Talking in the Library - Series Five

Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry, like Oscar Wilde, is fated to carry the tag “prodigy” until the day he dies. With the same combination of talents as his great predecessor, he is even harder to categorize. Wilde, for example, never tried to deliver his own lines on stage. Fry would be a valuable actor even if he never wrote a word. There is no point in trying to list his achievements in this paragraph, but I can personally vouch for one aspect of his wide range of knowledge that sometimes gets underemphasised in the press coverage: he is profoundly acquainted with poetry, as his book The Ode Less Travelled proves. The English language is in love with him and he generously attempts to reciprocate. When he arrived at my apartment for this conversation, he had already given half an hour’s riotous entertainment to the crew before we even sat him down. Then the cameras rolled and he really got going.

Victoria Wood
Victoria Wood is too alive and too productive to be talked of merely as an historic event, but it would a mistake to leave that aspect out, because modern television would be a lesser thing if she had not first broken down so many barriers. As a television dramatist alone, she is on a par with Alan Bennett, while as a creator of comedy programmes she changed the field for women and indeed for everybody, because very few of the men were trying hard enough as writers before she came on the scene and showed them what penetrating social humour should actually sound like. Above all, it should sound like an inside job. At her advent, the old framework in which Footlights graduates reported on the British social structure from above was at last outflanked, and a whole new intimacy began: often much more devastating, but always far less condescending. Such is her range, it is often easy to forget that her ability to write, and star in, a whole complex television drama is solidly based on the music-hall skills by which she can sell out the Albert Hall night after night and hold the audience enthralled on her own. When she kindly came to call, I raised these topics and others, including the recycling of household rubbish and the increasing prevalence of swearing on television – two themes that might well be closely related.

Catherine Tate
Both as a female solo act and as a pivotal figure of sketch comedy, Catherine Tate now rules the distaff castle that was built from the ground up by Victoria Wood. Tate is a worthy successor, and has opened up a whole new, and sometimes frightening, frame of reference: the British under-class. In Tate's gallery of grotesques, a moronic, sociopathic teenager has no redeeming features. It could be said that Tate's Nan, the harridan who can't keep her knees together while she mouths obscenities, goes all the way back beyond Shakespeare. But the continuity was broken in the Victorian age, and even Oscar Wilde had to dress up his witch as Lady Bracknell. Tate gives us the full House of Horrors termagant. She does so, as she does everything else, with an acute ear for language and a protean acting ability which is perhaps her sole drawback, because her admirers can only dread the prospect that she might be too often lured aside to speak lines that other people write. I, too, liked her in Doctor Who, but the Catherine Tate Show  is where her real gift for drama is on sumptuous display, and the public is right when it buys the DVD boxes by the trolley-load. Talking to her, I was nervously aware that I might be face to face with an historic movement. Luckily she chose to be kind, but I had an uneasy sense that she might be gathering material, and that I was it.