To think Stephen Fry is NOT a national treasure

[SnowWide]

Just listening to his English Delight on Radio4. Dire.

I've never understood all the adulation around him. He is accomplished, well-spoken, prolific. But so are many other actors and authors.

His TV documentaries, especially are really meh.. Dont get me wrong, they are very well made (the one where he travels America, another one on languages), but what exactly is the Stephen Fry touch? Any other knowledgeable presenter could fill his shoes and no one would know the difference...Only liked him as Melchett. Lost all respect for him when he started wittering away posting on Twitter, to be honest.

I also find Sandy Toksvig annoying. She used to write a column for the Sunday Telegraph. Basically, she trawled through the history books looking for 'on this day' items and knitted three of them together with some bogus connection. A trained monkey could have done it.
Apart from that, her main occupation seems to be ringmaster on The News Quiz (are you spotting a theme here?) where her main contribution as a comedienne is (a) reading a script and (b) laughing uproariously at other people.

If you want clever - sharp, quick-witted, original - then Paul Merton is your man.

I loved it when he flounced off twitter.

The thing I do like about him is his openness about his mental health issues but I also think he is smug and has no real idea of what it is like to not be middle class and Oxbridge educated.

I also dislike how there seems to be a quota of one woman per episode of QI.

His acting in non-comedy roles is poor.

He talks about every subject like he's a bloody expert when really he's just skim read the Wikipedia entry.

He is ubiquitous and sadly the genuinely self-effacing David Mitchell is going the same way. But at least Fry isn't marrying the ghastly Victoria Coren.

Sandi also does a column for Red magazine. Too fluffy, too contrived

As for Fry's convictions, do you notice how the media tends to gloss,over them or normalise them? Never gets amention. Unlike for someone like say, Lord Archer who will always be the man who perjured....

Yes but S. Fry was only convicted as a teenager wasn't he? Vile creep Lord Archer was an adult.

What's wrong with Victoria Coren Discolite? NB I'm not in the UK so only "know" her on Twitter and she's quite boring

I'm a bit ambivalent on Stephen Fry. YY like him on QI, Blackadder, Jeeves and Wooster (so shoot me) found his traveling round America prog UNBEARABLE. Would quite like him as a dinner guest tho. Can quite picture him standing around our barbie with a prawn on a fork cracking open a beer and regaling us Aussies with tales of Medieval Popes (or some such).

YANBU

I find him smug and am not too keen.

If he's half as smart as he'd like us to believe he is he's smart enough to have known better. He stole a credit card from a family friend. Hideous.

Oh ffs blueemerald, it was years ago, WHEN HE WAS A TEENAGER, he's since be diagnosed as having bipolar disorder, he himself thinks he was an idiot to do it. He's hardly recommending it as a positive thing is he.

I'm not his biggest fan by any means but have a little compassion.

He also took SHIT LOADS of Cocaine. How d'you like them apples?

I also do not like the Stephen Fry.

The Fry and Lawrie series were awful, as was the film 'Peter's Friends'. It was around this time I realised that Fry's comic ability relied heavily on describing things as 'pink', 'moist' or 'fluffy' (and sometimes all three).

I quite like QI though, but all he is doing there is reading from a script that has been prepared by the QI elves so it doesn't take any great intellect.

YABVVVU - he's the epitome of avuncular joy.

I have plenty of compassion, thanks, for those who deserve it. I don't consider smug, arrogant, sexist, self serving twats deserving. I don't even personally consider his crime that heinous (although I'm sure it was a horrible experience for his family) more the fact that it has been pretty much airbrushed from history. Why does he get to edit his past when others do not?

Also plenty of people who suffer from poor mental health do not commit crimes of any nature so it's not even really an excuse in my mind.

And he took cocaine- whoopdedo. How original. He really is one of a kind, ain't he?

I can't remember what show it was on (maybe Parkinson) but SF started talking about Kathy Burke. Not sure why now, but he was saying how wonderful she was and that the world was a better place for having her in it.

I thought this was such a gorgeous and wonderful thing to say about anyone , and his sincerity was clear. How often do you hear celebrities talking about other people like that?

Another time, there was a newspaper article about how he'd sent an extremely long, hand-written letter to a stranger who'd contacted him about her depression. Quite why she felt she had to go to the newspapers about it, I'm not sure but it seemed genuine & heartfelt. It's stuff like this that really makes me love him.

Oh, and he ripped Ann Widdecombe a new one in a debate about Catholicism, and that pleased me mightily too.

Er...he has never airbrushed his crime from history. He talked about it openly when he was on Who Do You Think You Are, and in great detail in his autobiography.

Which, to be fair, was a bit boring and I only got about a third of the way through it.

Yanbu. Don't get him. His twitter posts are pretentious, self indulgent and frankly embarrassing.

YANBU .. Martin Clunes is MUCH better

I also don't buy that he is only 53 or something. My dad is 50 and easily looks 10 years younger, and during the Jeeves and Wooster days I swear he was always a good decade older than my dad.

Ed Byrne.

Ed Byrne for King.

I spent too much time away from UK to know enough about him, but I would like to know whether Stephen Fry/Hugh Laurie ever studied acting/drama or if it was just their Footlights experience that got them acting jobs? My nephew is set on acting (hasn't revealed this to his DPs yet) and was talking about it to us, but we have no idea.

I didn't say he airbrushed it. He's perfectly happy to use it when it suits him (to support campaigns that I also agree with, like the poor teenager who lost his uni place because of a spent conviction). I'm sure SF could support this very worthy cause without making it about him. Or maybe he can't.

The media routinely makes light of his convictions and my issue is that I don't think 'they' get to decide whose crimes are serious and whose aren't.

Apparently SF also defines his condition as Cyclothymia

I think what I'm trying to say is that SF may now be a perfectly nice and reasonable guy but I don't like or warm to the character he plays on QI or on his documentaries.

Stephen Fry, for instance, is a smug cunt.

He was great in Blackadder but I also don't get the hype. Smug, smug, smug. And as my friend puts it, 'an intellectual for stupid people'.

i am scottish and can his appeal

feel quite sorry for him .......i don't think he has much self confidence

Well I adore him

And if my qualifications are to be believed I'm pretty far from being a stupid person.

I've read his autobiographies and novels - nothing in them is vaguely mysoginist - on the contrary he clearly has a lot of good female friends - like Emma Thompon. I love her story of arriving at his house in tears with a broken laptop containing her entire flmscript (for Nanny McPhee I think) and no backup - he calmed her down and spent hours retrieving the data for her.

Now that's not selfish or self-centred and the mark of a good friend. because I know what a difficult and tedious job data recovery can be

Nope - national treasure status unblemished IMO

He's an arse. Read 'Fat Chance' by Simon Gray for a hint of what his colleagues think of him.