Back to Manila, a journey with Stephen Fry

I'm back in Manila in the wake of super-typhoon Juan, after a short holiday in Australia and New Zealand. I bought Stephen Fry's latest offering 'The Fry Chronicles' at Sydney airport during my three hour transfer walk-about there and it lasted me the length of the flight from there to Manila almost exactly. That's about seven hours with frequent interruptions. Nice work, Stephen!

I have to say it started well with echoes of 'Moab is my Washpot' that had me sniggering in suitably schoolboyish style as the plane took off. A steward serving me a glass of pretty not-bad Kiwi Cabernet Sauvignon shortly after take-off told me how much he had enjoyed seeing Stephen Fry's solo act in Sydney, so all the indicators were good at first. Unfortunately, once university high jinks and examination techniques gave way to professional luvvydom, the whole thing deteriorated into a boring concatenation of names of celebrity chums and various restaurants, clubs, shows and venues, punctuated by references to the huge amounts of easily earned cash that seem to gush like geysers in the media world, coupled with outbursts of self-loathing and public airing of angst. I am churlish enough to feel that the angst and self-loathing are not unconnected with the ease with which the oodles of oof seem to pour into the ample trouser pockets of Stephen and his chums, not least from their sorties into the magical realm of television advertising. The constant harping on about not really being the most talented of actors reflects this - you have to be pretty thick-skinned not to feel that somehow wealth ought to be the product of real effort or talent...or maybe not? There is a way in which the media crowd seem strangely similar to the wide-boys in the city whom they effect to despise. The only difference I can see is that the city types don't go in for champagne socialism - although, come to think of it, given the amount of money they have, they might even be able to repair their horrible image a little if they launched 'cityslicker-aid!' or 'speculator-relief'.

My most interesting encounter with Stephen's literary output occurred some ten years ago. It has continued to perplex me ever since. A Belgian friend at the time had just lent me Dumas' 'Count of Monte Cristo' in order to improve my French - which it did: Dumas is not difficult, I recommend it as a thoroughly good read for anyone wanting to brush up on their Gallic linguistic skills. Purely by coincidence the next book I read was Stephen Fry's 'The Stars' Tennis Balls'. Believe it or not the plot is an almost exact replica in every convoluted, revenge-soaked detail of Dumas' far longer novel. Except, of course that it is set in modern-day Britain, not post-Napoleonic France. I remember combing the blurb, the introduction, reviews, statements by the author, every possibly relevant source I could find, for some sort of acknowledgement that the book was a spoof or at least a copy or perhaps even written in homage to the great French author. But I found nothing. And to this day I have remained not exactly tortured but definitely in a 'wish-I-knew-for-sure' state of mind about Fry's undoubtedly very readable novel. Was it just an unconscious act of copying, or was it deliberate? and if it was the latter, then why did neither author nor publisher, nor indeed any of the reviewers or blurb-writers make any mention of the famous previous work? Of course it could be that none of them had read Dumas for a while. I guess not many people have time for that old foreign stuff. Besides, there have been several films...