Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 16th August 2008 in The Guardian “Dork Talk” - The Guardian headline

However uninterested you may be in technology, it is likely that you use a voicemail system. If you have a mobile, then it will probably be the one provided as standard by your network. You dial 121, or 123, and dance the ghastly Menu Minuet until you’re done. The Apple iPhone has introduced a patented “visual voicemail” system, which presents a list of onscreen messages enabling you to play them in whichever order you like, but for 15 years that has been it so far as innovation goes.

But now we have SpinVox, a most extraordinary service that takes your voice messages, translates them into text and then sends them to you as either email or SMS text message. Or both.

Photograph: Steve Forrest/Rex Features

Here’s how it goes. I call you up, but you are out, or busy, and I am played your outgoing message: “Yodi, this is Dork Talk Reader, sorry I’se not in, but like leave a message after the tone, innit, and I’ll be in your face laters.” I leave my message: “Sorry to miss you, darling Dork Talk Reader. Do call back when you have a moment. I have momentous news. I guarantee it will rock the foundations of your world. Toodle-pip.” Now, if you, Dork Talk Reader, are a SpinVox subscriber, within minutes or less you will get a text as from my number that looks like this, inverted commas included:

“Sorry to miss you darling dork talk reader. Do call back when you have a moment. I have momentous news. I guarantee it will rock the foundations of your world. Toodle (?) pip” - spoken through SpinVox <*n> where <*n> refers to the number assigned to the message. You can call a SpinVox number (which will replace your old network voicemail number) and press *n to hear my message the old-fashioned way.

What is so magical and satisfying about the whole process is how astonishingly good the SpinVox engine is at rendering into accurate, grammatical, punctuated text even the most slurred, heavily accented or rapid-fire speech. In the example above it questioned the “toodle” but the word is spelt correctly.

Subscription is quick and easy. You are given a new voicemail number, which can replace the old one on your speed dial. One’s first use of the system is naturally to try to trap it into mistakes. I caught it rendering Miranda as Meranda - it did at least know it was a proper name, however, for it gave it a capital letter. Happily for the Lynne Trusses among you, the “it’s” was correctly rendered, and I have found it spot-on when transliterating phrases like “I’ve sent a message to their centre where they’re collected. Its accuracy is great, it’s amazing.” It works out the difference between “they’re” and “their”, and “it’s” and “its”, and can distinguish by context such homophones as “sent a” and “centre”. It even got “He went out into the mist and missed” spot-on. Now that’s clever.

It might not immediately strike you as useful, but once you have experienced a day where you don’t have to dial in to listen to messages, but can just glance at them, you will never want to go back. After all, the option is still there for listening to the voice. You can trial it for free, and then texts cost between 20p and 30p, according to the package (spinvox.com). Brilliant and British.

Not everything brilliant is British, however. Ever been annoyed about desirable products that are available only in the US? I recommend international-orders.com which ships American goods around the globe. For us there’s VAT and import duty, plus the website’s handling surcharge, but the dollar still being relatively weak, transactions can work out cheaper as well as making available droolworthy gizmos and doodads that can’t be found here. I had a Chumby delivered to my door (chumby.com won’t deliver outside the US): it’s a soft, squashy Wi-Fi internet device that loads customisable widget or gadget style programs. Through international-orders.com it will cost about £120, plus whatever Revenue & Customs adds on. An American would pay the equivalent of £90 - but then, they haven’t got the wonder of SpinVox, so nah.

© Stephen Fry 2008

Acronym of the week

VAT Very Annoying Tax

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 9th August 2008 in The Guardian “MacBook Air spawns digital anagrams” - The Guardian headline

‘Laptop machines”, by one of those preposterous twists of circumstance that make you wonder who is running things and why they haven’t got anything better to do, just happens to be an anagram of “Apple Macintosh”. If an anagram is a derivative rearrangement of essential elements, then one might be disposed to argue that such has been their rise in influence and prestige that almost every new digital product seems to be an anagram of Apple.

The MacBook Air, a superlight machine with solid-state hard disk, no CD/DVD drive and only one USB port, caused something of a splash when it landed in the laptop lake a few months ago. Designed as a travelling wireless subnotebook, Apple seems to have timed its emergence better than poor Palm, whose ill-fated Foleo now looks to have been a great idea just six months (which is one and a half digital years) ahead of its time. In February, I wrote enthusiastically about the Asus Eee, like the Foleo an Open Source, solid-state machine weighing less than a kilo. As the misguided fad for PC Tablets fades into memory, subnotebooks seem to have become the Next Big Thing.

Toshiba joins the fray with the Portégé R500 (£1,599, toshiba.co.uk/computers). The version I was sent for review weighed 1.7lb, being the most cut-down model, lacking the optical single-layer CD/DVD drive included in other lines. All variants come bundled with Windows Vista Business edition and the usual slew of proprietary wizards, assistants and guides. Somehow, the geniuses at Toshiba have found room for a fingerprint scanner, three USB ports, an SD card reader, an iLink (FireWire) connection, microphone and headphone sockets, and what I took be an ethernet port but turns out to be for an RJ-45 phone jack. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless come as standard, and there is in option for 3G WWAN wireless, too. The killer blow is the availability of a massive 128GB of solid-state storage. Toshiba’s doubling of capacity (Apple’s very expensive SSD is only 64GB), quintupling of connection sockets and inclusion of a CD drive make the Portégé a very attractive alternative to the Air. The keyboard feels rattly and cheap, the 12-inch display, despite also being a 1280 by 800 backlit LCD, seems less crisp than the Air’s, and the whole package lacks Apple’s trademark beauty and feel, but this is certainly not an ugly object, and the business community has every reason to welcome such a relatively cheap, truly light and powerful machine.

I am also impressed by Lenovo’s entry into the ultraportable market, the ThinkPad X300 (about £1,800, lenovo.com/uk). You may be aware that IBM, once the colossus of computing (unfortunate epithet, I apologise to the ghosts of Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers), was humbled into selling its PC division to the Chinese company Lenovo in 2005, along with brand names ThinkPad, ThinkVision and Aptiva. The IBM ThinkPad had been one of the most popular business notebooks in history, especially prized for its security features and black solidity. The Lenovo X300 is so closely allied in look and feel to a “proper” ThinkPad that one soon forgets that we are in the ultra-lightweight arena. The display, keyboard and chassis are all as solid as a rock, the bright, clear LED screen is 13.3 inches, like the Air, but at a functionally higher resolution than the Apple or Toshiba. There are three USBs, a fingerprint reader and a Gigabit Ethernet, but no SD card or FireWire capabilities. The 64GB SSD can be doubled, I believe, but at a price.

Toshiba has produced the lighter, cheaper, higher memory machine, but for those who value build quality and durability, the Lenovo will probably be preferred.

Acronym of the week

SSD Solid-State Drive. A hard ‘disk drive’ that isn’t a drive at all. Without platters, styli, heads and other moving parts, SSDs use less power, read and write data more quickly, and generate less heat than conventional hard drives. At the moment they’re dearer, but look out for future generations of ‘Nand’ and ‘Dram’ flash memory that will supersede the HD as surely as it superseded Winchester drives and floppies.

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 2nd Auguest 2008 in The Guardian
“Barebones recording” - The Guardian headline

Dork Talk on YouTube

Video. Your mobile phone might be capable of it, your compact digital camera almost certainly is and there are dozens of dedicated camcorders available that can write moving picture information to all kinds of media at all kinds of qualities for all kinds of money. Why, then, a basic handheld video camera that can do nothing else? a) What is the point? and b) Where is the market? The answers, refreshingly, are a) Fun and b) The young.

I am looking at the Flip Ultra from Pure Digital (£94-£99), and the Vado Pocket Video Cam (£89.99) from Creative. Each is the size of a packet of Rothmans; a light, “barebones” camcorder with a small LCD screen; basic playback, zoom, record and bin-it buttons; a built-in speaker; tripod mount connections; 2GB of memory; and a cunningly recessed USB cable. The most striking distinction between the two is that the Flip takes standard AA batteries, while the Vado has a lithium-ion unit, charged through its USB connection to a PC or Mac. The Vado has a two-inch screen to the Flip’s 1.5.

The Flip has been in the world a little longer and offers all kinds of accessories: a tripod, an “action mount”, underwater housing, pouches, skins and adaptors. Most of those will work on the Vado, since they are so similar in size and specifications. There are five colourways to the Flip: silver, black, pink, tangerine and lime green, while the Vado is available only in silver and the inevitable girlie pink.

They are both light and quick in their responses; they are so cheap and so jolly that you don’t really worry about slamming them into your pocket or handbag, or dropping them on the beach. You point, you press a button and you record. You can review on the device itself, although the sound playback is horrendous. The 2GB memory allows up to an hour of MPEG-4 AVI footage to be recorded at an acceptable 640 x 480 resolution. This memory is fixed and built in. Pre-installed on it are applications to run on your computer, available the moment you mount the camcorder via USB. They include the 3ivx codec and, in the case of the Flip, a PC and Mac application that allows direct uploading to YouTube, MySpace and AOL, as well as (PC only) Muvie-style video mixing capabilities.

I made a couple of very quick test movies of myself this morning and uploaded them to YouTube; it was very early so forgive the dégagé appearance and dopey manner. You will find the results on a YouTube account I have set up: DorkTalk2008. The Creative footage is on youtube.com/watch?v=0qaA5AQCqug and the Flip on youtube.com/watch?v=eKA_omhtb7Y, but on YouTube it is easier to search - I suggest “DorkTalk2008″ as the query term.

So, which should you choose? The Vado has a larger screen and is slimmer, lighter and cheaper: the Flip Ultra has a wider choice of colours, the advantage (or disadvantage) of standard batteries and better pre-installed software. I think I prefer the Flip. It is bulkier, however. If you have had a look at the YouTube clips, you may think the Vado’s sound recording is superior, on the other hand are the colours on the Flip a little richer? And which one responds better to changes in light? Oh dear… so hard to decide. Frankly, I wouldn’t throw either of them out of bed.

Have fun and stay young.

Acronyms of the week

LCD Liquid Crystal Display … if your TV isn’t plasma or an old-fashioned cathode ray tube, then it will be LCD, the display technology used for everything from phones to fridges.

USB Universal Serial Bus, the standard interface that connects your computer to devices such as phones, printers and cameras.

MPEG-4 The fourth video and audio compression standard of the Moving Picture Experts Group.

AVI Audio Video Interleave. A ‘container’ format or ‘transporter’ for playing the video.

3ivx A ‘codec’ (short for compressor-decompressor or coder-decoder) that allows the AVI to contain and transport the MPEG-4 data stream.

© Stephen Fry 2008

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 26th July 2008 in The Guardian
“Well worth the wait” - The Guardian headline

I’m so happy to be back. My thanks to all those who were kind enough to be in touch to say that you missed me. You were well served by my distnguished stand-ins, however, and thanks go to them, too, for keeping Dork Talk alive. But let’s get straight to business: an extra-long column for openers, for this month sees another Apple launch.

A happy customer at the Apple store in London (Photograph: Sang Tan/AP)

Whatever one’s view of Apple as a manufacturer of digital equipment, as an author of operating systems and designer of software, as a multinational corporation, as a lifestyle statement or as a quasi-religious cult, it remains a matter of ineluctable fact that the introduction of the iPhone just over a year ago changed the smartphone market for ever. An incredible three-quarters of all mobile web browsing is now done on the iPhone, despite its market share being far smaller than that of either Windows Mobile, BlackBerry/Java or Nokia/Symbian devices. iPhone users report an unprecedented level of customer satisfaction (between 82% and 90%, compared with the second placed BlackBerry at 50%). This is not a surprise to anyone who has lived with an iPhone for even a short while, and even less of a surprise to anyone who has also had to work with a WinMob phone.

Let’s be clear about the iPhone’s shortcomings, however: this unparalleled success has been achieved by an expensive device with only a 2 megapixel camera, EDGE rather than 3G data speeds, no video, no GPS, no contact search, no file or text manipulation, no Enterprise or MS Exchange capabilities, no third-party applications and a locked-in network operator deal. I said at its launch that this revolutionary implement would thrill early adopters but be prohibitively expensive and under-functional for many others: “Wait for iPhone Three,” I wrote, “that’ll be the one that gets it right.”

A year of living with iPhone One has proved to me that the camera lens and its operation is good enough to produce better photos than phones with twice the resolution, that EDGE speeds allow swift email and full browsing in most areas of the country, that the Google Maps implementation and music, video and photo playback are stunningly impressive, and that other deficiencies are made up for by the sob-worthy beauty, elegance and lovability of another Jonathan Ive-designed Apple masterpiece.

Nonetheless, we want it all, and huge numbers of people have been fretfully awaiting iPhone Two: queuing began in New York a week and half before launch date; O2, the sole UK network provider, had its site go down hours after announcing pre-booking; the BBC’s technology site is so afraid of looking as though it “favours” Apple in some way that it has been failing to file legitimate stories for fear of the anti-Apple community, because, believe it or not, there are people out there who think the launch of yet another Nokia or WinMob Apple-a-like should be given equal prominence.

Well, finally, here it is, the iPhone 3G, hardly different at all in look or feel from iPhone One. The back, available in black or white, is now plastic, which offers better reception for the 10 radios hidden inside - four GSM (your standard quad band), three UMTS/HSDPA (your 3G) plus one each for A-GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. A standard earphone socket replaces the unpopular recessed jack and the switches are now metal.

This new phone’s greatness is not revealed in its outer lineaments, however, gorgeous as they are, software is crucial. Simultaneous with its release comes Version 2.0 of the operating system. Exchange and enterprise capability (for BlackBerry-style “push email”) has arrived, meaning that the iPhone is now a serious corporate contender: employee pester-power will see to it that it becomes the tool of choice for medium to large businesses that aren’t so pompous and deluded as to think dullness and bad design are a sign of probity and business acumen.

What else is new? The camera is the same. Contacts are finally searchable, a fuller range of email attachments can now be read and saved, a server-side push system for mail, events and contacts called Mobile Me has been introduced (subscription required) and, most importantly of all, Version 2.0 users (including those with original iPhones) will find an “Installer” icon on their home screen. This will be familiar to rebellious criminals like me who “jailbroke” their original iPhones months ago. It means that the power of the iPhone as a beautiful, smooth and function-rich handheld computer can now be realised. Anyone may now write for the iPhone. Existing applications (games, utilities, ebooks, dictionaries and so forth) already written for other platforms can be ported into Apple’s elegant and intuitive developer’s kit with astonishing ease. All applications have to be downloaded through the iTunes store. Believe me, in a very few weeks you will see things being done on an iPhone that will make you gasp and stretch your eyes. The built-in accelerometer alone will inspire people to amazing new heights of ingenuity. The accelerometer is a sensor that knows which way up the iPhone is: you can expect pedometer software, software that plays you music chosen according to how fast you are walking and where you are walking (thanks to the GPS), spirit levels, pinball games with tilt, games in which the iPhone itself is the steering wheel, apps that show you on a map where friends are - we cannot even guess what is coming.

I should digress here to point out that the latest HTC Touch Diamond (HTC is a wonderful manufacturer permanently hamstrung by its devices all being Windows Mobile) has an accelerometer, too, and comes with a ball-manipulation game that provides tactile feedback - you can actually feel the weight and bounce of the ball as you manoeuvre it. For the rest, it is yet another iPhone wannabe: it is too small, its multi-touch interface is too slow on the uptake and the whole experience is rather fiddly. It does have the best browser on a pocket PC I’ve yet seen, however, and for those determined not to go Apple, it is (thanks to the market-changing influence of the iPhone) a superior model of its kind (RRP £499, htc.com for stockists).

Unlike the iPhone 3G, the Diamond also has a front-facing camera (for video calls and video IM). What else is the iPhone 3G missing? No text manipulation (not even basic cut and paste), no Flash plug-ins for the browser, no video recording, no voice memos. Third parties will probably address these software issues, but it would have been better if Apple had solved them itself.

Perhaps the most significant development of all, however, is price. Apple, in harness with its network providers across the globe, has slashed the cost of both the 8GB and 16GB models. O2 in this country will offer the phone for less than £100, or free, according to tariff and other criteria (from Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores. The iPhone 3G 8G is free on the £45 and £75 tariffs, £99 on the £30 and £35 tariffs; the iPhone 3G 16GB is free on the £75 tariff, £159 on the £30 and £35 tariff, £59 on the £45 tariff. Go to o2.co.uk/iphone/paymonthly for full details). You are tied to their network, but the all-you-can-eat data package works out as excellent value, given the amount of browsing and downloading you are likely to do. 3G is of little interest to me, as it happens - by the time coverage arrives in rural Norfolk, the rest of the world will be 6G.

In conclusion: some will be disappointed by the phone itself, because they will have expected greater and more fundamental physical changes and improvements. In fact, I still maintain that the third iPhone will be the perfect device. But that is to take nothing away from what July 11 heralded: not evolution but revolution. Now that the Applications store is up and running, you will soon find it a very common sight indeed to see people crowded around each other’s iPhones showing off the latest impossible, breathtaking and groundbreaking application. “Ah, but mine can do this!” will be heard in every cafe and bar. Satirical sketches will be written and performed on Channel 4 mocking the trend. Once again, Apple has changed the rules, and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

Acronyms of the week

UMTS: Universal Mobile Telecommunications System; HSDPA: High Speed Package Data Access Both protocols of the near-broadband mobile speeds generally called 3G, or third generation.

GSM: Global System for Mobile communications The standard cellphone technology used for voice calls.

GPRS: General Packet Radio Service As above, but allowing data communications, such as email and web browsing.

EDGE: Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution I know, hopeless acronym. As GPRS, but now fast enough to be called 2.75G… nearly as good as 3G, in other words.

A-GPS, GPS: (Assisted) Global Positioning Satellite For satellite navigation. ‘Assisted’ refers to new versions that allow for better urban signals by utilising cell sites and other clever tricks.

IM: Instant Messaging (Skype, iChat, Jabber, AIM etc).

© Stephen Fry 2008

I’m acutely aware that I owe you a podgram and a new blessay. It’s been weeks and possibly months since I last offered you anything.

The thing is, I’ve just returned from America, having finished an epic documentary series on every single state. Having arrived back in Britain, I have hit the ground running and have spent the past eight weeks writing a book on the series plus I’ve been filming a new series of QI here in London.

In the meantime I gave a speech about the BBC and the future of broadcasting recently and for the moment, what I spoke about is all I can offer you. Please stay tuned for in the coming weeks I will have a new podgram plus news on exciting developments for the next version of Stephenfry.com.

The Future of Public Service Broadcasting
Some thoughts
Stephen Fry

Before I can even think to presume to dare to begin to expatiate on what sort of an organism I think the British Broadcasting Corporation should be, where I think the BBC should be going, how I think it and other British networks should be funded, what sort of programmes it should make, develop and screen and what range of pastries should be made available in its cafés and how much to the last penny it should pay its talent, before any of that, I ought I think in justice to run around the games field a couple of times puffing out a kind of “The BBC and Me” mini-biography, for like many of my age, weight and shoe size, the BBC is deeply stitched into my being and it is important for me as well as for you, to understand just how much. Only then can we judge the sense, value or otherwise of what I am saying.

It all began with sitting under my mother’s chair aged 2 as she (teaching history at the time) marked essays. It was then that the Archers theme tune first penetrated my brain, never to leave. The voices of Franklin Engelman going Down Your Way, the women of the Petticoat Line, the panellists of Twenty Questions, Many A Slip, My Word and My Music, all these solid middle class Radio 4 (or rather Home Service at first) personalities populated my world. As I visited other people’s houses and, aged 7 by now, took my own solid state transistor radio off to boarding school with me, I was made aware of The Light Programme, now Radio 2, and Sparky’s Magic Piano, Puff the Magic Dragon and Nelly the Elephant, I also began a lifelong devotion to radio comedy as Round The Horne, The Clithero Kid, I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, Just A Minute, The Men from The Ministry and Week Ending all made themselves known to me.

This was a world in which the BBC had a cosy and almost complete monopoly of radio. There were things called pirate radio ships, about which Richard Curtis has just written a feature film I believe, and these gave rise to Radio 1 and a whole generation of disk jockeys, but this was pop music, something that frightened and upset me then and frightens and upsets me now. That’s not generational, I’m from an entirely pop-literate, pop-loving generation, it is personal. For me comedy was all I wanted, whether in the surreal world of Goon Show reruns, the insinuendo-laden filth of Kenneths Williams and Horne, or in the grown up wit of Frank Muir and Dennis Norden. Many of the names that meant so much to me are now all but forgotten by the general public: Steve Race, Ian Wallace, Anthony Quinton, John Ebden, James Cameron, Kenneth Robinson. And in the past few years a cruel swathe has been cut through the once lush grass of great radio personalities: Alastair Cooke, Linda Smith, John Peel, David Hatch, Ned Sherrin, Alan Coren and finally, I was only yesterday at the funeral of the great Humphrey Lyttleton. Maybe this cruel swathe will be used as an excuse radically to reinvent radio. Radio 4 in particular is radically reinvented every five years or so, fortunately with no result whatever. Radical reinvention is not something that comes naturally to the British institutional mind. Indeed if you have an institutional mind, a change of stationery is seismic and upsetting enough to qualify as root and branch restructuring. Thus, altering the time slot of Woman’s Hour, allowing Gardeners’ Question Time to be independently produced and other such cosmic storms have constituted the radical and fundamental changes to Radio 4 that have allowed it slowly to evolve over the decades, matching and paralleling its core audience and providing a service so incomparable in its variety and quality as to be an actual reason for some to live in Britain. But it is ‘only’ radio: necessary to its survival has been the fact that the Associated Press, media tycoons and the political classes don’t care that much about it. Thus it has thrived. Thriven. Throven. Bethrived. I have to turn now to TV.

I may have grown up just as the Golden Age of Radio had passed, but the Golden Age of Television, that grew with me. When I was 7 my parents moved house. Well, we all moved house as a family, I don’t mean my parents left me behind, though who would blame them if they had? We owned, in those days, a television that disguised itself as a mahogany drinks cabinet, in the way they did – and they were never called just televisions, by the way, they were television sets. This one’s screen was, of course, black and white, it boasted one channel, the BBC (what we’d now call BBC1) and had a knurled volume knob in dark brown Bakelite. The set smelled the way dust always did when it was cooked on Mullard valves as they warmed up. It slid about on castors and had doors that closed with a satisfactory snick as a ball bearing rolled into its slots to secure it. The week before we moved, the BBC started a new drama, starring William Hartnell. An old man, whose name appeared to be Grandfather or the Doctor, had a police phone box of the kind we saw in the street all the time in those days. It turned out to be a magical and unimaginably wonderful time machine. My brother and I watched this drama in complete amazement. The first ever episode of Doctor Who. I had never been so excited in all my life. A whole week to wait to watch the next instalment. Never have seven days crawled so slowly by, for all that they involved a complicated house move from Buckinghamshire to Norfolk. A week later, in that new house, my brother and I turned on the good old television set in its new sitting room, ready to watch Episode 2. The TV had been damaged in transit and was never to work again. We missed that episode and nothing that has transpired in my life since has ever, or could ever, make up for that terrible, terrible disappointment. There is an empty space inside me that can never be filled. It is amazing neither of us were turned into psychopathic serial killers from that moment.

The years passed and brought with them for children Blue Peter, every Oliver Postgate from Noggin the Nog to Ivor the Engine by the way of the Clangers and Bagpuss. Mr Benn, Play School, Play Away, Rent-a-Ghost, Grange Hill and the Multi Coloured Swap Shop. How lucky our generation was. How spoiled. ITV played its part, of course it did, with Magpie and How and much else. This was a period of revolutionary drama from directors and writers such as Alan Clarke, David Mercer, Kenneth Loach, Mike Leigh, Alan Plater, Michael Apted, Stephen Frears, Dennis Potter. Play of the Month, Play of the Week, Play for Today. Cathy Come Home, Edna The Inebriate Woman, Pennies From Heaven, I Claudius, Tinker Tailor. Popular drama from Z Cars to Colditz. And comedy: Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Monty Python, Up Pompeii, The Goodies, Dad’s Army, Dick Emery, Morecambe and Wise, The Likely Lads, The Two Ronnies, Porridge, Reggie Perrin, Fawlty Towers. … ITV gave us Rising Damp, and those definite article ITC adventures from Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner: The Avengers, The Champions, The Adventurer, The Baron, Man in a Suitcase, The Prisoner, The Persuaders, The Protectors and of course The Sweeney and The Professionals. And during this time BBC 2 had arrived and with it Civilisation, The Ascent of Man and the full realisation of its first controller, David Attenborough, as the world’s natural historian.

A succession of progressive, imaginative, tolerant, liberal in the loosest sense, and amiably hands-off TV executives from those legendary BBC Chairmen, Hugh Carleton-Greene and Lord Hill, downwards had created, or presided over, a cultural revolution of astounding depth, variety, imagination and dynamism. And then, just as I was leaving prison, starting simultaneously my period on probation and at University, the way you do, the wind changed and Margaret Thatcher, the new Mary Poppins, descended into Downing Street, with new medicines for us to take, but very few spoonfuls of sugar to help them go down. I am not going to blame her or make political points. The wind had changed and she blew in with it and would one day be blown away by another change. But here she was and fundamental questions were asked, genuinely radical unthinkable thoughts were thought in an age of privatisation and anti-dirigiste, anti-statist conservatism.

The first few years of that long administration in fact changed nothing. Her government was busy with a terrible recession and the Falklands war, fighting miners, that kind of thing. During exactly this time, I left University and began on what, for want of a better word, I shall call my career.
Comedy was my point of entry into television. Comedy had been my rock and roll as a child and now I was allowed to do it for a living. There is an argument that comedy is a greater public service than any other genre of art or culture: it heals divisions, it is a balm for hurt minds, it binds social wounds, exposes real truths about how life is really led. Comedy connects. The history of BBC comedy in particular is almost a register of character types, a social history of the country. Hancock, Steptoe, Mainwaring, Alf Garnett, Basil Fawlty, Baldrick, Victor Meldrew, Alan Partridge, Ali G, David Brent, the matchlessly great General Melchett – it is much harder to list character types from serious drama who have so penetrated the consciousness of the nation and so closely defined the aspirations and failures of successive generations. A public service broadcasting without comedy, is in danger of being regarded as no more than a dumping ground for worthiness. Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

Meanwhile, back to history, for a moment. What was happening to broadcasting during the time I was cutting my comedy teeth? In drama, the word “play” had been all but banned. It was Film Four and Screen Two. The multi camera studio drama, such as I Claudius, had become a thing of the past, the way led by Brideshead and other single camera filmed pieces. ‘Yoof’ TV made an appearance thanks to Planet 24 and Janet Street-Porter and the Peacock Report appeared.

The Peacock Report, referred to by broadcast professionals in that way they have, as Peacock, came less than ten years after the Annan Report, which the great Noel, Lord Annan had submitted to parliament in 1977. Annan had been the first to detect a caterpillar in the perfect garden salad of the BBC’s golden age. He thought television as run by ITV and the BBC needed a shake up, it lacked a kind of diversity, plurality and edge, all happily unfamiliar words in those days. For the first time the founding Reithian tenets of authoritative patriarchal broadcasting were challenged: the de haut en bas principle in which the educated producer, presenter, writer knew what was good for the country and for the audience was under fire. The first and most direct result was Channel 4 three or four years later, specifically charged to speak for minorities and sections of society who did not want to be spoon-fed by the supercilious educated classes. The arts and documentaries, drama and comedy were still presented but in a kind of punked up style, all attitude and in-yer-face. TV went from Oxbridge to concrete, missing out red brick altogether. But the words ‘radical’ and ‘reform’ meant something quite different to a new and ideologically fired government and so in 1986 a new report emerged: Peacock.

Here was a report that really delivered a blow to the BBC’s solar plexus. Peacock began to foresee the possibility of digital diversity on an unimagined scale, it also put forward the ideas of a consumer-led, market driven broadcasting world, one in which the very principles of a licence fee funded public service broadcasting system would naturally be seen as obsolete. This suited the tenor of the times: deregulation, privatisation and a rigorous dismantling of the frontiers of the state – it was happening in the city and in industry and the utilities, why not broadcasting? The BBC, long seen as harbouring tendencies and personnel that were socialistic at best, Marxist at worst, was suddenly no longer a secure and unassailable acropolis. It was no secret that Norman Tebbit and some of the more fundamentalist free-marketeers and red-baiters of the administration would have been very happy indeed to dismantle the entire structure of the BBC. Peacock prevaricated and the charter appeared safe, but at a great price. Nothing would ever be the same again, the old certainties were dead and the harsh realities of capitalism arrived at Wood Lane and Portland Place. Whole departments were razed and working practices abolished, and something called an internal market was put in place. Radio Times was outsourced, the permanent make-up staff went, engineers, editors and set-designers were suddenly out of a job. Twenty-five percent of the BBC’s output was commanded to be produced from outside sources and a whole new independent sector was born. Companies like Hat Trick and Talk Back achieved almost instant success. Peter Bazalgette, who had been a typical BBC producer, starting life as a That’s Life researcher, then making Food and Drink and other such innocent programmes, started on the path that would lead him to Endemol and unimagined reach and riches. Men and women who had spent their whole lives dreaming up formats and broadcasting ideas as part of their job, suddenly had those ideas outside BBC premises, in their own time, because producers could now become entrepreneurs. There was money to be made and such a thing as loyalty to this new BBC was now a preposterous idea. The smell of Hugh Wheldon’s pipe smoke and tweed was finally expelled from every office, every corridor and every meeting room in the BBC. But at least the charter was safe, the licence fee was safe and the radio stations and the World Service and the general face and form of the BBC were safe and familiar. There was still Blue Peter and the Cup Final and Only Fools and Horses. The spinning globe and the logo were outsourced to Lambie Nairn, but the Beeb was still alive. David Attenborough and Bristol continued to make outstanding natural history programmes, the BAFTAs and Emmys continued to roll in for the innovative new drama and comedy.

And now … well, we know what has happened since. Satellite, digital TV, Freeview and now Freesat, the Internet and mobile telephony, BBC iPlayer for the iPhone, Mac and PC, a plethora of outlets so vast, complicated and fast-moving that audience numbers for traditional TV have plummeted. 3 million is now considered a good rating for a BBC 1 drama. Meanwhile of course ITV has morphed into a new kind of entity, more answerable to shareholders than ever before and Channel 4, always an uneasy hybrid of public duty ideals and free market commercialism, is finding it hard not to descend to freak show documentaries: “The Man With a Nose Growing Out of His Bottom”, “The Girl With Fourteen Nipples” and that kind of embarrassment for all concerned. So much so that C4’s very existence and right to continue is being questioned.

And we have a BBC that broadcasts through four major adult channels and a number of cb bb bb cb children’s channels, it has a news channel, a parliamentary channel, an HD channel (on which you will be able to watch this on Saturday!!!) . It also has a news channel in the form of its news.bbc.co.uk website, one of the most popular in the world. It has the iPlayer on its site too, streaming content to UK users only. But hell, there’s ways round that. Streaming? Hardly: anything that can be played on your computer can be stored on it and shared. A digital copy is a perfect copy. Once on the net it’s out there and will be bit torrented and Limewired and Gnutella-ed and otherwise P2P distributed. The BBC is making a lot of enemies giving away free programmes to an internet that everyone else is trying to “monetise”; at the moment it’s relying on the fact that you have to be slightly dorky to record from the iPlayer, but believe me that will change. It will soon be the work of a moment for my mother to get an iPlayer programme off her computer and onto her iPod, iPhone, or whatever device she chooses. In its digital doings, from interactivity through to HD and online resources, the BBC has been pretty much in the forefront of development, but also in the forefront of annoying those without its advantages.

Meanwhile I have continued to enjoy a happy career as actor, performer, broadcaster documentary maker and now, with an independent production company of my own, producer, so it is clear that I have had nothing to complain about: the old system was easy for my benighted Oxbridge self and the new system has worked for me too. I may be white and middle class, but hey, I’m gay and Jewish, so all kinds of minority compliance boxes are ticked by my very presence, aren’t they? Well do gay and Jewish don’t count as minorities in this business? Do you remember that scene in Mel Brooks’s To Be Or Not To Be. He and his wife Anne Bancroft play, if you remember, a theatrical couple in Poland at the outbreak of the war. As the Nazis move in more members if his company get taken away. One day his wife’s rather camp dresser, Sasha disappears. Brooks’s character really loses it. He slams his palm into his fist. ‘Enough is enough. First the Jews, then the gypsies, now the faggots. Don’t they realise that without Jews, gypsies and faggots there’s no such thing as show business?’

Anyway the point is … The point is I have of course, a kind of vested interest in the status quo. Or if not the status quo, it might easily be seen that any view I have about broadcasting is that of an insider. A member of the Oxbridge cosa nostra, the gay cosy nostra and indeed the kosher nostra. An insider moreover, who even if he had never stepped into broadcasting would, by virtue of that upbringing I told you about, be destined always to have in his heart a huge place for public service broadcasting as exemplified by the BBC.

And we most of us, looking around this room, have this problem, don’t we? We are likely, whatever our professions, to have an attachment to the kind of broadcasting we grew up with, a fierce pride in the staggering history of quality and innovation that has characterized British television and radio for fifty years. A pride, a sentimental loyalty that causes us to raise our well modulated, well educated voices loudly against any perceived barbarians at the gates. At a price, we saw off the Tebbit and print media attacks on our ramparts, a price that included many of us becoming extremely rich – damn you capitalism! – and now there is another attack imminent, at least a new report is beating its wings above us and stirring the air once more. And so once more we have to think not of how things have gone on, and how they are going on, but how they will go on. The future beckons. What will happen. As Neils Bohr, the great Danish physicist once said, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

This new report is not from a grand panjandrum like my lords Annan or Peacock, but rather – o tempora o mores – it is an Offcom Review of Public Sector Broadcasting. A new kind of cat has been put among the pigeons. There is nothing ideologically gross for us to moan at, nothing personal, philistine or crassly commercial to deprecate with elegant disdain, but a simple honest proposal. If we still want the broadcasting landscape in this country to be dominated by grand mountains and valleys of quality programming that can inform, entertain, educate and enlarge the horizons of the British viewer then perhaps we should accept a new ‘model’ for the financing and husbanding of such a landscape. Let the income from the licence fee now be shared amongst the BBC and its rivals. Let it be sliced, as the jargon has it.

Wow. A beguiling thought. Neat. And how appealing to our political masters. The Blairite/Brownite benisons of public/private interbreeding can be allowed to combine with the wholly reasonable recognition that in this fierce new world of rich-spectrum, multiple-bandwidth broadcasting, resources must be shared – all must be allowed to wet their beaks.

I said earlier that Peacock ‘prevaricated’ in not creating a wholly commercial landscape; it might be truer to say that the BBC won part of the argument back then because it was successfully proposed, by Andrew Graham and Gavyn Davies, inter alia, that broadcasting is a special case, that the rules of the market place don’t apply. As in the armed forces, coastal defence, policing and other fields, capitalism red in tooth and claw cannot be unleashed here. If we stopped husbanding the Yorkshire Moors or the Lake District the result would be weeds, scrub or desertification, not more efficient productive landscapes from Germany or South Korea providing consumer choice and real competition. If innovative, cutting-edge, new and risky programming is not subsidised, the weeds will blow in too. This was the argument and it prevailed. But. But it was ultimately an argument that applied to a spectrum poor, low bandwidth broadcasting world. Gavyn Davies and others were able to argue that there would be no real diversity and choice in a free market dismantling of the licence fee because it was not foreseen how staggeringly multifarious the technical possibilities of programme rediffusion, distribution, ownership and rights management would be twenty or so years later. Private competition meanwhile continued to hammer home its counter-message. ‘Actually the market does work, it only doesn’t work when it’s unfairly dominated by subsidised monoliths like the BBC. Take away their distorting effect on the market and all will be well. Choice and diversity will reign.’ I remember Hugh and I wrote a sketch in which I played a waiter who recognised a diner in my restaurant as a Tory broadcasting minister. I clapped him on the shoulder and told him how much I admired his policies of choice, consumer choice, freedom of choice. I then was horrified to notice that he had only a silver knife and fork for cutlery at his table. ‘No, no, they’re fine,’ said the puzzled politician. But my character the waiter raced off and soon returned with an enormous bin liner which I emptied over his table. It contained thousands and thousands of those white plastic coffee-stirrers. ‘There you are,’ I screamed dementedly at him, virtually rubbing his face in the heap of white plastic, ‘now you’ve got choice. Look at all that choice. They may all be shit, but look at the choice!’ The sketch ends with me trying to strangle him. Heavy handed satire perhaps, but that was how it looked to me we were in danger of going: thirty or forty channels but all filled with drek. Peacock had been made to see the danger of that too and the BBC’s unique funding model was safe – for the time being at least.

Meanwhile the free market is great, it has proved just how greedy for money even the most socialistic TV programme maker is – just watch them scrabble for the millions as their production companies are floated.

And as for broadcasting, well after a mad diversion of believing that it was all about distribution, every media boss now repeats the mantra Content is King.

‘We repent,’ they seem to be saying, ‘being a media boss is no longer about owning as many stations, networks, nodes, outlets and ports as possible – it’s about production, about making things. I see that now.’

‘Hurray,’ shout the programme makers, ‘finally you’ve understood. So, give us the money then.’

‘What money?’ say the media executives, ‘there is no money. We spent it all buying up companies and their back catalogues. We needed content in a hurry, because – in case you weren’t aware … content is king, you know.’

‘Doh. Hang on … but what about new content?’

‘Good lord no. Are you mad? Far too expensive.’

The arguments for keeping the funding structures in place might be considered compelling: despite everything, the BBC is still doing what it has always been charged to do. It actually makes programmes. It pioneers comedy and popular entertainment, it reveals some of our cultural heritage to us in the form of costume drama, documentary, history and science programming; it informs, educates and entertains, it tells us about the human heart and the cosmos, the wide globe and the narrow street, it responds to new technologies and still manages to retain some sense of being the nation’s fireplace.

If it were to be forced to turn commercial, who would benefit? How would consumer choice and quality be maintained? What systems overseas provide tempting paradigms to imitate? None. Let’s stay the way we are.

All of which is arguable when looking at the BBC alone. But Offcom has wider responsibilities of course, as does government. They must balance public provision with private competition across the whole of an industry of converging technologies and diverging missions. They look at the plight of ITV struggling with its miserable ever-widening Mr Micawber gap between expenditure and income and, specifically at Channel 4 with its ambivalent position as a commercial operator with an often countervailing non-commercial remit. How ironic. Channel 4 is the perfect example of the glories of private and public and yet far from freeing it up, it’s been hamstrung by its unique constitution. How can we ensure a healthy, post digital switchover future for such networks? Where will the funding come from?

And what about other private companies who want to invest in the fabulous opportunities offered by online broadcasting: how can they compete with the BBC and its unfair subsidy? The days of claiming that the market cannot work are over, and it’s time to look at broadcasting in a new way. Thanks to TiVo, Apple TV, Sky Plus, Elgato and other forms of personal video recorder, televisions are now audio visual retail outlets that know about and respond to the consumer. Real market choice is here, there is no national fireplace, the individual with his remote, connected as he or she is, has no stake in station loyalty, no interest in network branding: show them the list of content, in categories including action, adult, arts, children’s, documentaries, drama, films: in sub-categories and nested sub-sub-categories, special interest according to age, religion, ethnicity and sexuality – who says the market place can’t tick the boxes for plurality, diversity and inclusivity?

Control is – or soon will be – the consumer’s: there is no need for a front end branded One Two Three Four, whether BBC or ITV. No need for anything but content. And if you want content to be anything more, any scintilla of a soupçon of a hint more than what market forces demand, if you sincerely want content to be occasionally uplifting, ennobling, educative, innovative, top down, nourishing and of bountiful, beautiful benefit to Britain and its citizenry, then yes, absolutely, the only source of financing for that is the licence fee.

So long as the playing field is level, the market will take care of the set top boxes, the distribution systems, the digital pipelines to the audio-visual retail outlet that is the consumer’s television, while the licence fee can – if it must and likes the idea – pay for content that can’t pay for itself in the normal cut and thrust of the marketplace. And if Channel 4 wants to (or must because of its remit) make that kind of public service programme as well as Hollyoaks and The Girl Whose Breasts Talk German, then the licence fee should cover that as well. The days of the BBC as a national institution, hosting and front-ending publicly funded content are over. The mighty oak must have some of its branches lopped off to light in on the smaller trees around it. Public Service Broadcasting is now merely the management of licence fee monies: we don’t need a BBC for that, or rather the BBC we need is a slimmed down BBC. It doesn’t need to try to be all things to all people, it can concentrate on public service and leave the commercial populist programming to the private sector.

Wow! Radical. And tempting. Perhaps. Perhaps tempting. Not to me, I have to say, but then I am not Britain or an average Britain. This image of the consumer’s home as a kind of electronic bookshop, as outlined by media business guru Barry Cox, where we move from passive viewer to active consumer may seem beguiling to some, but actually we already know that model. We know it from hotel rooms and aircraft entertainment systems.

It’s technically doable, especially when cleverly finagled with PVRs, but is it broadcasting, is it, actually, what anyone wants? Well actually, it exactly isn’t broadcasting, it’s narrow-casting. But is it wanted? I don’t know, I can’t speak for Britain, I can’t second guess polls, though I can imagine how easily they will return the results wanted by either side, according to the way the questions are framed. “Do you want to see the BBC dismantled so that you have to choose and pay for all your programmes like a hotel room film menu?” NO. “Do you want to stop paying the licence fee and being forced to watch poncey documentaries and have access to thousands of films and saucy programmes at the click of a button?” YES. GIGO, as they used to say in the early days of computing: garbage in, garbage out.

But that is nothing, nothing to the real problem. Content. Production. Programme making. TV programmes suffer from the embarrassing necessity of having to be written and made. Unlike Yorkie Bars or tennis balls or mobile phones you can’t just gear up the machinery and stamp them out in perpetuity. Every damned new programme has to be developed, nurtured, and tried out. Relationships have to be forged with writers, performers, presenters and directors, failures have to be accommodated and accepted. How this is achieved in a brave new world of post switchover root and branch restructuring, I don’t know.

Even the most immoderately free market media analyst or commentator I have heard or read would concede that there is a need for good impartial news coverage; that a nation deserves access to programmes that reveal truths about themselves and the world. But mostly they would argue too that if that is what the BBC is to provide, it can be slimmed down, the corporation can lose the need to make its Doctor Who and Strictly Come Dancing, its populist forays can be taken care of by ITV, whose audience share would concomitantly rise, narrowing its dreaded gap, while money would be freed from retrenching the BBC’s ambitions in the digital world, in film-making, in popular TV, in sporting occasions, money that could create better PSB programming and allow Channel 4 access to money that would spare us more The Boy Whose Testicles Play The Harpsichord.

Or perhaps a PSB system can be implemented on the American model of public subscription, or on the New Zealand and Singaporean models, based on a kind of central funding body. Neither of these can really be deemed especially successful, but again they free up money which can be thrown at as much public service broadcasting as anyone wants, and let real commercial players get on with making real commercial stuff.

But what would that BBC then be? Who would watch it? How could an audience be brought to a channel that showed nothing but worthy programming, no matter how excellently produced. Isn’t the whole point of the BBC as a major channel, a real player in TV production across the spectrum of genres and demographics, isn’t the whole point of that BBC its ability to draw audiences into PSB programming by virtue of their loyalty and trust in a brand that provides entertainment, pure and simple? Isn’t the slide scheduling from BBC4 to 2 or BBC3 to 1 an example of that, just as it can be from BBC2 to 1? I have been involved in programmes that have made that journey. Who Do You Think You Are? started on 2 and went to 1, like Have I Got New For You and a documentary I made recently on Gutenberg started on 4 and then screened on 2, getting I am told very good figures indeed, and staying in the top 3 on the iPlayer top ten for a week. It would not have been possible to get that audience, for what I am persuaded (well I would be) was an important and almost copybook example of PSB programming, without the cross channel trailing and station loyalty that the present all-encompassing nature of the BBC allows. In a sense the nature of the BBC as it is, ‘gives permission’ to all kinds of people to watch programmes they otherwise might not.

What is the alternative, a ghettoised, balkanised electronic bookshop of the home, no stations, no network, just a narrowcast provider spitting out content on channels that fulfil some ghastly and wholly insulting demographic profile: soccer mum, trailer trash, teenager, gay, black music lover, Essex girl, sports fan, bored housewife, all watching programmes made specifically for them with ads targeting them. Is that what we mean by inclusivity? Is that what we mean by plurality? God help us, I do hope not.

And anyway, cannot it not be understood that what we call ‘entertainment pure and simple’ is neither. It seems hardly necessary for me to rehearse the argument in comedy: Gervaise and Merchant, Lucas and Walliams, Mitchell and Webb, Catherine Tate, the Gavin and Stacey team, and before them Ali G, Steve Coogan, you name them, they all developed their arts over time, they all made minority failures, they all needed to be brought on. No one but the BBC could have made Blackadder, especially after the expense and relative failure of the first series. Does it count as entertainment or as public service broadcasting? Do we have to make a distinction? That’s the point surely. With all respect to OfCom and Barry Cox, and all the media analysts and broadcasting journalists who insist on one, do we really have to make a distinction?

I have to be personal again. I wanted to make a pair of films about bipolar disorder, did I have to believe that I was making a public service series? Could I not believe as I did, that I was making two television programmes that I hoped as many people as possible might watch? Just I would hope if I was making a drama or a comedy? Yes, those couple of films on manic depression may well have fulfilled a public service, one that could be uniquely followed up via the BBC’s resources on radio, on websites and on help-lines, but the gratifying large audience that tuned in, did they do so because it was public service broadcasting? How insulting to everyone concerned is that?

I was asked by the BBC to make this speech, if speech is the word. They hoped I suspect, but in no way insisted, that I would fight their corner against cuts, against the slicing of the licence fee: at the very least they expected I might make a case for the public service aspects of comedy, and for its importance and for the need for it to be nurtured and fostered. I have happy to do that, not out of eternal loyalty and belief in an institution that has, as much as any school or college made me who I am, but because I genuinely cannot see that the nation would benefit from a diminution of any part of the BBC’s great whole. It should be as closely scrutinised as possible of course, value for money, due humility and all that, but to reduce its economies of scale, its artistic, social and national reach for misbegotten reasons of ideology or thrift would be a tragedy. We got here by an unusual route that stretches back to Reith. We have evolved extraordinarily, like our parliament and other institutions, such is the British way. Yes, we could cut it all down and remake ourselves in the image of Italy or Austria or some other notional modern state. We could sharpen the axe, we could cut away apparently dead wood, we could reinvent the wheel, we could succumb to the natural desires of commercial media companies. Although I have an axe to grind on this, you should understand that it is personal not professional. Actually, if licence fee slicing and other radical plans do go ahead, I do not believe it would affect my career as either performer, presenter or producer, in fact I would probably profit more from the change. It is simply that I don’t want to live in a country that emasculates the BBC. Yes, I want to see Channel 4 secure, but I don’t believe that the only way to save it is to reduce the BBC. We can afford what we decide we can afford.

You know when you visit another country and you see that it spends more money on flowers for its roundabouts than we do, and you think … coo, why don’t we do that? How pretty. How pleasing. What a difference it makes. To spend money for the public good in a way that enriches, gives pleasure, improves the quality of life, that is something. That is a real achievement. It’s only flowers in a roundabout, but how wonderful. Well, we have the equivalent of flowers in the roundabout times a million: the BBC enriches the country in ways we will only discover when it has gone and it is too late to build it up again. We actually can afford the BBC, because we can’t afford not to.

In this third episode, he discusses the merits of Oscar Wilde’s view on American violence and good wallpaper.

Download the latest podgram “WALLPAPER”. Available in both .m4a (audio visual) and .mp3 (audio only) formats.

Producer note, Andrew here: Grateful thanks to the guys over in the Stephenfry.com/forum. They’ve transcribed Podgram 3 for you to read. As ever, please be patient as I manually approve comments from new users.

Note on “comments”, Andrew here. On Monday we upgraded the security of this blog and disabled some commentary sections of around 40% of Stephen’s blogs. We’re sorry that you have been unable to comment for three days. We are now working through the blogs and enabling the commentary sections. However, some of the older blogs will close off comments. We’ll start with September and October 07.

Thanks to Susan P alerting me to this.

Download the latest podgram “BORED OF THE DANCE”. Available in both .m4a (audio visual) and .mp3 (audio only) formats.

The PODGRAM is free via the iTunes Store or RSS feed subscribe link on the podcast page.

You may wonder why the podgrams can’t, like the blessays, be downloaded directly from stephenfry.com. Why must one go through the leviathan that is the iTunes store? I am afraid that no host that we can find is capable of dealing with the 1 terabyte plus of traffic engendered without crashing. And so we turned to the might of Apple to help us out. The problem we always return to is bandwidth. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. Who would not prefer to pootle along the country lanes in a flowered gypsy caravan, rather than blast down the motorway in a colossal juggernaut? Trouble is, when you’ve a certain number of deliveries to make a van just isn’t big enough. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. I sound like a 30s schoolgirl with a lisp. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. What is she saying?   Something to do with sandwiches perhaps? Or bandits. Bandits eating sandwiches and wearing bandages? We’ll never know.

Americans are no more irony illiterate than Britons or anyone else

Well. So. Thus. To the substance of this podgram. Since October 2007 I have been travelling around America making a documentary for the BBC. The idea is to visit every one of the 50 states that make up the great Union. We started six months ago at the top right hand corner in the state of Maine and will finish, in May this year of grace 2008, in Hawaii. Part paean to the continental Unites States and its matchless variety, beauty and almost preposterous grandeur, part journey of discovery through 50 entities, so diverse, proud and individual as almost to deserve to be considered nation states in their own right, part attempt to discover the nature and characteristics of the fabled “real America” whose citizens are so much more than the sum of wearisome cliché:   red-necked gun-toter, bible-thwacking faggot-hater, egocentric freak, camp Hollywood gossip  or ludicrous military figure shouting in sunglasses. We see a lot of New York City and Los Angeles on British television, and we see a good deal of sneering at religious cults, eccentric sex therapists and semiliterate politicians, but for those of us who have spent any time in the country, these are no more indicators of life in America, or conclusive characteristics of Americans than films about braying dukes and vomiting ladettes are clinching definers of all things British. If you are confused about what a ladette may be you can look it up (http://www.wordwebonline.com/en/LADETTE). God help you. Anyway. That is the idea. Not a propaganda piece for the America Tourist Board, if such a thing exists, but not an attempt to seek out the stupid, the mockable and the obvious. Incidentally, forgive a detour here, but if there is one misapprehension about Americans that annoys me more than any other, it is the lofty claim, usually made by the most dim-witted and wit-free Britons, that America is an — ho-ho — “irony free zone”. Let it be established here, this day, that no one, on pain of being designated fifty types of watery twat, ever dare repeat that feeble, ignorant, self-satisfied canard ever ever again. Americans are no more irony illiterate than Britons or anyone else and the repeated assertion (and it is no more than an assertion not a demonstrable provable fact) is no more than a pathetic symbol of a certain kind of Briton’s flabby need to convince themselves of their sophisticated superiority over the average American. Now, don’t feel bad about the fact that you, dear listener/reader have, at some point in the past been guilty of repeating and transmitting this feeble myth, we all have. It’s lazy, easy and gives us a warm glow. My war on the lie begins now, and is not retrospective, so you need not feel ashamed. Only promise never to repeat it. Actually, even if you think it’s true, have the grace to recognise that such a clunking, tedious, oft-repeated cliché is so dull and well-worn that it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, it’s just plain tedious and only bar-stool bores and dull-witted gibbons would ever think it worth trotting out. Besides, it is ugly, graceless and rude.

Some American landmarks may be obvious and yet for all that impossible to ignore. The Grand Canyon for example: for our film crew to pass it by would be silly. And there are cultural equivalents. Most obviously perhaps musical landmarks. You cannot really travel through the Appalachians in Tennessee and Kentucky for example, without wanting to sample the clog dancing, banjo-strumming, guitar picking, fiddle-scraping, bass-slapping Hillbilly music known as bluegrass. Then there is the Mississippi River, from its mouth in New Orleans where jazz, zydeco and cajun music were born, through the Delta whence came the blues and up to Memphis, Tennessee, which styles itself the birthplace of rock and roll, and thence to Chicago where house music was first heard, a city that also has its own tradition of blues, jazz, swing, funk soul and rock. A few hour’s ride east will take you to Detroit, Mo’town.

If you add to this the rhinestone country music of Nashville, the gospel tradition abounding throughout the south, the Tin Pan Alley achievements of Broadway, the cowboy music, the West Coast sound and Seattle grunge, it is easy to look at a map of America and see an atlas of music. What a treat for me then to take those legendary trails.

Yes…

But…

Oh dear, this is an odd but, and I really must get it right.

I cannot BEAR …

No, that isn’t right at all.

I just don’t GET …

No, that isn’t it, either.

The thing is, trusted listener/reader, I have a problem with popular music. A real problem. It marks me out as an inadequate citizen of my time. I like to regard myself very much as a lover of the modern, a neophile, if you will. I like cars, computers, digital doodads, television, movies, just about anything new and shiny enthrals me. But, I …

It isn’t really to do with ancient versus modern

No, you see, I’m getting it wrong again, it isn’t really to do with ancient versus modern. It’s about something else, something quite other, something perhaps more profound.

Let me tell you about a moment, if you don’t know it, in a most excellent film called Running on Empty, made by the great Sidney Lumet, who has never really known how to make a bad film. It stars Judd Hirsch off of of of Taxi. I don’t know why people say “off of”. “You’re that Stephen Fry off of QI, people say to me.” And once, “aren’t you off of of the telly?” Two ofs. Anyway. Judd Hirsch off of of of off Taxi, Christine Lahti of Golden Globes lavatory fame, Martha Plimpton and the effulgent River Phoenix. Oh and Steven Hill, an actor with whom I’m ever so slightly obsessed, has one scene as Christine Lahti’s father … quite brilliant. The premise essentially is that Hirsch and Lahti, as Arthur and Annie Pope, once blew up a napalm factory as a protest against the Vietnam war, they thought the factory was empty, but there was someone there who was mutilated in the explosion and the FBI has been on their tail ever since. River Phoenix is their musically very gifted son, born on the run, who practises piano on a dummy keyboard, so unsettled are their lives. So, we witness them escape one near FBI bust and they arrive in a new town with new identities, River dyes his hair and enrols in the high school in this new town as Michael Manfield. He is destined to fall in love with the music teacher’s daughter, Martha Plimpton, but that’s later. We see him arrive, slightly late, at the music class. He gives Ed Crowley, who plays the teacher, his registration documents and is told to find himself a seat.   Crowley continues with his lesson: he plays two pieces of music through speakers. One is classical, the other is, I think, a Madonna track. Crowley asks the class what the difference between the two is. There is the usual dumb silence you get when you ask a class of teenagers anything. Eventually one kid sticks up his hand and suggests, “one of them is good and the other is bad?” Crowley isn’t having that. “A matter of opinion, surely?” River shyly puts up his hand.

“Yes, Mr …. Manfield?”

And this is River’s answer: “You can’t dance to Beethoven.”

Crowley is delighted by this.

You can’t dance to Beethoven.

So there we have part of my problem. Dance music. It is not that there is classical or modern, serious or popular, the division is between music you can dance to or music you can’t.

I know that much of what I am about to say is wild exaggeration, but bear with me. I want to address a terror that lurks within me, a huge beast on my back, a great maggot in my brain. You cannot expect too much rational talk from a fellow who is unburdening himself of his deepest fears.

This is not a blessay or a podgram in which I reveal that I prefer classical to pop music. That is a) dull, b) over-familiar, c) as mad as saying that I prefer air to food: both food and air are necessary and besides they each use different pipes, so preference doesn’t enter into it, and d) it isn’t true anyway even if it could be, which it couldn’t so there.

All that music I talked about in describing a journey around America? I love it all. Or can love it. I love country, blues, rock and roll, gospel, zydeco, jazz, swing, Tin Pan Alley, roots, bluegrass, hillbilly. Less keen on the West Coast sound, on funk, soul, mo’town, rap, hip-hop, house, R and B. Don’t hate them, just don’t like them quite as much. Outside America I have gone on record as to confessing a weakness for Led Zeppelin and Abba twin poles on the Euroglobe, but each as splendid in their own way as the other.

But this is not a Nick Hornby Man List in which I show off my knowledgeable, insightful eclecticism. I know a great deal less about popular music than almost all of my contemporaries. The point is that I do want you to understand how much I love, or can love, this music. It is important when I try to explain to you how much I hate, or can hate, this music.

It’s all dance music. Give or take. I mean, yes, some tracks are dancier than others, some styles are dancier, but essentially they are all about tapping those toes and swinging those feet.

I hate doing it myself

I hate dancing more than I can possibly explain. I hate doing it myself, which I can’t anyway, but I loathe and resent the necessity to try. I hate watching other people do it. I hate the way it breaks up conversation. I hate the slovenly mixture of sexual exhibitionism, strutting contempt and repellent narcissism that it involves. I hate it when it is formless, meaningless bopping and I hate it (if anything even more) when it is formal and choreographed into genres like ballroom or schooled disco. Those cavortings are so embarrassing and dreadful as to force my hand to my mouth.

If I listen to music, I like either to do it completely alone, so that if I am taken by the desire to move my feet and body (which is inevitable with so much music) I can do it unwitnessed, or I like to LISTEN to it, to hear the line of it, to follow the lyrics and to allow it work inside me. I do not want to use it as an exercise track for a farcical, meaningless, disgusting, brainless physical public exhibition of windmilling, gyrating and thrashing in a hot, loud room or hall. I do not want to use music as the medium for a mating or courting ritual. No one would ever select me as a sexual partner on the basis of my ability to froth, frolic and gibber in time to music anyway, and nor would I ever choose a partner by such desperate and useless criteria.

I can’t dance. It may well be true that guilty feet have no rhythm, but it is also true that perfectly innocent feet can also be unable to move persuasively or happily to the beat.   I can’t dance and I SO do not want to. Or is it that I don’t want to because I can’t? No, I don’t think so. I can’t play football, golf, cricket to anything like a human standard and I want to desperately. Desperately. It really isn’t a question of being truculent and captious about it. I really, really, really hate dancing and have not the slightest milligram of envy for those who can do it. If there is such a thing as ‘being able to do’ the kind of dancing people routinely engage in. Not so much an accomplishment as an affliction.

The unhappy self-consciousness of the adolescent   on the dance floor at school, or in the village barn dance or local disco is too well known a standard hero of   rueful dissection for me to need to describe myself in that guise in too much detail.   Here were boys and girls my age twisting, spinning and jumping at each other and they all seemed to know what they were doing. Had I been confined to the sick room with an asthma attack the day disco dancing was covered in the syllabus? How did they know which way to move,when to fling up a hand, when to spin, when to jump? When to look into their “partner’s” eyes, when to look at the floor? There was nothing written down, did it accord to some chord change or eight bar measure that I, in my hot discomfort And pop illiteracy simply could not hear?

Dancing around a handbag

Yes, it was true that the girls often danced with each other, or in desultory fashion around a handbag and yes it was true that some boys were gawkier, jerkier and less convincing than others, but that didn’t seem to worry them too much, they just got on with it. They had jumped in and they were being born along the current of the music. I was hanging on the bank, gazing in … what? Envy? Disgust? Misery? Scorn? Hungry sorrow? Actually, none of those things, I just wanted to be somewhere else. If I had been offered the skill and dance charisma of …. I don’t know, John Travolta, say … I would have turned it down. I found, from the get go, that a dance floor was a place I never ever wanted to spend any time at all. Not so much as a second of my life.To this day I cannot abide so much as a minute in a place where people are dancing. I find it simply unbearable. Think of it as an allergy. I hate films set in such places. Have never sat through all of Saturday Night Fever, Flash Dance, Dirty Dancing or any of those. I feel ill just picturing them: the leg warmers, the tights, the stretching and leaping … ugh…. And how people love to try and drag me to the floor. Just as I am tired of people saying to me “I’d really like to see you drunk one day, Stephen” I am tired of them saying “I’d love to see you dancing your head off.” Grrrrrrr.

Nowhere to run

There is a celebrated moment in Pride and Prejudice where Darcy squashes the blandly pompous Sir William Lucas, who has said something like, “There is nothing like dancing … I consider it one of the first refinements of polished societies.” To which Darcy replies, “and it has the advantage of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies.   After all, every savage can dance.” We overlook the less than respectful language of the day, but actually the ‘savage’ element of dancing, the primal nature of it has returned to our culture and is the basic form enjoyed by most people in our “polished” society. At a pinch I would welcome that over the continued existence of endless long ballroom routines in which you have to be taught the steps of quadrilles, cotillions, gavottes, waltzes and so forth. I suppose the descendant of that ghastly form of entertainment is the vile terror known as Line Dancing, a proceeding so fatuous and horrible as to defy language. I have twice been caught with nowhere to run in one of those events. It was like being on the gymnastics mat at school, or in the infant Music and Movement   room. The sweaty, ghastliness of it all and the silly hats and embarrassing clapping. Oh god, I’ve given myself hives just thinking of it.

And hell, that reminds me of childhood Scottish dancing lessons, hopping over swords. Or more recent holidays with friends with Highland Reels promised as an after dinner treat. ‘In this life,’ Sir Arnold Bax is reputed to have said, ‘you should try everything once, except incest and folk dancing.’ Eightsome reels. Stripping the Willow. The Roger de Coverley, whoever the arse he was. Morris Dancing, which is fashionable to loathe, I really don’t mind at all. In fact I quite like it, because there is never the faintest chance of being invited to join in. Organised dancing and disorganised dancing in which one is supposed to participate. Both of them fill me with dread and disgust. Yes, probably self-disgust more than any other kind.

Maybe it all springs from having to sing at school the Worst Song Ever Written — Lord of the Dance. ‘Dance then, wherever you may be, for I am the Lord of the Dance said he. I’ll dance with you if you dance with me, for I am the lord of the dance said he.’ And so bloody on. If ever a song were guaranteed to create a generation of atheists and non-dancers it is that one. ‘I danced for the sun and I danced for the moon. I danced at night and I danced at noon.’ I mean, come on. Seriously shut up. Shut so up and go so dreadfully and entirely away.

Classical music, we might as well use the term, is of course descended, like all music, from forms of dance. Even the most classical classical music has its roots there. Sarabands, gigs, minuets, galliards, pavanes, mazurkas, schottisches, waltzes, polkas and reels have informed the repertoire from the very beginning. You would be hard pressed to dance to a gig from a Bach partita however, or to boogy on down to the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde. River was right. You can’t dance to Beethoven. Time signatures change and shift, there is no back beat, what dance rhythms there might be are played with in such a fashion as to discourage a tapping foot. Classical music is there to be listened to. It doesn’t make it better. I really, really mean that I do not believe that it makes it better, and I despise the snobbery and ignorance that is convinced otherwise. But it does make it better suited to Stephens. I can follow the line, lose myself in the music’s conflict and dialectical struggles, dive into the textures, surge with the ebb and flow of climaxes and surface again, all without pumping, primping and body popping. Again, I am aware that many of you, no matter how many times I repeat this, will think I am being all superior. So let me be absolutely clear about this. This is all a weakness, failing, problem, phobia, hang-up with me. It is something to do with physical shame, clumsiness, self-consciousness, pride in privacy, lack of co-ordination, all of which have culminated in a huge and insuperable hatred of losing physical self-control, in jumping in and joining in. The once sappy bendy young tree is now too old for anything to be done about it without his gnarled distorted shape cracking with a puff of dry dust, so it is too late to change.

It is more or less certain, statistically, that the vast majority of you listening or reading will love dancing and will be annoyed and upset to think that I am contemptuous of your adored hopping and bopping. I am not contemptuous. I think less of no one for loving to dance. I am fully aware that, from the most polished society to the most, hem, savage, it is what humans do more than writing, ball games, praying, knitting, riding, singing even. They dance in the mornings they dance at nights, they dance in their trousers and they dance in their tights.   The whole world dances. Except Stephen and a few others. So do believe this. I am not in any way, not in ANY WAY scornful of those who dance, I am merely describing my allergic response. I am allergic to champagne as it happens, and this has given me a very healthy and natural distaste for it. I could describe the loathing and fear I have of the drink,   but it would in no way implicate champagne drinkers. So let it be with Terpsichore and her art. I am allergic to it, but I do not despise those who are not. I can’t go so far as to say that I envy them, but scorn and derision? Absolutely not. Just don’t ever look for me on the dance floor.

And so when people ask me what I think of pop music, or folk music, or rock and roll, or whatever other kind, I never quite know how to answer. I like listening to it, there is much of it lifts my spirits, that speaks to my deeps, that cleans me out, cheers me up, flies me away. But as for going to concerts, being in rooms where it is playing, hearing it on television, at parties, in the street, having it pour from hairdressers, clothes shops and bars — well no thank you.

And if you think that means I’m an enemy of the people, an elitist, a snob, then I’m sorry I haven’t explained myself properly.

Thank you for letting me leak my unlovely torment all over you. Thank you for listening/reading. Until the next time. Fare well.

Stephen

© Stephen Fry 2008

Producer’s note, Andrew here.

Thanks for the kind offers about bandwidth. Currently The Positive Internet Company, a lovely company based in the UK are providing stephenfry.com with all our 1930’s school girl needs. Hope you all enjoy listening (and watching) Stephen’s latest offering.

Created by me and the team behind the official website The Adventures of Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry’s PODGRAMS launches with the first episode BROKEN ARM on Wednesday 20th February.

In this podgram I discuss the

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday February 2nd 2008 in The Guardian
“Deliver us from Microsoft” - The Guardian headline

In recent weeks I have banged on about Open Source, expending two articles on Firefox alone. Open Source applications make their code available to everyone. Disagreements and rabid balkanisation within the Open Source community aside, for our purposes the term might as well refer to free software whose licence allows you to share the source code, alter it, use it, do with it what you will.

The two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU project and Linux. I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.

I am writing this article on a kind of mini John the Baptist, a system that prepares the way of the software saviour whose coming will deliver the 90% of world computer users who suffer under Windows from the expensive, clumsy, costly, ugly, pricey toils of Microsoft.

The Asus EEE PC perched on my knee combines GNU software with a Linux kernel powered by an Intel Celeron Mobile Processor to produce a very extraordinary little laptop. It weighs less than a kilogram, starts up from cold in about 12 seconds and shuts down in five. It has no internal hard disk and no CD drive. It offers 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage and a seven-inch display; wireless, dial-out modem and ethernet adaptors are available for networking and internet connections, three USB ports, mini-jack sockets for headphones and microphone, a VGA out, an SD card slot and a built-in webcam. All for about £200 - less than the price of a show, dinner and taxi for two in London’s West End.

When you press the EEE’s power button, the lightning speed and quietness of boot-up tell you that you are in the hands of a solid state flash drive: no vulnerable moving parts and buzzing platters here. Within seconds a tabbed screen will appear on your display: the tabs are labelled Internet, Work, Learn, Play, Settings and Favourites. A click on each reveals a page containing bright, clear icons that relate to 40 separate applications and half a dozen or so selected web links. The applications include Skype, Firefox, Thunderbird (the Mozilla mail client) and OpenOffice.org, an Open Source suite of applications that allows you to create and edit Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. One of the pre-installed web links is to Google Docs, which lets you do the same MS Office compatible work online. This combination of “server side” applications and Open Source software is, rightly, scaring the heck out of Microsoft which is in danger of relying, in a few years’ time, on its excellent Xbox games console for income and kudos, its domination of personal computing a rapidly diminishing memory. Well, I’m allowed to dream.

The EEE is far from perfect: system software claims two-thirds of its meagre 4GB of storage, the keyboard is sub-par, the trackpad worse; it seems a shame to boast a built-in webcam and a full field of IM clients, yet be incapable of videochat; the OS, a customised version of Linux, part Debian, part Asus’s own creation, makes downloading outside the bundled software updater uncertain. But these defects are minor compared with the machine’s astounding value and functionality - and to the future trends in computing it heralds.

This is a computer designed as an introductory machine for children or adults, as well as a simple cheap do-it-all machine along the “One Laptop Per Child” model but which is also absolutely ideal as a truly cheap, portable, resilient device to slam into a backpack or briefcase. Everything you could want is there in free, Open Source form. It does not pretend to cater for the power user but, while file management is basic for the average person, tuxheads (Linux experts) can go straight to terminal mode and do their stuff. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, this is a wonderful little friend who does all we need straight out of the box. And it is only the beginning…

© Stephen Fry 2008

Over the next month or so I continue the American documentary, filming my way up from New Orleans to the Great Lakes for Leg 3 which begins on the 3rd February.

I will be posting new blogs, both in audio podcast form and in traditional text blessay mode.

Meanwhile thank you for the tremendous quality and spirit of your own postings and comments, for pointing out my manifold omissions and ignorances, for contributing gracefully and knowledgeably to the various debates and for overlooking my own spasmodic presence.

Sxxx