SOUPY TWISTS! A BIT OF A SAGA: • 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 •

STOP PRESS! AUDIOBOOK IS NOW LIVE, LOVES!

Weeeeeeell for all the sakes of goodness, let me expound, expose and exposit. May I? I think it would be useful to backtrack somewhat. Can it truly be six and a half years since the official Fry & Laurie celebration ‘Soupy Twists’ first revealed itself to the world, in hardback form? If not, it must be nigh-on, if not more. And yet, here we find ourselves, cowering in the broken mid-2020s, privileged to behold the resurfacing of this leviathan of comedy history afresh – thirty years after the final episode of ‘A Bit of Fry & Laurie’ trickled out of BBC1, never to be repeated… Basically, I have been very busy.

Traditionally, innocent young hardbacks develop into comely hot paperbacks roughly one year after release, but such was not the case with this Unbound production, despite all the absolute agonies of hitting my full crowd-funding targets. However I framed it in the above blog posts, that was one of the most stressful periods of my entire life, even with Stephen and Hugh backing me on functional social media platforms, the daily grind of begging for hard cash for theoretical pages felt like Groundhog Day cubed.

Therefore it’s probably fair at this late hour to admit that I was utterly dismayed when the Unbound bods presented the original Soupy Twists cover to me as a fait accompli – a funereal black tome bearing the scowling monochrome image of young Hugh and Stephen, in that incongruous order, just daring the browsing comedy aficionado to pick up the book and buy a copy, with their comically frowning sneers. Nothing could have been more opposite to my intention with the book, which I dearly wanted, as the OFFICIAL Fry & Laurie book, to be the positively conclusional entry in the glorious line of official F&L book releases, as collected by me in the early ’90s:

These gleaming white hardbacks, glimmering with gold lettering in a smart serif font, with, there on the cover, a glorious photo of the two thirty-something colleagues in even more glorious Technicolor – garish paisley shirts and all, smiling invitingly at the would-be reader, and guaranteeing a good time for all – were what this project had always been about. I begged, I bargained, I asked if the designer could at least just flip the bloody photo so the pair were standing in the right order… but all protestations fell on deaf ears. It was a shock, dealing with such an avowedly author-oriented publisher, to find that my views on the product were considered so irrelevant. The subsequent admission, that Unbound would not be honouring any (usually automatic) paperback release for my lovingly crafted double comedy biography, simply added insult to the injury which had been caused by the bludgeoning-multiplied-by-arse-ache of the whole dashed experience.

But! A proverbial pish and thirteenpence, I don’t wish to waste too many precious pixels dwelling on this negativity, and anyone who follows the publishing news knows that Unbound-as-was have bigger woes to deal with just now – but although both my hard-funded, under-loved books created with them seemed to melt in the ether after release, I can at least remain grateful to the company for unbegrudgingly giving me back full rights to both books many years ago – essentially, for the Fry & Laurie book, being told that if I wanted a paperback, I had to fusking well do it myself.

And so, dear you, I have. 

Many months have been spent combing through the original MS for fixes and update requirements, brand new beauties from the depths of the exclusive Fry & Laurie unused sketch archive have been found and folded into the brew, and the whole book has been reformatted, and redesigned, published by Plummie Books (aka me). Yes, I’m afraid it is only available on a truly evil platform, for which I would pay in any good non-fictional purgatory, and I am truly sorry for that, but sadly the KDP system works. And now the printed paperbacks are in my hands, holistically my own work (bar the wonderful Index, by Paula Clarke Bain), I do feel just a teensy bit proud of myself.

Just before Xmas I was intending to pay a professional artist to create the cover image in my mind’s eye – our two heroes, dinner-jacketed and proffering cocktails to the potential reader, caught in smiling ‘Soupy Twists!’ salute… This was in a way a violent retaliation against the idea of using AI to create book covers; I really wanted to actually pay a real artist… but then, coming from my own empty pocket, I wasn’t able to actually offer very much, and the artists who did kindly show an interest quickly made it clear to me that the process was going to be so painstakingly slooow and wrought with imponderables that, for my own mental health (having already decided that the book would be a spring release, launched at the 2025 Bath Comedy Festival), it was just going to make more sense to give Alamy £50 for the best colour photo they had of a young Stephen & Hugh, and have done. Once again, it seemed impossible to rely on anyone but me, to make this book a reality.

Sir Stephen and Non-Sir Hugh have of course been fully updated as to the book’s development throughout, and I got a wonderfully supportive email from Hugh: ‘I certainly will tweet from the rooftops when the time comes, assuming Twitter hasn’t been taken over by Klansmen, or SPECTRE, or Man City. Not entirely out of the question.’ Sadly, Musk’s destruction of Twitter means that I obviously won’t be holding Hugh to this kind promise, and Stephen has also left Instagram, so once again, I’m all on my own here. But at least they’re with me in spirit…

Irredeemably evil though Amazon most assuredly is, anyway, I have at least achieved what I set out to do – to create a Soupy Twists paperback after so many years of waiting. As of 1 April – before or after noon – you will honestly be able to buy both the Kindle eBook and the paperback, exclusively from KDP. I would have loved for it to be available in bookshops, but short of the shop owners paying the full whack for each copy, I don’t believe that is an option here.

But that’s not in any sense all! Full closure for this multimedia publishing saga can only come with the release of Soupy Twists in audio, and so we’ve spent over a year working on the fully updated audiobook version, to launch at the same time! Sadly, as ever, the madness of the Audible system delayed the release by a month or two, but now it has surfaced, I think fans will see why we’re so proud of it.

I say ‘we’, and it’s rather a neat story. 20+ years ago, when I was still in the double act ‘Jem Roberts & Paul Gannon’, I had a great idea for a comedy show format, like a grudge wrestling match between two duos, presented by a stand-up as referee, and you’d play sketches off against each other, play jokers, etc. – rather like ISIHAC, a fake competition which was basically just a sketch show in disguise. The other duo we were in cahoots with were called Nice Mum, and we literally only met up once – the hottest day in 2004, I seem to recall, sweating myself inside out on the Central Line. But then this Nice Mum duo landed a Radio 2 gig and dropped out, and it wasn’t until circa 2017 or so that one of the pair, Kris Dyer, suddenly swam back into my ken. Having been rudely informed by Penguin/Random House for years that nobody wanted audio versions of my books, some brave soul out there had so enjoyed The Frood, that they had gone out of their way to arrange a recording of it for the blind! That man was Kris, his audio company is Rakkit Productions, and since he got in touch to let me know about his reading of The Frood, we have adapted the rest of my books for audio in different and entertaining ways! I have always been aware that poor Kris would quite probably have preferred to have read the rest of my oeuvre himself, but I’m as frustrated a performer as anybody, and so it’s been all me me me… until now! Because how else can you turn a book largely composed of duologues between two colleagues into an audiobook? Of course, this ersatz Fry needed an ersatz Laurie, and so that’s how we’ve split the recording between us, rare unperformed sketches and all.

And speaking of unperformed sketches, on April 5th me and Kris physically met up for the second time, and the first in over 20 years, as we marked the occasion of the release of the paperback and audiobook with a live show for the Bath Comedy Festival. Abetted by wonderful young actor Josie Mae-Ross, we breathed some form of life into at least an hour of oddities from the F&L archive… And the show is now online here!

When Sir Lord Baron Stephen gifted me the comedy contents of his hard drive eight years ago, I certainly marvelled at the sheer expanse of sketches either rejected for the many series of ‘A Bit of Fry & Laurie’, or written for series that never saw the light of day, but even I thought that the two existing live shows composed entirely of un-performed F&L material, staged in London and in Bath, must have ‘filleted the oeuvre’ to some extent, putting the sound of scraping barrels within worrying reach…

But let’s just say that after our one and only Zoom rehearsal, the script I somehow managed to stitch together turned out to be at least 250% too long, and so I was forced to strip out more than half of the material, relegating it to a file named ‘Soupy Twists Live 4?’… and even then, there must be at least a further forty-odd minutes’ worth of stuff too crap to include, so if you tot it all up, this material Fry shared with me must equate at least, ooh… six hours or more? More than two unmade series of ‘ABOF&L’? Most of it is madder than a melonball, of course, a discernible tinge of late night substance-fuelled manic typing can sometimes crop up, but at its best… it’s unbeatable, like most Fry & Laurie comedy. And yet the colleagues still fail to make any kind of lap of autumnal lap of honour…!

Please do whisper the name of the book to anyone you know who may have any form of penchant for those two dear old terribly tall and undeniably privileged comedy geniuses and what they got up to 30+ years ago. This project passed the rent horizon many years ago, it’s time it enjoyed its time in the sun. If you’ll pardon the pun. The non-existent pun.

Cheers.