Stephen Fry, in velvet

A few years ago, I had my once and only brush with the high life, at the premiere of Bright Young Things. Lots of my cousins were there, similarly unprepared to deal with the arsenal of skinny Chelsea blondes who were throwing themselves at bright young actors in all directions; unable and frankly unwilling to compete with the cleavages, we drank champagne in corners before running off on kamikaze celebrity missions. The goal was to be gently insulting –- every so often we met on the dance floor to compare notes: “I got Rowan Atkinson!” There was one man there that no one wanted to be rude to -– instead, drawn inexorably to the divine presence, I snuck under somebody’s jewelled arm to rub my cheek against his velvet lapel before running off into the crowd in jubilant shame. That man was Stephen Fry.

Fry: undisputed king of British comedy; compere of a variety of different programmes including QI (Quite Interesting), in which funny people talk about unusual topics; and a pretty good novelist to boot. These days he has a massive entourage on Twitter -– I tried to become a stalker, I mean follower, but couldn’t find his profile. Perhaps he has filters to block people who have touched him in public. Luckily for all us freaks, he spoke to Radio Four’s Analysis about all things techno. The full transcript is here or read on for highlights.

Of Twitter, he says “those like me in the public eye have discovered it’s a magnificent way of cutting out the press.” He believes that this is a large reason for all the negative commentary; journalists feel threatened by a form which may soon render the interview form obsolete and therefore attack the banality with sublime hypocrisy. (Anyone who’s read a broadsheet interview recently will see his point: even the most erudite novelists may be asked about their fashion choices, while all entertainers are expected to provide exhaustive summaries of their diets.)

Talking about porn on the internet, he has an unusually apt metaphor: the web is a city like all others and in it there are red light districts. How to ensure that these are inaccessible to children is even more difficult virtually than it is physically. He also confesses to being a web snob -– “a MySpace page is just pretty low rent” – but is fairly enthusiastic about texting, noting that eighteenth century writers used far more abbreviations in their letters. He cites Byron –- we can only hope that his next project will be a literary comparison of Mariana with one of the Japanese cellphone novels. Or perhaps not.

Finally, Fry makes a reply to fuddy-duddies who are concerned that the book will be supplanted by the internet; that the rise of the computer will mean the end of literacy. In the nineteenth century, when the novel became the dominant literary form, intellectuals were convinced that this meant an end to serious learning. “I doubt you can find any sentence describing how human learning has degraded now that isn’t congruent to a similar sentence written at that time…” He may have a point. Hell, at least kids these days are motivated to read –- even if it’s just so that they can search for the pretty ladies online…