The Holy Underpant War

It has been suggested in certain quarters that I’m delusional. Some would go further and claim they make insightful comments when questioning my mental heath, my abilities as a diarist, and my friendship with some of the greatest minds of our age. Well I’m here to rebuff these remarks and to again state that I’m merely the chronicler of reality. If our American cousins don’t understand the world of London celebrity, then it really isn’t my concern. I suggest they go take a long jog along an abbreviated pier. I am quite comfortable with the life I lead and the friends that surround me. It doesn’t surprise me when fans of the man I know simply as ‘Fry’ question my relationship with their hero. Take the incident that greeted me this morning. It is not the stuff of celebrity magazines and red carpets. It’s just the stuff of my grim everyday life.

Newly hatched from beneath my duvet, I had been heading in a south westerly direction, negotiating a run of stairs with the intention of heading towards the kitchen and seeking out a woman called Judy. Toast was on my mind when I heard a rather strange outburst coming from the front room.

‘Hurrah!’ came the martial cry followed shortly after by the sound of wood cracking lampshade.

I might have ignored it but, when another ‘hurrah!’ was followed by a ‘have that!’, I stepped into the living room to see what the commotion was about.

The stuff of merry old England was never like this. There was Stephen Fry, with his plastercast arm in a sling, hopping around the living room, jousting with a mop resting on his good elbow. It was an odd sight but odder still for the large pair of gentleman’s Y fronts that were hanging from his lance.

‘Ah, Sir Richard! How good of you to rise before noon,’ said he. ‘Methinks you have too much ale last night and a good time with yon buxom wench.’

‘I hope Judy doesn’t hear you calling her that,’ I warned. ‘Yon wench packs a buxom punch.’

‘Pah!’ he laughed. ‘Fry frets not. You must hurry up and sate your appetite. We attend a tourney at noon and there we might be spending the night in the Sheriff’s dark dungeon.’

It’s funny how a statement like that can press for attention despite the other things that are going on in the world. You would think that the next words out of my mouth would have been: ‘why are you waving your underpants on the end of a stick, Stephen?’ But instead I merely asked: ‘What sheriff?’

‘Sheriff Plod of the London constabulary who will arrest us for causing a public affray. That’s if it all goes to plan…’

‘Plan? What plan?’

He toed the day’s Guardian across to me and dropped the knightly patois. ‘Ah, Dick! Were we both smaller men, we might think it a trivial concern. However, blessed as we both are by marvellously manlike hips and loins, I thought it only right that we both attend a demonstration at the Oxford Road branch of Marks & Spencers. We’re due there at twelve.’

‘Are we?’ I replied. ‘And why “we”?’

‘Because I thought you’d be there as a favour to one of your oldest friends,’ said a voice from over my right shoulder.

I turned around and saw a man who has been welcomed too infrequently in the Madeley home.

‘Paxo!’ I said, rushing up to shake Jeremy Paxman by his hand. ‘What you doing here?’

He sneered. ‘I’m here to organise a protest to stop the insufferable creep of cheap quality gussets,’ he said and sneered again. He means nothing by it, the poor man. It’s just the way that God connected his face to his chin.

‘That’s right,’ explained Stephen. ‘Jeremy has taken it upon himself to protect all us who like underpants with the luxury of extra supportive gussets. We are to be the vanguard of the campaign. When the world sees Richard Madeley being dragged screaming into the back of a police van, they’ll know that we feel strongly about quality underpants that can carry a couple of large sized bowling balls.’

‘That’s all well and good,’ I replied, ‘but what has this got to do with me? I don’t wear underpants. Everybody knows that. I refuse to become a martyr to the visible panty line.’

‘Tsk,’ said Stephen. ‘In fact, double tsk. Where’s the man who wrote the two hundred like mock heroic epistle about Jeremy’s sock drawer? You do know that this protest is about socks as well?’

That did perk my interest. ‘Socks? What’s this got to do with socks?’

With that, Jeremy kicked off his shoe. ‘Look at that,’ he said, gesturing to his big toe. ‘I’ve not had these socks for a week and already they’ve gone through.’

Sure enough. The Paxman toe was there for all to see. Pink, well clipped, and full of sneer.

Something gave way and my resolve collapsed. With an audible twang, my shoulders sank all the way to the sofa where I lay my head against a cushion.

‘Come, come,’ said Stephen. ‘It’s not that bad.’

‘Turn that frown upside down,’ said Jeremy; rather ironically, I felt.

In fact, it was a foolish remark given that Stephen does like to take some things very literally. ‘I don’t know the full procedure of removing a mouth but I imagine it fairly tricky to turn a frown upside down. You’d probably have to cut into fairly complicated facial muscle. I’d be surprised if you didn’t end up with some paralysis in the cheeks and jaw.’

Jeremy sneered again, proving that there’s no paralysis in either his cheek or jaw.

‘Come on,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘Give me five minutes while I go and put on a pair of underpants. If I’m going to do this, I might as well do it properly.’

‘White Marks & Spencers only,’ sneered Paxman as though I needed the warning.

It was Stephen who insisted that we take his taxi. It meant that I had to do the driving. It’s an odd business negotiating London’s traffic when people try to flag you down every few hundred yards. I imagine that’s why Stephen loves it so much. It gives a man a sense of being enormously popular and ‘in demand’.

We rolled up before Marks & Spencers just on the stroke of noon. Jeremy and Stephen climbed out the taxi and I drove round the corner to park in a loading bay. When I got back to the front of the building, the protest had grown quite considerably. John Humphrys was there, as was the complete news reading crew of the BBC. It would seem that Marks & Spencers underpants are the underwear of choice for the BBC newsroom. John Simpson and Huw Edwards were holding up placards demanding a rethink on sock policy while Stephen walked up and down waving Judy’s old kitchen mop in the air with a pair of his underpants flying proudly from the top.

‘Ah!’ he cried in his loudest thespianised voice. ‘’Tis, I, Fry, walking up and down outside Marks & Spencers waving my underpants around on the stop of a stick made from Judy Finnigan’s mop.’

Perhaps it was the uncomfortable sensation of underpants on my hips or the sight of unfriendly policemen gathering at the edge of the scene but I couldn’t step forward. Call me a coward or the consummate TV professional, but I knew I couldn’t be arrested. Not today. Not when I’m due at the studios to interview Colin Corfield who has lost 44 stone after having a gastric bypass operation. How would Judy cope without me once “Dancing on Ice” stars, Tim Vincent and Aggie MacKenzie, landed on the sofa? Say what you want about Marks & Spencers underpants but this fight wasn’t mine. With the sound of Stephen’s protests fading as I went, I walked back into the crowd and at the next corner waved down a taxi. Gussets be damned! Ed Saunders would be coming into the studio to talk about Tim Burton’s ‘Sweeney Todd’.

A Sunday Morning Manatee

‘Richard.’

‘Richard.’

‘Richard!’

‘Richard.’

‘Richard?’

‘Richard.’

‘Richard…’

‘Riiichaaard!’

‘Richard.’

‘Richard. Richard.’

‘Richardddddd...’

‘Richard.’

‘Dick?’

There was a sudden rustle of duvet and a figure loomed snapping at my side. ‘For God’s sake, Richard! Why don’t you go and see what he wants?’

‘Isn’t it your turn?’ I asked Judy but she just groaned and rolled onto her side. ‘That’s very unfair,’ I added. ‘You know I went last time.’

‘Oh, no,’ she muttered, heading dreamwards. ‘He’s your friend. You go and see to him.’

I gave breath to a sigh. Lying on my back, my eyes open, I’d found myself in a deeply meditative zone and I didn’t want to move. From there, I had begun to make some sense of my life, my career, and my future. It would take something very special to move me…

‘Richard?’ went the voice again, this time with a note of mild distress.

Unquestioning, I slid out of bed and into my slippers. I winced as I stood up. Judy always forces me to wear pyjamas when we have visitors and I have an unnatural habit of getting the cord of my pyjama bottoms wrapped around my tenderest parts.

I hobbled out to the landing and paused at the door to the spare room before I knocked.

‘Richard?’ said a voice on the other side.

I went on in. The room was in semi darkness; the only light coming from a slight chink in the curtain. It was enough to illuminate the man lying on the extra long bed.

‘Yes, Stephen? What do you want this time?’

Stephen Fry peered out from beneath his sleeping hat, his broken arm held up by makeshift rigging that Judy had strung from the ceiling.

‘I’d like a glass of water,’ he said.

‘Water?’

‘Well, I, Fry, would be shamefaced were I to ask you to make me a hot chocolate made with organic goats milk and with a touch of cinnamon sprinkled on the top.’

I looked to the man to whom I owe so much. ‘And I,’ I replied, ‘would be shamefaced if I didn’t make you a hot chocolate made with organic goats milk and with a touch of cinnamon sprinkled on the top.’

I turned for the door.

‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ he asked.

‘No, not at all,’ I replied. ‘It’s hard to sleep when your intellectual world has been thrown into chaos...’

‘Chaos’ might have been too strong a word for what I’d experienced earlier in the day. ‘Turmoil’ was a better way of describing it. Working as Stephen’s scribe, I’d been introduced to new ideas and shown the way a gifted imagination works. We’d written an opera together, followed by essays, poems, and an intense hour writing out a future Dork Talk article about the exploits of Mozilla browsers. The whole experience had taught me that writers aren’t born but fashioned from tweed and green cape. Writing isn’t a craft. It’s a gift possessed by a few rare intelligences of true and natural genius raised at the twin comedic teats of Cambridge University and the BBC. It was just the sort of thing to make a lowborn man bitter about his more talented friends.

Some might even say that I’d have been justified were I less tolerant of the Great Man’s peculiar demands. But I am, if I’m anything, a patient acolyte of the Priory of Fry. I can’t forget that I owe him many debts. He’s saved me and my friends on so many occasions, he could spend a month with us and I’d bow to his every request. I was more than happy to wander down to the kitchen and put a pan on the hob for the man who had bravely plucked shattered walnut shell from Ronnie Corbett’s groin.

The heat had barely begun to rise from the milk when the kitchen door opened and Stephen wandered in. He was dressed in a bathrobe with the official Fry crest on the pocket; two hippos cavorting around a quill errant.

‘I thought I’d find you here,’ said Stephen, cradling the heavy cast on his broken arm. ‘I was wondering how you’re getting on with the hot chocolate.’

‘It’s warming nicely,’ I replied.

He walked to the breakfast bar and threw a leg over a stool. His arm made heavy contact with the worktop and he winced slightly.

‘I never did ask you how you broke it?’ I said.

‘Ah, now there is a story to be told in the glow of a hob busy boiling goats milk,’ said Stephen. He smiled and slowly brushed his hair from his eyes. There was a definite whir in some mental mechanism as his mind switched modes from observation and to composition. ‘After I, Fry, Scrabble Champion, left you the other day, I took a plane to Brazil.’

‘Brazil?’

‘Indeed. It was going to be a week long jaunt around the nation that brought us the G string and the maraca. I was there to film a new documentary about the animals of South America. My destination was the city of Tefe on the bank of the River Solimões. It was there that I met the BBC crew and the subject of the first programme. A family of manatee.’

‘Manatee?’

‘Sea cows,’ he explained. ‘A strange creature that is best described as having the athleticism of Christopher Biggins and the personality of Jo Brand. Not the world’s most loveable beast and, in truth, Richard, probably harbouring a desire to exterminate mankind. Think of them as the aquatic version of the North Koreans. Fortunately, like the North Koreans – and, for that matter, Christopher Biggins – they lack the equipment to do us any serious harm. Except, that is, when mankind happens to be called Fry. Ah, Richard. I didn’t see it coming. One moment, I was in a pool of water talking to camera and the next and I’m being mauled by a sea cow. It didn’t even have the decency to say “moo”.’

‘It mauled you?’

‘Slowly but it caught unawares.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘And that’s how I came to be injured. To avoid serious sea cow mauling, I jumped back and tripped over a submerged log. Fortunately, my landing was cushioned by the female manatee. You might say it was a swings and roundabouts situation. My injury would have been much worse if I hadn’t landed on the creature.’

‘Lucky for you.’

‘But, alas, not for Mrs. Manatee. In saving me, she suffered a mortal wound. A very contradictory beast, the manatee. Some are prone to do great violence and others equally great kindnesses.’

‘Oh, Stephen,’ I said, wiping an honest tear from my eye. ‘Don’t tell me any more. You didn’t warn me this story would end so sadly.’

‘Not as sadly as for the family of little manatees. As the ambulance drove me away, I could hear them crying out for their mama. “Mama. Mama. Mama.” A sad sound, indeed. Their mother crushed by a falling Fry and their father condemned as a Fry mauler. The world can be so cruel.’

I turned around just in time to catch the milk before it boiled over. I quickly poured it into a cup, stirred in the chocolate and shook out a bit of cinnamon.

‘Ah, wonderful,’ said Stephen, taking it from my hands. ‘And you had cinnamon. I’ll sleep well after this.’

I smiled but I doubted if I would sleep at all.

The cries of the baby manatee would keep me awake until dawn.

Have A Break, Stephen Fry Style!

Heavens! Crikes! Shudder and Drool! Throw the word ‘calamity’ full force into a room crowded with ‘disaster’, ‘shock’, ‘outrage’, and ‘catastrophe’ and you might experience a fraction of the concern I had felt by the time I came to button up my fly at ten o’clock this morning.

At first, it began with a touch of mild annoyance when I was awoken by Judy hammering away in the spare bedroom. Groggily, I slipped out of bed and fed my feet to the slippers. Bones cracked, ligaments creaked, but His Madeley’s Slippers Brown and Orthopedic held up well as I set off to see what the old girl was up to.

‘I won’t be long,’ said she from the top of a wobbling stepladder. The curtain rail was hanging down across the windows. ‘As soon as I’ve fixed this, you can help me carry the new bed up the stairs.’

Daylight bankrupted my sleepiness but not my sense. ‘New bed?’ I asked. ‘What new bed?’

Judy wobbled again on the ladder and I thought for a moment she might actually fall through the window. She grabbed the wall just in time. ‘The new extra long bed and mattress I had delivered this morning.’

‘Extra long?’ I too felt a bit unsteady. The world wasn’t making much sense to me. ‘What’s going on Judy? Why do we need an extra bed?’

She turned and looked at me as she slipped her claw hammer into her workbelt. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve not heard the news!’

‘I’ve been asleep and in a fairly deep one at that. I was combing the knots out of Katie Denhem’s hair.’

Judy gave me one of her narrowing stares that warn me against mentioning Katie’s name too often. It’s the reason why I’ve held off including her picture in my bestiary.

‘You claim to be the man’s closest friend yet you haven’t heard the news?’ She gave me the full force of a tut which couldn’t have sounded more dismissive if she’d driven it through my forehead with her hammer. ‘Stephen’s broken his arm.’

That news shocked me into wakefulness. ‘Is he okay? Is he conscious? Did he mention my name?’

‘It’s only a broken arm but I’ve told him that we think it only right that he comes and stays with us for a few days while he recovers.’

Words are an unnecessary luxury when men of action are in their slippers before noon on a Saturday. I rushed to the window and lifted the rail into place. ‘Hammer away, Judy. Hammer like you’ve never hammered before…’

As Judy began to hammer and my arms began to rebel against the weight of the heavy curtain pole, I looked down and out the window and saw the postman walking up the drive. I smiled to him as he approached but he didn’t smile back. I suppose that’s the problem with sleeping in the nude. One quickly discovered the limitations of a pair of slippers when you’re holding up a curtain rail before a low silled bedroom window.

Stephen arrived an hour later when I was dressed, shaved, and buoyed by cornflakes.

‘How bad is it, old boy?’ I asked as I helped him into the hall.

‘Alas,’ said Fry, his arm in sling and plaster. ‘’Tis I, Fry, with the cruellest break of all. It’s my writing hand. I fear that the good people of The Guardian will have to do without Dork Talk for the foreseeable future. And my iPhone has been ringing all morning but I’ve been unable to answer it.’

‘Don’t you worry yourself about that,’ said Judy, fluffing a cushion on the sofa. ‘You come and sit down. You poor thing. And if you need somebody to do your typing for you, I’m sure Richard would only be too happy to help. It might even do him some good and show him that a real writer doesn’t just sit there and make things up off the top of his head.’

‘Indeed,’ said Fry, though I noticed, failing to meet her gaze.

‘I’m happy to do that,’ I said, flopping into my arm chair. ‘You need anything in the meantime? Something to eat? Entertainment? I could ring Oddie and ask him to bring his musical spoons?’

‘No, no,’ smiled Stephen as Judy perched herself next to him. ‘I just want to rest a few moments before we get to work.’

I looked at him. ‘Work? On a Saturday?’

‘I have noticed this in your before, Dick. You have a distinct reluctance to grasp life with both hands and shake it free of every drop of its possibility.’

An odd thing to say when your wrist is encased in plaster. He’d be grasping little in both hands for the foreseeable future. However, Stephen was right. I do complain about not having the time to write, yet in a few weeks I might be burdened with additional duties to make these days feel like protracted holidays.

‘Okay, I’ll help you,’ I said. ‘What do you need?’

He smiled as he used his good hand to retrieve his pipe from a pocket. Judy was soon shoving shag in his bowel and helping him to light it.

‘Bring my laptop in from the car and we’ll begin,’ said Stephen after a couple of mild puffs. ‘I was hoping to finish my libretto for my new opera based around the legend of Grunhilda, the one armed Bavarian bandit and truffle hunter. Wagner left his score unfinished when he began to find it too much for him. Luckily, I have the genius of Andrew Lloyd Webber to finish the music and give an extra the polish and layer it with my lyrics.’ He cleared his voice and began to sing in that occasionally fragile voice of his…

‘’Tis I, Grunhilda, speaking to you on my Alpine horn.
Where are you my band of flaxen haired lovelies,
We need to ascent again up yon Matterhorn,
Where grow the finest of Baverian trufflies…’

He gave an almost embarrassed smile as his voice finished echoing through the rooms.

‘Okay…’ I said.

‘Then I’d like us to write a couple of chapters of my new novel, “Bullocks in Tow”, my tale of farming life set against the backdrop of genetic mutations and cattle haulage.’

‘Right…’

‘And we’ll finish by writing a couple of essays on Tamil nationalism and security exploits in Mozilla based browsers. I thought after some dinner, we might spend the rest of the night writing poems and end with a game of Scrabble.’

‘I can see that you’re going to be busy,’ said Judy rising and adjusted her cuffs in a way that evoked just a touch of envy.

‘Indeed I am,’ I smiled, though I didn’t quite know how I should feel. ‘Give me five minutes, Stephen, while I just go and update my blog and I’ll be with you and Grunhilda.’

And now that job is done it’s time for me to learn how to write like the Master and learn the history of Grunhilda and her trufflies.