrating on a new sci-fi comedy called Time Travel is Dangerous, which stars Brian Blessed and Johnny Vegas. He’ll also be appearing in and writing for a new US drama called The Interrogator as a former MI6 agent who has very specific skills but presumably doesn’t watch Downton Abbey in his spare time.
