Stephen Fry

[Brodie]

In his own words.

 

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Stephen Fry dismisses MPs' expenses row

 

Thats pretty much my opinion on that situation, but obviously put accross much more eliquently than I could ever manage. Newspaper headline after headline about a bit of expenses fiddling, (the ironly being the journalists and newspapers arent exactly the role models we want) which takes the focus of the real issues the country is facing.

 

The whole thing is pointless to the extreme, the rules that guided the MPs were lax and they took advantage, as people are liable to do in most walks of life. The rules have now been tightened, we now all know whether are own MPs are as moralistic as we would like, and if not we dont vote for them - that should be the end of the story.

 

But the fact that Stephen Fry said it, doesnt mean thats a reason to dislike the man, surely he's entitled to an opinion like the rest of us?

[Total Longo]

I notice he's the first person on those hideous M&S Christmas adverts, along with other irritating twats like Jennifer Saunders and James Nesbit. I don't understand all the cock-sucking on this thread, I don't mind Stephen Fry as a comedian, writer, presenter etc, but i do draw the line at Christmas Ads being shown in early November so for that reason he can do one. I find the likes of Stewart Lee, Charlie Brooker and Armando Ianucci much funnier and for some reason, a lot less annoying.

[Anubis]

What was wrong with what he said? I'm more than willing to debate that. Simply stating that he didn't doesn't really do much.

 

Personally I don't see how you can equate people pocketing some office stationary or fiddling their lunch expenses from a private employer with people who have put themselves forward as servants and guardians of the public, who then raid money they've taken from the public in direct contravention of the rules. They may have bent sopme rules to flip homes, but many of them abjectly and routinely broke those rules on necessity to buy duck houses, clean moats, and but cat food - amongst other things. We castigate benefit cheats, so why should we not castigate MPs.

 

But the fact that Stephen Fry said it, doesnt mean thats a reason to dislike the man, surely he's entitled to an opinion like the rest of us?

 

I haven't said I dislike him. In fact, had you read everything I've posted (which you obviously haven't), you'd see quite clearly that I've stated that I do like him. I said his opinion on MP's was wrong. That's my opinion.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Personally I don't see how you can equate people pocketing some office stationary or fiddling their lunch expenses from a private employer with people who have put themselves forward as servants and guardians of the public, who then raid money they've taken from the public in direct contravention of the rules.

 

Raid money! Come off it. They've bent and broken the rules to claim more than they are entitled to. It's wrong, we all know it. However, it has been hyped out of all proportion. You're doing it yourself with this 'raid money from the public' stuff.

 

They may have bent sopme rules to flip homes, but many of them abjectly and routinely broke those rules on necessity to buy duck houses, clean moats, and but cat food - amongst other things.

 

Cat food? Fucking hell, let's stop the planet from spinning whilst we moan about an MP mistakenly claiming for some fucking cat food. I mean, it'll get the slaughter of many hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghans off of the front pages for a while. It's media hype and people have fallen for it.

 

We castigate benefit cheats, so why should we not castigate MPs.

 

He didn't say that they shouldn't be castigated. Are they wrong? Of course they are. Has it been wildly blown out of proportion by the media and that is his main point.

[Anubis]

Errors my sweaty hairy arse. I love the way you concentrate on cat food, but when you start to add up all the claims going back over years then what has been claimed in breach of the rules it adds up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Hundreds of thousands of pounds which could have been spent on schoolds, hospitals, or maybe a proper winter heating allowance for pensioners.

[Brodie]

In my opinion he's wrong. Ministers should be given greater pay, but he's got a cheek when people were claiming for moat cleaning, cat food and duck houses. People have not fiddled their expenses to the tune that many MPs have.

 

Calm down SM, I had read your previous posts, but as you can see from this quote you can see where I might have got the impression you might have a problem with him due to his opinion on one topic. Unless, instead of 'he's got a cheek' you meant 'he's got a right to his opinion'?

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Errors my sweaty hairy arse.

 

No, there were errors. Errors that were corrected straight away and before it was in the papers. There were also cases of deliberate fraud. These should be dealt with by the police.

 

I love the way you concentrate on cat food, but when you start to add up all the claims going back over years then what has been claimed in breach of the rules it adds up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Hundreds of thousands of pounds which could have been spent on schoolds, hospitals, or maybe a proper winter heating allowance for pensioners.

 

Hundreds of thousands of pounds. It's probably more than that. It might even stretch two half a day in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

I concentrated on cat food because it shows how petty this is. I've said they were wrong to claim for certain things. Some of them should be charged even. Still, it's nothing in comparison to what is being kept off the front pages by this hyperbolic nonsense.

[TE-23]

I notice he's the first person on those hideous M&S Christmas adverts, along with other irritating twats like Jennifer Saunders and James Nesbit. I don't understand all the cock-sucking on this thread, I don't mind Stephen Fry as a comedian, writer, presenter etc, but i do draw the line at Christmas Ads being shown in early November so for that reason he can do one. I find the likes of Stewart Lee, Charlie Brooker and Armando Ianucci much funnier and for some reason, a lot less annoying.

 

". . . the only . . . faintly diverting thing in the show is Cowell's hair, suspiciously jet black, bristly and curiously flattened on top, as though he prepares for each episode by dipping his head in matt-black Dulux and painting his dressing room wall with it . . . Silly hair and shit singers: that's The X Factor . . ."

 

Charlie Brooker is ace.

[Stouffer]

Moab is my washpot is a very good read.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

He won a Special TV Award last night. Top man.

[Steve Holt]

Good stuff. I never watch them anymore but very few deserve it more.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Good stuff. I never watch them anymore but very few deserve it more.

 

I didn't catch it, either. It's well worth a watch, though.

 

d_Nz14WMobw

[Steve Holt]

I didn't catch it, either. It's well worth a watch, though.

 

d_Nz14WMobw

 

Thats just brilliant. Repped.

[Steve Holt]

RHxXcPC-PcM

 

I fucking love Weebl

[RedBrian84]

Stephen Fry is a legend. As far from smug as you can get. Intelligent, witty and a gracious human being.

 

A Bit Of Fry And Laurie is one of my favourite programmes of all time, and QI is essential viewing. His relationship with Alan Davies makes the show; I remember the "50 not out" programme that was on a few years back and Phil Jupitus said Fry was like the 'kindly headmaster' and the guests were his 'eager pupils'. He said that Fry loved to hear Davies' daft statements and views, and he would encourage him, even if he came out with lines like "we'll all live on Mars one day".

 

I think Jupitus' assessment is quite right; Fry has got a bit of Mr Chips about him.

 

Long may he reign!

[Lee909]

Stephen Fry

The odd quotation, thought or reference that's too long for Twitter

 

The Daily Mail and Lord Dacre appeasing again

 

DM can stand for Direct Messages in Twitter or the Daily Mail out there in the big bad world. I don’t read either, and all my friends know that I never read British newspapers of any kind.

 

Nonetheless there are always those that like to sympathise: today I’ve had plenty of, “Ooh you seem to have riled the Daily Mail” and “The Daily Fail have got it in for you today”… tweets. None of which has made me turn to the loathed organ in response and dignify it with reading whatever it is that it has written about me. I have pieced together that it’s the usual “what right does the pompous luvvie have…” etc etc. Well, the same right as the pompous journo who wrote the piece I would assume. In other words the right of free speech. Are they suggesting I actually don’t have the right to blog? Apparently the hate-piece* was put together by a disc jockey called Colin something or other whose great use for Lord Dacre, the Mail’s autocratic führer, is that he is gay. “Hurrah! Stephen Fry doesn’t speak for all gay people!” Well, of course I bloody don’t and would never claim to. But if there’s one thing the Mail can do better than any other paper it’s erect a fake coconut and then knock it down and claim a prize.

 

I have helped spark a debate about the Sochi Olympiad and I can be as proud (or “smug” as they would undoubtedly call it) about that as I like.

 

There’s no real personal animus in this at all. A friend gave me a “Hated by the Daily Mail” badge and it remains one of the proudest things I own.

 

image

 

But there’s form here. The Mail still can’t quite live with the shame that it has always, always been historically wrong about everything - large and small - from Picasso to equal pay for women. Because it has always been against progress, the liberalising of attitudes, modern art and strangers (whether by race, gender or sexuality). Of course they’ll leap on a Stephen Lawrence bandwagon once the seeds of their decades of anti-immigration racism (read a 1960s or 1970s Daily Mail) have been sown, but deep down they have always come from the same place and had the same instinct for the lowest, most mean-spirited, hypocritical, spiteful and philistine elements of our island nation.

 

Most notoriously of all, they loved Adolf Hitler when he came to power, and as the Czech crisis arose they were the appeasement newspaper. And woe-betide any liberal-minded anti-fascist who warned that the man was unstable and that consistently satisfying his vanity, greed and ambition was only storing up trouble. The whole liberal left, not to mention Winston Churchill, were mocked and scorned for their instinctive distrust of Hitler. The Daily Mail knew better.

 

In January 1934 Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, younger brother of the paper’s founder Alfred Northcliffe (the 4th Viscount Rothermere is chairman of the company that still owns it) wrote an article called “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”. He was sending congratulatory telegrams to “My dear Führer” as he liked to call him, right up until a few months before the outbreak of war. For more details read this article by Richard Norton-Taylor

 

Months before war, Rothermere said Hitler's work was superhuman | Media | The Guardian

 

Of course I know Putin isn’t Hitler. But then Hitler wasn’t the full Hitler we now think of in back in 1935 either. The death camps and atrocities were years away. He became the Hitler of 1939 because we never stopped him. All historians agree now on how doubtful and uncertain he was in 35, 36, 37, and 38. The occupation of the Rheinland provinces of Alsace Lorraine and the annexation of Austria went unchallenged. The Olympic games reinforced his huge status at home.

 

Nor was Stalin the full Stalin in 1920. True terrible bloody leaders become so because they are not stopped. The last four lines of W. H. Auden’s The Tyrant come to mind:

 

 

 

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

 

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

 

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

 

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

 

 

 

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco and any other despot you care to mention: they become despotic, maniacal, more autocratic, more insane every time they are given a greater sense of their own power. The fanatical junior KGB officer Vladimir Putin will become, if he is allowed to get away with it, as autocratic as any Tsar or any Soviet chairman. Vladimir the Terrible will have blood on his hands. He already does, but there will be so so much more. Little children will die in the streets. All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. That saying is so well-known it’s hardly worth repeating. You would think…

 

But apparently I don’t have the right to bleat my liberal opinion. Apparently because one of my livelihoods is acting (oh how they love to forget the fact that I’ve written books and even more millions of words of journalism) makes anything I say “luvvie talk”. It rather amuses me that the Oxford English Dictionary cites me as the first person to use the word luvvie. The word has come back to bite me in the arse, you might say…

 

IL DUCE DACRE

 

I should add this, just because you have a Right To Know. Lord Dacre is himself a frothing autocrat. An absolutely foul-mouthed boss, who constantly screams the c word at just about anyone. He would have read my Open Letter to David Cameron and yelled that “that cunt Fry needs another fucking dressing fucking down” — just the kind of language that his paper would prissily decry of course, there’s the glory in the vile bastard’s hypocrisy. He sends his son to Eton, but somehow mocks me for being posh. He bullies, swears and shrieks, but presents his paper as having the values and standards of a misty Midsomer Britain. He decries indecency on one page and pushes his male readers into a semi over a semi-nude actress on another. His cancer scare, miracle cure stories are sickeningly anti-science and the only good thing to be said about his Mail is that no one decent or educated believes in it. Which is what you can say about psychics, mediums, homeopathy and the casting of runes, but that makes it, like them, more exploitative and wicked, not less.

 

Dacre is, all those who have had the misfortune to work for him assure me, just about as loathsome, self-regarding, morally putrid, vengeful and disgusting a man as it possible to be. His power is absolute. Cross him either in private or public and you will be assassinated by his sycophantic squad of columnist minions, all of them infected with his brand of repulsive hypocritical and gleeful spite, ready to vomit out a screed against the BBC (watch this hilarious Vine loop as an example WTF | Watch: If you think Sky News was bad with the royal baby coverage... - entertainment.ie ) or any other institution they hate.

 

He absolutely despises me and thinks I stand for everything that is wrong about Britain and I think exactly the same of him.

 

Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice. In the case of the Daily Mail that’s 50p or whatever it is now and in the case of me it’s for the low, low price of free.

 

*hate-piece is a genuinely used term: I can remember being rung up by an editor in the 80s when I still wrote for papers and magazines. “Yeah, we need a hate-piece on x by tomorrow”. It was one of the moments that eventually stopped me from ever writing for papers again. That and the blessed advent of sites like this and twitter.

[Lee909]

Stephen Fry

The odd quotation, thought or reference that's too long for Twitter

 

The Daily Mail and Lord Dacre appeasing again

 

DM can stand for Direct Messages in Twitter or the Daily Mail out there in the big bad world. I don’t read either, and all my friends know that I never read British newspapers of any kind.

 

Nonetheless there are always those that like to sympathise: today I’ve had plenty of, “Ooh you seem to have riled the Daily Mail” and “The Daily Fail have got it in for you today”… tweets. None of which has made me turn to the loathed organ in response and dignify it with reading whatever it is that it has written about me. I have pieced together that it’s the usual “what right does the pompous luvvie have…” etc etc. Well, the same right as the pompous journo who wrote the piece I would assume. In other words the right of free speech. Are they suggesting I actually don’t have the right to blog? Apparently the hate-piece* was put together by a disc jockey called Colin something or other whose great use for Lord Dacre, the Mail’s autocratic führer, is that he is gay. “Hurrah! Stephen Fry doesn’t speak for all gay people!” Well, of course I bloody don’t and would never claim to. But if there’s one thing the Mail can do better than any other paper it’s erect a fake coconut and then knock it down and claim a prize.

 

I have helped spark a debate about the Sochi Olympiad and I can be as proud (or “smug” as they would undoubtedly call it) about that as I like.

 

There’s no real personal animus in this at all. A friend gave me a “Hated by the Daily Mail” badge and it remains one of the proudest things I own.

 

image

 

But there’s form here. The Mail still can’t quite live with the shame that it has always, always been historically wrong about everything - large and small - from Picasso to equal pay for women. Because it has always been against progress, the liberalising of attitudes, modern art and strangers (whether by race, gender or sexuality). Of course they’ll leap on a Stephen Lawrence bandwagon once the seeds of their decades of anti-immigration racism (read a 1960s or 1970s Daily Mail) have been sown, but deep down they have always come from the same place and had the same instinct for the lowest, most mean-spirited, hypocritical, spiteful and philistine elements of our island nation.

 

Most notoriously of all, they loved Adolf Hitler when he came to power, and as the Czech crisis arose they were the appeasement newspaper. And woe-betide any liberal-minded anti-fascist who warned that the man was unstable and that consistently satisfying his vanity, greed and ambition was only storing up trouble. The whole liberal left, not to mention Winston Churchill, were mocked and scorned for their instinctive distrust of Hitler. The Daily Mail knew better.

 

In January 1934 Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, younger brother of the paper’s founder Alfred Northcliffe (the 4th Viscount Rothermere is chairman of the company that still owns it) wrote an article called “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”. He was sending congratulatory telegrams to “My dear Führer” as he liked to call him, right up until a few months before the outbreak of war. For more details read this article by Richard Norton-Taylor

 

Months before war, Rothermere said Hitler's work was superhuman | Media | The Guardian

 

Of course I know Putin isn’t Hitler. But then Hitler wasn’t the full Hitler we now think of in back in 1935 either. The death camps and atrocities were years away. He became the Hitler of 1939 because we never stopped him. All historians agree now on how doubtful and uncertain he was in 35, 36, 37, and 38. The occupation of the Rheinland provinces of Alsace Lorraine and the annexation of Austria went unchallenged. The Olympic games reinforced his huge status at home.

 

Nor was Stalin the full Stalin in 1920. True terrible bloody leaders become so because they are not stopped. The last four lines of W. H. Auden’s The Tyrant come to mind:

 

 

 

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

 

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

 

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

 

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

 

 

 

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco and any other despot you care to mention: they become despotic, maniacal, more autocratic, more insane every time they are given a greater sense of their own power. The fanatical junior KGB officer Vladimir Putin will become, if he is allowed to get away with it, as autocratic as any Tsar or any Soviet chairman. Vladimir the Terrible will have blood on his hands. He already does, but there will be so so much more. Little children will die in the streets. All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. That saying is so well-known it’s hardly worth repeating. You would think…

 

But apparently I don’t have the right to bleat my liberal opinion. Apparently because one of my livelihoods is acting (oh how they love to forget the fact that I’ve written books and even more millions of words of journalism) makes anything I say “luvvie talk”. It rather amuses me that the Oxford English Dictionary cites me as the first person to use the word luvvie. The word has come back to bite me in the arse, you might say…

 

IL DUCE DACRE

 

I should add this, just because you have a Right To Know. Lord Dacre is himself a frothing autocrat. An absolutely foul-mouthed boss, who constantly screams the c word at just about anyone. He would have read my Open Letter to David Cameron and yelled that “that cunt Fry needs another fucking dressing fucking down” — just the kind of language that his paper would prissily decry of course, there’s the glory in the vile bastard’s hypocrisy. He sends his son to Eton, but somehow mocks me for being posh. He bullies, swears and shrieks, but presents his paper as having the values and standards of a misty Midsomer Britain. He decries indecency on one page and pushes his male readers into a semi over a semi-nude actress on another. His cancer scare, miracle cure stories are sickeningly anti-science and the only good thing to be said about his Mail is that no one decent or educated believes in it. Which is what you can say about psychics, mediums, homeopathy and the casting of runes, but that makes it, like them, more exploitative and wicked, not less.

 

Dacre is, all those who have had the misfortune to work for him assure me, just about as loathsome, self-regarding, morally putrid, vengeful and disgusting a man as it possible to be. His power is absolute. Cross him either in private or public and you will be assassinated by his sycophantic squad of columnist minions, all of them infected with his brand of repulsive hypocritical and gleeful spite, ready to vomit out a screed against the BBC (watch this hilarious Vine loop as an example WTF | Watch: If you think Sky News was bad with the royal baby coverage... - entertainment.ie ) or any other institution they hate.

 

He absolutely despises me and thinks I stand for everything that is wrong about Britain and I think exactly the same of him.

 

Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice. In the case of the Daily Mail that’s 50p or whatever it is now and in the case of me it’s for the low, low price of free.

 

*hate-piece is a genuinely used term: I can remember being rung up by an editor in the 80s when I still wrote for papers and magazines. “Yeah, we need a hate-piece on x by tomorrow”. It was one of the moments that eventually stopped me from ever writing for papers again. That and the blessed advent of sites like this and twitter.

[Mike D]

on Just a minute..

 

[YOUTUBE]vOaIUXsLWq4[/YOUTUBE]

[Champ]

Cant be doing with him on these awards programmes

[Carvalho Diablo]

Cant be doing with him on these awards programmes

 

Can't stand the fucking fat luvvie poof tbh.

 

Can't remember who said it but I'll always remember this about Fry : " Stephen Fry is a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like."

 

[VERBAL DIARRHEA]

Fry Bentos

[Navman]

 

Can't stand the fucking fat luvvie poof tbh.

 

Can't remember who said it but I'll always remember this about Fry : " Stephen Fry is a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like."

 

 

Stephen Hitchens

[Strontium]

Stephen Hitchens

That would be Peter Hitchens.

 

Appropriately enough, Peter Hitchens is an intelligent person's idea of what a stupid person is like.

[torahboy]

 

Can't stand the fucking fat luvvie poof tbh.

 

Can't remember who said it but I'll always remember this about Fry : " Stephen Fry is a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like."

 

That was Peter Hitchens. He and Fry met at some equally insufferable cunt's funeral, it may have been the other Hitchens' adios, and they had a bit of a non-physical set to - about the bible or talmud or some other Tolkien story. Peter got frightfully miffed that there was a bigger prick than himself on the planet and decided to attack Fry through his Mail on Sunday column.

 

I detest Hitchens because he is a thick, nasty, right wing space case. Fry, on the other hand, is such a hysterical tart about his sexuality and his shite acting skills that I find him more irritating than hateful; he's such a self-loather that he does all the disliking for me.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

Whoah whoah. Shite acting Skills? His Pacino inspired shouting role as the Duke of Wellington and the great Melchett are timeless.

 

Negged.