Weeeeeeeeell, moving on from the Shakespearian for a mo, I did say it was a busy book season, and here in my all-too-mortal hands, I hold a glossy and shockingly high profile new book which owes its existence entirely to my own persistence and perspicacity – the very first publication to be released in the blessed ‘A Bit of Fry & Laurie’ canon for nigh-on three over-long decades.
So, ladies and the gentlest of men, I pitched for ‘A Lot of Fry & Laurie’, we got ‘Fry & Laurie: Everything Funny They’ve Ever Written’, released by Michael Joseph this very very month. If not before – but I only just got my copy.
This is a bibliographical creation of great beauty and inestimable fluffiness, of course. I could not feel more proud to have had any hand in making this ludicrously overdue celebration a reality, even if held at stanley-knife-point. Convincing the two comedically diffident colleagues to agree to this renaissance project was not a task I outlined for myself without deep trepidation and colossal misgivings, but, one way or another, thank Fryness and Laurieness that it has ultimately paid off. This book even smells nice. Mmm.
That typed, I was very much prepared to point out that this isn’t the actual book which I ultimately pitched to the Powers That Be at Michael Joseph, part of my old haunt at Penguin/Random House – nor indeed to Stephen and Hugh’s excellent literary agents at David Higham. No, that book was ‘A Lot of Fry & Laurie’ – the literal Complete Works. And let me sculpt it in ten-feet-high entirely gilt letters, lest any dear reader out there detect for one millisecond even the tiniest fleck of chagrin about how my initial manuscript has emerged from the other side of the palaver of the long and complicated publishing ritual: when I say that this book is not quite the one which I originally pitched, it’s because even as I solemnly sent it off to the publisher, I felt certain that ‘A Lot of Fry & Laurie’ could never exist.
Despite a highly stressful period of over-work, at the start of summer 2025 I found myself suddenly without any paying job, for the first time in nearly six years. Being a publishing professional of between 30 and 20 years’ standing (take your pick of industry), I did not fancy the idea of lying around playing retro videogames, re-reading Wodehouse, eating endless satsumas et cetera, nor less did my wife – though Fred might not have minded too much. I had to – I have to – keep creating, keep thinking of exciting new projects and Really Wild Things to put out there in the hope that enough folk will also like the idea enough that eventually some of them would help put shoes (and socks, in colder seasons) on Fred’s growing feet.
And so, having just finally put the official Fry & Laurie history Soupy Twists! out into the world in paperback to my satisfaction (satisfaction not inclusive, of course, of the almost totally echoing absence of any form of publicity, with Sir S long since abandoning all social media and Hugh’s kind promise to tweet about the release feeling somewhat impossible to re-request given the fact that Twitter had essentially been destroyed from right out under us), I found myself musing on the tragedy of all the oodles of un-published Fry & Laurie material the former comedian had kindly entrusted me with.
Perhaps the obviousness of ‘A Lot of Fry & Laurie’ had been with me for longer than I recall, but as such a devoted fanman of the ‘A Bit Of’ franchise (which it most assuredly is not), then it was that a definite flea entered my ear about the fizzling nineties fate of the beloved ‘A Bit Of’ sketch books released to tie in with each series – two tastefully silly selections for the first two paperbacks, the compendium of the ‘Third Bit’ which remains a hardback masterpiece, only followed by the format-trashing floppiness of the 4th and final collection, released in 1995. These are all faded but cherished volumes on my shelves, obviously, and I felt Soupy Twists! had added to the oeuvre dutifully and merrily… But the house still didn’t seem in order.
One repeated gripe Hugh shared with me when I was writing the colleagues’ official story was that he and Stephen had never had any kind of ‘guru’, no manager steering the ‘A Bit Of’ brand to new heights – like gentlemen cricketers, they amused each other for our amusement for a number of years, and then bowed out with just a tinge of uncharacteristic sadness. Had anyone been detailed to corral their efforts, Hugh argued more than once, they may never have stopped entertaining the world together, to this day. They had just been ‘falling down stairs together’.
This was really the impetus I needed to contact them both, and their saintly assistants, and send a clear “How about it?” proposal. Throughout my career, I have limited my pesterings of my favourite double act (and indeed, every comedy legend in my Contacts) to a very minimal every-few-years civility, so this pitch was a biggie.
My proposal was to essentially slavishly reprint ‘3 Bits of Fry & Laurie’, but with the final volume folded into the MS, and adding some of their choicest sketches from before and after the run of BBC shows – their most often performed sketch of all time, the deliberately calamitous Hedge Sketch, did not even feature in any of the ‘ABOF&L’ episodes or books. So this would be the ultimate anthology of their entire written career together as a double act, from Footlights to Alfresco, to Saturday Live, to ‘A Bit Of’, to this day.
One major problem was – I’m a fanboy! Sorry, man. And as I began to unpick the existing printed sketch collections, and see the omissions decided on by ‘the boys’ or their editors nearly forty years ago, I found it utterly irresistible to immerse myself in putting right what I saw as all sorts of terrible injustices against comedy over the years. Sketches like the piano number in which Fry randomly drops into a WWII monologue – “Berlin in 1944 was a shattered and divided city: no city for lovers…” or even the truly seminal ‘Gay’ sketch, surely in their Top Ten, had never been included in the original books, even though many sketches which never even made it to the screen were added, for welcome fan service.
They always say the aim in life should be to make your pleasure your job, and so I dived busily into frenetic editorial activity, rebuilding each series’ script collection to provide facsimiles of the original releases, only with the excised bits lovingly pasted back in. I went back over all the sketches performed on Saturday Live (sadly not via original TV scripts, who knows if such things possibly exist anywhere?) and presented the whole sorry Gordon & Stuart saga from first chocolate bar promo to their narrow escape of being blown up for The Cause. Already knowing that The Hedge Sketch would be the inevitable closer, I then selected only the finest, laugh-out-loud sketches from the completely unperformed treasury of which Stephen had sort of made me digital custodian.
The whole ethos of the project for me was completism: the Complete Works, seeing as neither Fry nor Laurie have ever made a single move to have one last run round the comedy block together, this would stand as the ultimate database of their entire contribution to sketch comedy, their equal to Monty Python’s essential ‘Just The Words’.
Plus, of course, I had to pen a short introduction, blowing the partnership’s respective trumpets, because they clearly weren’t going to do it themselves – and it only seemed fair that I got my chance to present my credentials as author of Soupy Twists!, and perhaps a few more Fry & Laurie fans might discover the pleasures of my book, as well.
Presenting these scripts as practical performance texts was also utterly central to my vision: sketch comedy has been circling the plughole for so long, I felt the lack of any classic comedy inspiration for today’s sketch comedians in the zeitgeist could not help.
Admittedly, things do seem to be looking up slightly with the surprisingly promising SNL UK and the brilliant likes of Ellie & Natasia – and her little brother Jamie – but sketch comedy is due a resounding mainstream comeback, and the two gentlemen I consider the greatest ever exponents of the art form should be part of that. This book would be a revelation to a whole generation of new comedians!
Except… ex-cept… once all was cut and pasted and formatted and edited and pruned and perfect… my glorious ‘A Lot of Fry & Laurie’ manuscript was over 193,000 words. I desperately urged the publishers that wonderful things could be done with formatting and typeface selection, and was particularly exercised about the complete irrelevance of reproducing any photos, stressing my desire for this to be the most useful performance text…
But I’m not all that stupid, I’ve suffered too much heartbreak in the publishing sector to be a green Pollyanna who imagines that any professionally published book is going to emerge on the other side of the process anything like the dream book you had in mind when you were constructing the text. I knew that what I was providing was an enormous, beautiful block of marble for others to chisel away at. I just hoped Stephen and Hugh would gain pleasure from revisiting so many no doubt entirely forgotten comic gems, and would bear in mind the devotion of fans to so many classic ‘Bits’ when they – or further editors given the power by them – began to chip away at the unpublishable edifice. In truth, since submitting the text, I have not chipped in so much as the tiniest thoughtlet during the evolution of the book, which is a decision I’m big enough to admit is probably very wise of the splendid Jillian Taylor at Penguin Random House.
For those fans depraved enough to be intrigued at the idea of what my original Fry & Laurie compendium looked like, I prepared a tiny snapshot of the contents list at the very bottom of this blog…*
And yet… hang the flip on… if you compare the list below to the resultant contents list, you’ll find, to my utter shock… very little difference at all! The miracle has finally been allowed to happen, and a book has survived publication with all its jouissance intact!
You could have knocked me down with a sizeable brush. You see, I’ve been awaiting this book for over a month now, certain that it was a fraction of the book I delivered. And this morning, as if to tempt fate, I decided to put on my Stephen Fry socks, my Mr Bean pants (both gifts, I hope you appreciate) and Comic Relief t-shirt… and within the hour, the gigantic tome was there on my doorstep! I had no idea my underwear had such powers – I’ll have to think of how best to use this new ability.
True, I would have chosen a colour photograph for the cover, I would have preferred a Fry-Laurie order of photo composition (if Ant and Dec can always get it right…) and I do miss the white and gold design of the original books… But, by Berhwale the Avenger, these are minuscule grumps in a sea of joy. This book far outstrips my least realistic hopes.
If it’s fan service you’re after, I think Stephen, Hugh and I have delivered the goods in no small order. And although this is all golden cultural necessity to me, the colleagues really didn’t need to let me do all this – I couldn’t be more grateful.
Hugh Laurie was actually the man who taught me once and for all the fan’s place in the entertainment system, many years ago, in the mid-noughties. News broke that he was to star in some new American medical drama, and being a Cookdandbombd keyboard warrior of the most egregious kind at the time, I bewailed what I saw as the further loss of honestly one of the finest comedy performers of all time – once again, that priceless elastic physiognomy was going to waste months, maybe years, in service to some US TV show or other rather than doing what it was put in this earth to do – make me laugh. Actually, it was before I reached that silly conclusion that the absolute ridiculousness of my position suddenly dawned on me like a holy flash: who the fuck did I think I was? Hugh Laurie did not owe me, nor any fan of his comedy work, anything – he was master of his own fate, and perhaps this ‘House’ programme might turn out to be quite good for him. So good luck to him…
And I still say a drippingly sincere good luck to them both, and reaffirm my utterly throbbing pride to have given them the means to present their own life’s work in the way that both colleagues agree they would like it to be remembered in the 21st century (“if at all”, Hugh would surely add – I cannot say for sure, but the new book title has a discernible Laurie-ish touch of awkward modesty to it).
I am delirious with pleasure in finally flicking through Fry & Laurie’s own choice of the humungous database of sketches I furnished them with, and very high on my list of current hopes is that many, many thousands the world over will experience comparable pleasure. And then, if they perform them out loud, that pleasure will be increased manifold. Maximising pleasure is surely a good thing in these times.
