Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The trouble with television is that allows its viewers to believe that they know fully each person who ever appears on its screens, it is a trick of the box that it coaxes the watcher into the belief that they are an eyewitness into the minds, the thoughts and perhaps even the indiscretions of the subject at hand.
The nearest thing to the autobiography is the personal documentary, the kind that in which the television’s keen eye for the past can bring to the viewer’s attention the subject at hand in all their glory and perhaps even the low points of their career, the echoing of the author’s own words but with the personal interaction of those that know them best. In Stephen Fry: A Life On Screen, one of Britain’s much loved all round entertainers, writer, actor, quiz show host and travel enthusiast becomes the spectacle of intense but good natured conversation.
Stephen Fry has been on the nation’s screens for such a long time that it is impossible to think of a time post 1980 when he hasn’t been in something enlightening or indeed culturally entertaining. From the Blackadder series to A Bit of Fry and Laurie and onto his groundbreaking documentaries as he travelled round each state of America and his exploration into the world of mental illness and hosting the popular quiz Q.I., Stephen Fry has been a constant factor. A Life On Screen captures that with an element of elegance but also as much honesty as can be filled into an hour’s worth of television.
What was interesting, especially for those that have read any of his autobiographies, was the embracing of the times when the subject was perhaps to be considered was not the smiling man of comedy, the brush with the law as a young lad in which for all his buoyant personality he found himself being considered a criminal in the eyes of the his elders and the sadness involved with the public breakdown a few days into the play Cell Mates.
Whatever the viewer might believe they know about someone off the television, almost as much as they truly know perhaps about their neighbours, the truth is never truly seen in all its glory but at least in Stephen Fry: A Life On Screen the viewer is treated to television which opens a few curtains on the life of one of the U.K.’s favourite sons.
Ian D. Hall