Stephen Fry: “Lost, alone and I wanted to take my life”

To call Stephen Fry a national treasure would be underselling him. One of the hardest working names in British media, you name it and Stephen has done it; writer, actor, director and comedian. The size of his contribution to British culture in over four decades as a public figure is staggering. However, behind this mountain of work and out of the spotlight is a side of Stephen Fry that many people will be completely unaware of, from a childhood of crime and loneliness, to severe mental health struggles and attempts at suicide. In this honest and revealing conversation Stephen discusses the scars he carries within him and which affect him to this day. But despite this he is constantly reinventing himself and striving to find joy in the smaller things in life, all the while spreading happiness and wonder with his work. Stephen: Instagram - https://bit.ly/3un1E3d Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I was lost and adrift. And really, what I first wanted to do was to take my life.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  He's a comedian, an actor, and a national treasure.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  He's a director, he's a writer. I'll probably miss things out. He's a master of language. And tonight's my night.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  I was a deeply difficult child. My parents sent me to a psychiatrist when I was 14. I started doing weird things. I was sent to prison.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  So the best I could do after a disastrous childhood, I decided, was now concentrate on getting into Cambridge. That changed everything.

• 0:36Speaker 03

  Ladies and gentlemen, Stephen Fry.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  I want to please people. And if I don't please them, I get upset. I've done it wrong.

• 0:44Steven Bartlett?

  Age 37, you star in a play. The play gets some pretty harsh reviews.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  I was lost and adrift. And really, what I first wanted to do was to take my life.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  Stephen vanished on Monday, leaving a number of letters for friends.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  That started my journey into my mental health.

• 1:04Steven Bartlett?

  When you were 55, it was your third suicide attempt.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Afraid so, that's right.

• 1:09Steven Bartlett?

  Can you take me back to that moment?

• 1:24Steven Bartlett?

  I'm so fascinated by people's foundations, their earliest years, their context, because it seems so apparent that that ends up shaping who we are and who we become and our orientation in life. So as I read through your story and your earliest years, it was an unthinkable roller coaster ride of twists and turns. But what do I need to know about Stephen Fry's earliest years to understand the man that's sat in front of me?

• 1:49Speaker 00

  Well. To use the language of the time, I was a disruptive, deeply difficult, screwed up child. That's kind of the language they used then. And I think, to give myself some, I won't say credit, I would probably, in later years, have been diagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I was extremely difficult to keep still and I found it hard to focus. I was, I'll say, um, as vain as it may sound, I think, um, intellectually advanced for my age. I was very quick with language and with speech.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Um, and just seeing things and remembering things in particular. So I never had to revise. And so in that sense, I had a lot of spare time. But on the other hand, socially, and where it matters to a child, I I never fitted in or felt fitted in because I was bad at all the things that are valued when you're a child. I I couldn't catch a ball. You know, I sort of did the the sort of uncoordinated hand clapping method of trying to catch, which is always mocked like just as you've done. And the cry of unco would follow me, short for uncoordinated and worse. Kind of words we certainly don't use now to describe a

• 3:12Speaker 00

  shall we say a dyspraxic um figure in terms of, you know, physicality. I was just, you know, I I was growing too fast, too tall and very thin, hard to imagine now. Uh, and I wasn't musically very gifted particularly. Uh, and I couldn't draw. So all I had was my passion for language and and I loved it and I played with it and I told stories and I tried to make myself less unpopular, put it that way. By by, it was a boarding school. I I was sent away at the age of seven in Britain, which is not a huge country. It's about as far as you can be from home there. My parents were in Norfolk on the east coast and I was sent to Gloucestershire on the west. Um, uh, to a a prep school from the age of, as I say, seven,

• 3:56Speaker 00

  which to some people sounds a bit cruel and weird to send a seven year old boy two hundred miles from home and just have them there. But you have to remember two things. One. That was what happened, as far as I was concerned. My father had gone to a similar school, my mother had boarded since she was four. But that was because she was a Jewish refugee in England and her father wanted to hide her away from the impending Nazi invasion, and so that was a particular reason. But my brother had gone at that age, and of course, by definition, everyone at the school was in the same boat. So you just thought, that's what happened. I mean, if you take a child and put them in a cupboard between half past two and three

• 4:41Speaker 00

  in the afternoon and shout at them through the keyhole every day, they'll just think, oh, that's what happens. No, and then you welcome them out and give them a big hug and say, that was your cupboard time. You know what I mean? Anything you do to a child regularly is the normal world, essentially. Until they see other children having a different experience. But so class locked, I guess I was, without really noticing it. Grew up in the countryside, in a large house, not Downton Abbey, but, you know, we had gardeners and people coming in to clean and that sort of thing, servants, I suppose, staff, whatever word you want to use.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  And it was deep in the countryside, and the other boys that I knew, very few girls, but I did know girls, and even they went away to school. So all the boys I knew were going away to school, and the parents you met say, when are you going off to prep school then, Stephen? I go, when I'm seven, and they go, very good. That was it, because I didn't know any other children. I mean, that sounds monstrous, but that's just the way things were. You're stuck to your own. It wasn't outright snobbery or anything, it just was, this was the world into which I was born. So you don't really question it particularly. And through most of my prep school time, age seven to thirteen is a prep school in Britain.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  I was very disruptive. I passed exams very easily. I tried as hard as I could to get out of any form of physical activity. I gave myself asthma attacks and the rest of it in order to be put off games because I just hated the particularly rugby and the muddy, cold, horrible things, running and the collision of bodies and bones. It was just so vile. Um, I wanted to sit and read a book by the side of the field. And humour, particularly then as I moved to thirteen and went to the big school, you know, the public school as it's known, though of course they're not anything but public, they're private.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Um, and that, that was scary because it's six hundred boys. Um, rather than the prep school's ninety, so it's a much less of a little nest and much more of a who. But I was thirteen and so when you're thirteen, as you know too well, chemicals start to boil and bubble inside you and things begin to happen in your mind and soul. And, um, I was not prepared for the astonishing cataclysm, the catastrophe, the glorious catastrophe of love. Uh, it had never occurred to me that it would, it would be what it was, which is silly because we grow up hearing nothing but love songs. And what did the Beatles do?

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Go on about Love Me Do and Please Please Me and, and, and Money Come By Love and Hold My Hand and everything's a love song. And suddenly, when you fall in love, all those lyrics make sense. And you realise there's nothing else in the world and nothing else is even slightly as important. And of course I was in love with another boy and I was aware that that was probably not the right thing. And it, it threw me out of everything really. I, I just stopped being able even to pretend to be an normal, well behaved schoolboy. I, I started doing weird things like climbing the roofs of all the buildings, the big chapels and churches and classrooms. So that was the first school from which I was expelled. I'm, I'm going to compress the story because it gets kind of,

• 8:15Speaker 00

  goes on and on and on. I was then expelled from another one and then kind of another one. And then I left and went to London, left home, went to London. And the, the major problem there was I was in a pub. It was getting a bit chilly. I saw a coat, liked the look of it. Half inched it, stole it and left the pub and then discovered there was a wallet in it. Oh my goodness, and two credit cards. So I went absolutely nuts around Britain with these credit cards. Staying in grand hotels, buying things and travelling and so on.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  In those days, they didn't even have magnetic strips on the back of credit cards for, for, you know, uh, that you, you just have to roll them on a piece of carbon to, to, to take an imprint. So there was, it was very easy to use them fraudulently as long as you looked vaguely convincing.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  I, I was aware, because my father had once lost his Barclay card, that it was the bank that paid, not the poor fellow whose cards I'd stolen. So I didn't feel guilty in that rather pathetic way we do when we try and square our dishonesty. You know, um, eventually I ended up in Swindon of all unlikely towns. I think I was going to meet a school friend and the idea was going to go to the Reading Festival. Um, so I stayed in the hotel in Swindon and that's when, uh, a couple of, I got back to my room, having been shopping, there were a couple of men in the room, which I thought was rather weird. Uh, and being used to hotels by this time, I assumed they were like cleaning or maintenance people. I said, no, it's all right, don't need anything. And then, then, then said my name, only not my name, the name that was,

• 9:58Speaker 00

  the, the name of the fellow whose credit cards I had stolen. Let's say his name was Smith, so they said, Mr. Smith, and I went, yes. And they said, Wilcher CID, held up. And suddenly I realised that the jig was up. I was sent to prison, uh, on remand, I was sent to a young persons institution on remand. While they waited, there were seven counties, I think, that had paperwork that I had travelled in with these cards that had to be caught up with. You're eighteen? Uh, seventeen, just turning eighteen, that's right, yeah, by this time.

• 10:33Steven Bartlett?

  So it was interesting because I was reading about your, as I read through those first eighteen years of your life, I saw someone with clearly huge intellectual potential. But also, which doesn't seem to be very common with someone who exhibits those qualities, someone who was kind of like rebelling against society, had this sort of, I think in your own words, an addiction to stealing things. And is that, and I couldn't quite figure out why, but what I'm understanding now is because it comes back to that feeling of being an outsider and kind of rebelling against the society that you weren't able to fit into.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  I think that's exactly right. And I, my parents did send me to a psychiatrist when I was fourteen, fifteen. He was, oddly enough, a member of parliament and a junior health minister, as well as a psychiatrist. So a very grand Harley Street office, you know, with one of those enormous Mont Blanc fountain pens the size of a small submarine with which he slowly writes things down. And he was slightly annoyed my parents weren't in the diplomatic service because apparently the way I behaved and the things I did were very typical of people from unsettled families. And, you know, constantly moving and so on. But he prescribed me something.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  And later I found out when I was doing a documentary about mental health and I went all the way back to my school and spoke to my old schoolmaster, he had a copy of a letter from that psychiatrist in which the psychiatrist had written bipolar, question mark, which I knew nothing about at the time, that was when I was fifteen. So there was clearly some mental, they recognized there was a mental kink, if you like. A hundred percent it would have been called a moral kink, basically, they're just saying he's a, he's a bad lot, you know. But we were on our way to being more understanding about children's behaviour. But yeah, it's that whole mixture, my love of literature and stories and wanting to be involved in the, in the world of ideas desperately to learn more and to understand

• 12:31Speaker 00

  more and to share ideas. A cheap wish, watching Parkinson every Saturday night to be famous, but not sure how, how that could happen, it seemed absurd. And a deep, deep, like a.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Like hot lead leaking in the stomach whenever I contemplated my sexuality, this feeling. Because all I I read and read and read around it, you know, you go to a library in those days. Of course, there was no world wide web, so you use what was known as the bibliography at the at the back of a book, which would recommend other books that were sources for that book. And so you would build a web of connections of. So I read a biography of Oscar Wilde, and that led me to biographies of other figures in his circle and other figures later and so on. And I saw there was this extraordinary tradition of literary artistic people um who were who were queer, as we'd say now. And of course, the ones I was reading about were were born in mostly into an elite part of the society

• 13:31Speaker 00

  that allowed them to go and live in North Africa or Italy or Greece or somewhere where it wasn't quite so dark and, you know, oppressive. Uh, but the average person, you know, who was born queer had a miserable outcome. It was illegal and you, the police would treat you dreadfully and newspaper articles. And and so I saw ahead of me a life of shame and secrecy and or abstinence and, you know, sorrow and it just, you know, that there was no possible way the world will be open and free for me. It would just be, the best I could do after a disastrous childhood, I decided in prison,

• 14:13Speaker 00

  was now concentrate on getting into Cambridge, become an academic, forget anything about the world, because the world wasn't for me. And that would be enough. And it would also repay my parents for the extraordinary stress and distress I'd I'd I'd given them. And so I, when I was put on probation, finally, at the end of the prison thing, having served quite a bit in remand, I was just put on two years probation, went home, told my parents I would look after myself entirely, got jobs, got myself a moped, went into Norwich, did a course, and amazingly got a scholarship to Cambridge, Austria. Yeah, so that changed everything.

• 14:58Steven Bartlett?

  It is the most remarkable turn, I think, that I've ever I've ever seen in someone's life. I think I've never seen someone who has a series of sort of criminal engagements, gets expelled from school multiple times. I read at seventeen, there was a suicide attempt after an argument with your father, which led you to be in hospital as well. You end up in jail, and then from jail, you go to Cambridge.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  It doesn't seem like the part. It doesn't seem normal. And while I was at Cambridge, for the first year, I was on probation still. I remember saying to to to one of my tutors or supervisors, I said, oh, look at the date. I said, I'm no longer on probation. And he said, you weren't on probation, thinking I meant some sort of academic probation, you know, that I hadn't done good enough essays, and that I had been given a warning that I better work harder. He said, you're not on probation. I said, well, actually, I told him. He said, what the hell? Why didn't you tell us? I said, well, why didn't you ask me? They never, they never asked. So, but it is extraordinary how everything turned, because, you know,

• 16:08Speaker 00

  in the first kind of week, I met Emma Thompson, who was an undergraduate, reading the same subject, English. And I then saw her in a play, and I was just knocked out. I couldn't believe it. I had considered, maybe I should do some acting at Cambridge. I started doing that and really enjoyed it, but did lots of other plays as well. And I wrote a play called Latin. It was a comedy. And that went to Edinburgh. And it won a prize. And Emma came to see it and brought someone along to watch it that she thought might enjoy it. And I didn't remember this experience. But that person was Hugh Laurie. And he apparently came and watched the play and said hello briefly. Then, at the end of my second year.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  I was approached by Emma who said, I'm gonna come around and introduce you to Hugh. There you have met him. And I said, no, I haven't. And she said, yes, you have. Um, anyway, she took me over to his college and knocked on the door and the door opened. He was sitting on the bed with a guitar in his lap and he said, hello. And I said, hello. And his girlfriend was there making a cup of tea. And he said, I'm just writing a song. And he started to play a bit of the verse of the song. And I said, oh, it's fabulous. And I sat next to him. We started to work on on the lyrics of it. I added some ideas and then we, you know, built it up into three or four verses in the choruses. And the song was finished. And then he picked up a piece of paper. We started to write a sketch. And Emma and Katie were just staring at us. It's what's happened?

• 17:39Speaker 00

  We didn't, you know, we barely didn't ask each other our names. We just immediately just fitted, I'm sliding my fingers into each other, to give an example. Um, it it was, I I described it as like falling in love, but in a platonic comedy love. Um, we just seemed to gel straight away. It was most extraordinary. So from that moment on, we started writing stuff together um for our show. And I thinking that either I was gonna stay at Cambridge to be an academic or maybe I was gonna go to a drama school afterwards and join the Royal Shakespeare Society and hold spears and bellow speeches. Uh, and now there was this strange possibility of using comedy as a as a

• 18:22Speaker 00

  way of going forward and maybe not staying at Cambridge at all, but trying to, you know, tread the boards in an amusing way.

• 18:29Steven Bartlett?

  Why acting? I I sat I sat here with Maisie Williams, who's the the young Game of Thrones actress.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Indeed, I know who you mean, yeah.

• 18:36Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and I I find, you know, and then I read this book called The Body Holds The Score. And it talks about Six ways that we can help our mental health and things like yoga and all these kinds of things, but one of them is acting. And it talks about the role that I, you know, this kind of separation from identity and how that can be liberating and wonderful. And when I, when I heard you describe your first acting experiences, you use words like blissful and amazing and as if you'd found your place in the world.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  It's true. I mean, it is also, it is the acknowledgement, the, the love or the sense of attention you get from an audience that you're, it's not, I mean, of course, it's a kind of vanity, but it's not that you want to be praised exactly. It's just you want to experience that moment and keep experiencing it. It's not, oh, look, you must write marvelous things about me or come up after the show and tell me I'm a genius. That's all embarrassing. But, but the moment you're on stage and you feel that people are looking at you and not admiring you, Stephen, but that they are, you have won them over. They are following the story of the character you are and they are sucked up into it and you've made it.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  It's a wonderful feeling, but something even more primal than that, because I can remember when I was very young, five maybe, and my brother was seven, going to a pantomime in Norfolk. And the usual thing happened, Buttons comes out and goes, hello, boys and girls, who'd like to come up on stage with me now and sing a song? My brother dived under the seat and made noises like a piece of dust so that no one would notice him, like most children. He was damned if he was going to get up and make an exhibition of himself in public. But I stood on my tiptoes with my arm up so high that I nearly split the membranes of my underarm, you know, going me, me, me, me. And we both had the same parents, we both had the same DNA, more or less, not identical,

• 20:31Speaker 00

  but not identical twins, but I mean, really, we're pretty similar in terms of our. Birth and our parentage and environmental upbringing and yet he would rather have cut his arm off than go on stage and I would cut my arm off in order to go on stage. And that's just something that was built in. And that was when I was yet too young to be self-conscious, to have, if you like, those kinds of issues of self-worth and, you know, wanting to lose myself somewhere else. It was just a young show-offy, I want to be up there. That's, you know, you see a stage, you want to be on it. Much of what you say about the mental health aspect is true, but it is also the case,

• 21:13Speaker 00

  and I'm sure you've sort of heard stories about this, that even when you're in a very long-running play, when you're in the wings for the first night, you know, there's, you are trembling, you are white, your heart rate is really up and you step on stage and you do it. But the weird thing is, six months later, if it's a long run, you're standing in the wings, you're talking to the stage manager and people like that, you're going, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, I'll see you after this scene and you go on. Doctors have done this, they've wired people up. Your heart rate is as high on that night as it would have been on the first night. It's just you've got used to it. The comparison, and it's not a comparison of quality or value, is with an RAF pilot.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  Every day, they're flying up like that and it's, they love it. They're just made for it. I mean, it's frightening and they hate to see their companions killed and so on, but the awful thing is when it stops. Suddenly the war's over. Every single day you were in a Spitfire, you were facing death, you were doing such amazing things and now there's nothing. And similarly, you're in a long play, of course it's nothing like being in the air force, it's of no importance to anybody except other people, but nonetheless, it does cause the similar kind of shakes in your body and the excitement. And then that's the end of the run, stop.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  And it does explain, I think, a lot of the substance abusing and addictions and the kind of unhappinesses and breakdowns and short term marriages and relationships that are also common in the acting world. I mean, it may be true that there is something good for mental health, but I don't think anybody would say that as a group actors exhibit mental health of a happier and better kind than other groups of people. So, you know, it's a complicated story, really, isn't it?

• 23:12Steven Bartlett?

  It's so interesting that that sort of anticlimax, I think we've referred to that before as like gold medal depression.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  We tend to set ourselves goals of, if only I could live in that kind of a village in, you know, in the south of England, like quite near a station and nice little house, but not too expensive. And yeah, and then you get it. And so, yeah, you live in the suburbs, hooray. Oh, maybe that car, that new one there, that Tesla or whatever, I'll get a, then I'll be happy. You don't literally say, then I'll be happy, but there's a kind of sense of, that's all I really want. And each of these goals is met, and it isn't it. There's the line of T S Eliot, that's not it, that's not it at all. And we go through life thinking, that's not it, that's not it at all. There is something in all of us,

• 23:58Speaker 00

  a whole, a need for connection and love and truth and a sense of something beautiful beyond. And we can, if you're religious, you call it heaven. And if you're a humanist, you know, you call it a fallen, achieved life of friendship and, you know, elements of sacrifice and so on. But you know, you know that there's a hope for it. But if you mislabel it and think that it's connected with money or cars or mortgages or jobs or status, you're never happy because of your status, because of things you've achieved. Happiness comes from somewhere else. And of course, I've yet to meet anyone who can

• 24:43Speaker 00

  tell you where it comes from regularly, where it can be tapped, like some resource, ah, that's where you get your happiness. We know there's fake happiness from a... So a blow of a drug or something like that and that couldn't be a more fake happiness. And there's the happiness of sitting around a table with friends. That's beautiful fleeting moments with friends and family where it's all working and people aren't shouting at each other and you can just look at each other. I I I was at a memorial service and for a very dear friend, the composer Leslie Brickus, you know, who wrote Feeling Good and Pure Imagination for Willy Wonka and Goldfinger and a lot of great songs.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  He was an amazing songwriter and and I remembered I had this diary entry when I was just getting to know him where there was a party. I think it was his birthday and it was full of people, some of whom super famous and extraordinary people, but he I remember just catching sight of him. And thinking he looked so like a Persian cat, just looking from one friend to another with this huge smile on his face. Just being happy to have his friends around him. It's a simple thing and yet it's the best thing and and we chase. We chase things that give us less time to see our friends.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  We we we we chase work targets and we chase journeys and holidays and things with individuals and so on, but. And I think we grow away from it. I think the older you get, the the the less you appreciate friendship, which is really sad. When you're in your twenties, you tend to do things as a group. You go on holidays as a group because you haven't yet got married and partnered off and paired off. So I don't know if you agree with me, but I do think maybe that one of the one of the jobs of getting older. Well, I'm convinced that when the job is getting older is not to become gnawed, you know, like a tree. When the tree is young, you can bend it. It's a green stick, as they call it, you can bend it and shape it and so on.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  But once it gets old, you know, and it starts getting that bark and if you tried to bend it, it would snap. And and we become a bit like that.

• 26:54Steven Bartlett?

  Coming back to the the the first point you said there about the goals we should be striving for, I found that really interesting. If not, if not striving for a gold medal or this thing or that thing, how does someone, you know, listening to this now? What kind of goals do you think would protect them against that gold medal depression? What kind of orientation?

• 27:13Speaker 00

  It's an interesting point, and of course, I, you know, obviously understand that there are people who need to meet goals in order to pay debts and, you know, that there are certain amounts of money they have to have to pay for their heating and their mortgage and all the rest of it. And I'm obviously not suggesting that that's valueless because you need to keep a roof over your head and everything else. But in terms of one's own personal sense of fulfillment and self-worth and achievement, I'm more and more convinced that it comes from how you treat people and how they treat you back and how you, how you would try to be a better person. I know it sounds really silly. I'm not a religious figure at all, but, but I'm very interested in religions.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  And I can understand that in some cases religions help cement a sense of community. Where I don't like it is where it's exclusive, of course, where you have to buy into a certain set of ideas and so-called truths in order to be part of that community. But I can understand how, looking at a wider sense of, of life and it's really about when you're falling asleep at night, and this may just be me, can I fall asleep at night and feel I've been a reasonably okay person that day? Is this the one I have to apologize to next morning? Did I, was I short and

• 28:38Speaker 00

  sharp with someone? Was I a bit mean? Was I lazy? Did I, did I lie and, because I wanted my own way there? And I'm not suggesting I'm a saint and I always manage it to, but I do have a very loud voice in my head. Philosophers call it a deontic or deontological voice, this sense of obligation that is a peculiarity, it seems, of our species. As far as we know, the image I was used because they look so cheerful, an Amazonian tree frog perched on a branch with its big grin. Isn't thinking, oh god, I was a terrible Amazonian tree frog yesterday. I really let myself down. I was mean, I was unkind.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  I must try to be a better Amazonian tree frog. What we admire about animals is they spend a hundred percent of every day being themselves. And we as humans are fully aware that we don't. We are not fully ourselves. We lie, we hide behind, we pretend, we fail, and we judge ourselves. Now, that peculiarity of humanity is tried, people have tried to explain it in different ways. Obviously, the Genesis myth is that we ate a fruit. It gave us the knowledge of good and evil and the sense of shame of our physical selves. All those things that separate us from animals. Because humans, since we were cognitively conscious,

• 30:07Speaker 00

  have been aware that we're animals, because we can see that we defecate and eat and sleep and mate, just like other animals, and sometimes very quite close to the other animals. If we, depending what part of the world we live. But we can also see that we have these other things that animals don't. Who gave them to us? Where did they come from? What do they mean? And how do we live up to them? Are they a curse or a blessing? Do they make us mini gods? Or do they make us the playthings of gods, a cruel kind of, you know, little, as flies to wanton boys to the gods are we? They kill us for their sport, as Webster put it, and, you know. So, and those, that's, those oldest questions still, still really obsess us.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Particularly now, of course, because in the age of AI, we are able to be gods ourselves. We are making sentient beings. And we will have to decide whether, like the Greek gods, we give them fire or deny them fire, and maybe they'll kill us. But will they have what we have, this sense of, I try to be good? I mean, you try to be good, don't you? Try my best. Yeah. I fail. Yeah, you fail. It's right. And we all like that, but we don't pay much attention to that. And yet, it's the most extraordinary thing about us. It really is. And, and, um, as I say, I'm, you know, I'm not a moral, I'm not a model of moral probity and rectitude of any kind.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  But I do have that loud voice, and I've always had it. And when I was a, when my grandfather died. And this is very, but and I first learned to play with myself. I was terrified that he was watching me because he had died. And I thought, I can't do this because my granddaddy is watching me and it's just awful. And in a sense, that in, there you have it in one image. That's what humanity has been cursed with since our birth. The big daddy in the sky is watching you and is, and it's making you self-conscious. And you're holding back from your true nature because, oh, I can't do that in front of God.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  You know, and um, somehow we have to square that and give ourselves permission to be who we were born to be. And allow ourselves to live the full lives that we feel that we're on a journey to. But accept also that we will feel that we let ourselves down and that we're guilty of this and guilty of that. It's a, you know, very tempting to be more like, you know, someone like Samuel Beckett and the absurdist. And just say, there is no meaning to any of this. It's absurd. Life is absurd and meaningless. I know very well that in, in philosophy, there are very, very few professional philosophers who believe in free will.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  But we all live as if free will exists and we all have to live as if we are accountable for our actions. Otherwise, society falls apart. But if, deep down, we know that, that, that really there is no free will. Uh, uh, I mean, the most extreme examples are, in a sense, the easiest to see it. What, a psychopath is, is not just a murderer, but it's a murderer who is cunning and who plans coldly their killing. They choose to kill. So you may say they're the most evil kind. But no one on this earth has ever chosen to be a psychopath. It's a condition. You don't, it's like saying, oh, he's an asthmatic. We must, we must, we must lock him up. Well, you don't choose to be asthmatic. You don't choose to be psychopathic.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  The case of psychopathic, you're harming a, a lot of people and causing misery. So clearly, we've got to find a way of removing them from, from the natural orbit of humanity. But, you know, it's, this, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I'm having fun.

• 33:56Steven Bartlett?

  On that point, on that point of the psychopath, how, how possible do you think it is to really change?

• 34:05Steven Bartlett?

  Who we are, it's a bit of a strange question, but

• 34:07Speaker 00

  No, it's a good question.

• 34:09Steven Bartlett?

  Past the age of, you know, eighteen, you know, the im- the imprints have been made into our character, our identity, our sense of being, our search for validation, as you've described, and I've seen through your story and mine. How possible is it to change who we are? And are we anybody? Or are we just a byproduct of our sort of DNA and our experiences?

• 34:26Speaker 00

  That's such a good point. I mean, we are, in that sense, we are a story. And the story is, i- i- is a mixture of different elements. And a story is a myth. It's, it doesn't happen, you know, it's a bit, I'm sure you've read the Noel Yuval Harari.

• 34:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  That wonderful chapter where he just sort of proves that Persia doesn't exist. It's a myth, you know, it has a symbol, it has a people working for it, but there is no such thing as Persia. There's a Persia car, but that's not Persia. And so on. And similarly, there is us. Now, if I cut my toe off, I'm still Stephen, I'm just Stephen, I'm missing a toe. If I cut my head off, I'm dead. So obviously, you know, I'm the remains of Stephen. But if, if I start, start cutting more and more bits, when do I stop being myself? It's, it's, it's such an extraordinary idea. We're aware of our own self. And unless we have particular problems on the neurodiversity scale, for example, we

• 35:31Speaker 00

  also fully understand other people's selves and that they have a self and that therefore they'll have their own will and their own desire. And the chances are their appetites will be similar to ours. So, you know, if we're both not eaten for a day and someone brings in a tray and there's a cake on it, we'll look at each other and we'll know we each want that cake, you know, we've projected into the other's mind, I mean, in the most simple way. Theory of mind kind of shows us that. But.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  What that self is, how it can be in any way quantified, it can't be removed from the body, as far as we know. I mean, obviously, there are superstitions and people talk about astral projection and so on. There's no evidence that's ever been done.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  You can, in a metaphysical way, reach yourself into other people's selves even after you're dead. Shakespeare does that every day to different people, reading his sonnets or or Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon does, whoever. You know, I'm reached by David Bowie when I turn on Starman. I feel his self is connecting with me, his art, yes, his poetry, his vision, but also the self. He talks to you, that's what art does. And in that sense, you are immortal. Indeed, that was Shakespeare's obsession. So long as men can live and eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  You know, he was aware that there is, there is a way that we communicate beyond language. The actual sound in the throat of words being said vibrating the ear is one way for language to get into us. The other, a very recent invention, only 5,000 years, is reading characters on a page and writing them. But the other way is harder to understand, isn't it? But we do connect with people who are dead, who are away from us, whom we remember. And their self is as real without a body as the self of someone who has a body.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  So in that sense, there is an immortality, but it's held together by communal memory and by means of communication like print. And if they die, then the selves of the past die as well, don't they?

• 37:58Steven Bartlett?

  Since you were a young man, at the core of you, what do you think has actually changed? If I went to the very core of you and I could see it, I don't know, hold it in my hand, what would be different at the very core of you between the age of, you know, 20, 25 and today, let's say?

• 38:16Speaker 00

  I think I'm much calmer. I think I'm more accepting of things. Um, I feel less need to prove myself. It may not sound like that, the way I've been rattling on.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  I, I of course have found a kind of permanent love. I kind of, that's very ungracious, but I got married nearly eight years ago. Um, and that, that's changed things to be married, especially talking about that child early on who knew he was gay and, and saw ahead of him only a life of exile and shame. The, the, the prospect that I could ever actually be married and live happily. And, and for it to be no big deal to anybody. I mean, there must be people, I suppose, in the world who think it's disgusting. But you don't often bump into them. Um, so that, that, that's made a big difference and uh, I'm ambitious only for

• 39:16Speaker 00

  an ex, if there's an exciting project, like this film I told you, I'm learning Polish uh, at the moment to, to, to, to, to be in a film. And I'm, I'm very excited and ambitious about the film, not because I want it to win awards and be a huge success, but because I really am, I haven't done anything quite like it for a very long time. And so that's a thrill. Um, and otherwise, I, you know, I suppose I just, I don't need, I don't need to connect to people in the way I used to. I used to be slight, I really shy enough to need cocaine to stay up at night and to go to parties. There was, you know, quite a few years of that.

• 40:00Steven Bartlett?

  Fifteen years?

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Fifteen years. You've done far too much research, damn you. But yeah, and, and I mean, I look back at it and I think I cannot believe I was such an ass. But on the other hand, there are friendships I made that I don't, there's a regret and things I discovered and learned about myself and so on. But mostly, of course, it was a very, very wrong course. Fortunately, not a fatally wrong course, either in literal terms or in terms of career. But um, I realised that I am a very, very quiet domestic soul. I don't like going out. I don't like parties. I, I, I said, I said to my husband a couple of years ago, I said, I don't think. I've ever met a person or read about a person that I hate as much as I hate parties.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  He said, that's a bit strong. Do you hate parties more than you hate Hitler? I said, well, close.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  That was just a sort of weird moment, didn't it? I do go to parties, but I don't. Standing up, talking to people with a drink in my hand is just my idea of agony. Because I tell you another secret, which you may have uncovered, but it's an embarrassing one, is that I have a condition called prosopagnosia. It means face blindness. It means I will see you in the street two days' time and I will blank you because I won't recognise you, I'm afraid. And it's absolutely heart and gut-wrenching because you are convinced that people think you're looking down at them, you don't care about them, you haven't bothered to remember them because they're unimportant to you. And it really isn't that. I remember names all the time. Most people the other way around.

• 41:33Steven Bartlett?

  On the other way around.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember faces but not names. But I, and it is, I have a little card in my wallet that says, you know, prosopagnosia society. And I give it to people. I say, oh god, I'm so sorry, but look, believe me. You know, like, so I did an event for Mind last night and there were some wonderful people in it. I was moderating it, the mental health charity. And I was thinking in the cab on the way home, I said, if I see any one of those people, and we had this wonderful conversation, the chances of my recognising their faces are so low. It's awful. And, and you know, you teach yourself various things like the colour of what someone's wearing on a particular day, or if they have a, you know, an earring or some sort of jewellery or something external to the face.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  But it's a, it's a very odd one. So that makes parties even more difficult.

• 42:22Steven Bartlett?

  Age thirty-seven, you star in a play, which again, called Cellmates, I believe.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 42:29Steven Bartlett?

  The play gets some pretty harsh reviews, to say, to say the least, from a lot of the big newspapers as such. And that's another real low moment in your life.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Hugely so.

• 42:40Steven Bartlett?

  Can you take me back to that moment?

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was pretty grim. I mean, I, we'd done previews of it in Guildford and maybe what, Guildford and Richmond, I think, before coming into the West End, into the Noel Coward Theatre, as it is now, the Albury, as it was, I think. And I was with Rick Mail, whom I loved, and sweet, funny man, and he was brilliant and charming as always, the rest of the cast were nice. It was written by Simon Gray, a British playwright, and he also directed it. And I was playing George Blake, the spy, the British spy, who was sent to Wormwood Scrubs and then amazingly escaped. I was never comfortable in the play, and I was beginning to feel lost and adrift

• 43:26Speaker 00

  and deeply unhappy, and I couldn't understand why. The play wasn't that much of a disaster. I mean, it had good audiences and they applauded at the end. And some people said, yeah, I don't think it's his best play, but it wasn't an absolute catastrophe, shall we say.

• 43:41Steven Bartlett?

  At this point, because this is important context, you're well established.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 43:47Steven Bartlett?

  In your, in writing, in...

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Yes, things like Blackadder and Jeeves and Wisteria and Fry and Laurie had happened, and my books had been selling. So I was, you know, in the public eye, I was well known. Anyway, one Saturday, there was a Saturday night, I guess the press night had been on Friday or something like that. So we then had a Saturday night, and then on Sunday there were the Sunday papers, of which I saw some, and some of which were deeply unkind to me. And that, that did make a difference. I mean, I've said I didn't go just because I didn't like the reviews. It wasn't entirely that, that would have been a bit weak, and certainly was a weak thing to have done anyway. But it was a whole concatenation of something

• 44:33Speaker 00

  wrong in my head. I just suddenly saw myself as in the wrong place, doing the wrong things, and I wanted to get away from everything I knew. And really, what I first wanted to do was to take my life. And I did run the car engine in the lockup garage of the flat where I was in London, and then realised it was a catalytic converter, and that it wasn't really going to do much harm to me. And then there was stuff of it, and I was just coughing a bit, and...

• 45:02Steven Bartlett?

  That's quite a significant decision to make, following...

• 45:06Speaker 00

  I know, I know. I just wanted out, really, that's it. I just... Wherever I was, I wanted to be somewhere else. And if it was nowhere, that would be, at first, that was the most perfect place to be. I just didn't see the, as anybody listening who's had the misfortune and the terror of considering taking their life suicidal ideation, as it's known in the trade, as it they will probably concur with me that there comes a moment where you just start saying to yourself, what's the point? It's a strange phrase, because, you know, you could, anyone could say it at any point, but there's some moments when you say it, it seems so truthful, there is simply no point in anything around oneself.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  And that's how it seems. Anyway, so I got in the car and drove to the South Coast to Dover, I think it was, or no, Folkestone, and got on a ferry to Zebrugge in Belgium and then ended up in Bruges. In Bruges, like, like Colin Farrell and Brendan. And I then wandered a little further east into Holland and then into Germany and Hanover and Hamburg. And you didn't tell anybody you were going? No, no. And this was ninety-three or so. There was no World Wide Web as such. It was just beginning to happen.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Tim Berners-Lee in Switzerland was beginning to develop the World Wide Web. But there were these things, these things called commercial online servers like CompuServe and America Online, rather than direct kind of internet connections. I had been connected to those for some time and I'd taken my computer with me, I guess. So I was in a hotel in Hamburg and then I got a message from my friend Hugh, who said, old fellow, you must come home. Be in touch at least. And so I kind of sent him an email on this CompuServe thing and.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  I agreed that the it was nonsense. I had this in my head, this idea that I would go up from Hamburg and Hannover up Schleswig-Holstein, which is the border with Denmark and go up into Denmark. And somehow in the north of Denmark, I would sit on a rock in a thick white pullover with a pipe clenched between my teeth, writing impossible poetry and teaching English to Danes and be forgotten, you know, and just live the rest of my life. That was a total fantasy. But no, Hugh said, come on, it's fine. Come home. We really want to see you. Everyone wants to. And so I drove back overnight to Amsterdam and my father had got a flight to Schiphol and we

• 47:58Speaker 00

  met in a hotel in Schiphol. And then got a flight, little airplane back to Southend.

• 48:06Steven Bartlett?

  What did you say to your father that day in Amsterdam when you met him?

• 48:09Speaker 00

  I said, you've spent your life getting me out of terrible and embarrassing holes, and this is probably the worst of them. And he said, no, it's fine. It's all okay. And he was just wonderful.

• 48:20Steven Bartlett?

  I watched a news report of your absence.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  Really?

• 48:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I watched it upstairs before we had this conversation of the, I think it was maybe BBC News or one of the big stations reporting that you had, you were basically missing.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:35Steven Bartlett?

  A big picture of you on the screen and saying that you had, you know, the way that they'd framed it, obviously, is they said, you did this play. They showed some of the headlines, some of the reviews, and they said, he's Stephen Fry's vanished.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 48:46Steven Bartlett?

  And everyone was very.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Of course, I never saw any of that. I did see a photograph someone sent me years later of police on the roof of my house in Norfolk, which was slightly disturbing, looking for signs of me and obviously feeling the worst. It was a strange event, but in some ways it was a cleansing or a necessary step, I suppose, because as a result of it, I went to see psychiatrists and started to try and work out why.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Why my mind was taking me into such impossible dark places? Or, you know, when I had so much to be thankful for, I mean, what the hell? You know, I had enough money, I was well regarded in my profession.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Why should I have come to such a crisis? Just because someone didn't like my performance in that play is not really good enough. And I'm not that hypersensitive.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  So that started, what I suppose we have to call my journey into my mental health. And a few years later, can't remember when, well, quite a few years later, probably about eight or nine, if not 10 years later, I made a programme with the BBC, or two episodes, I think it was, called The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, in which I tried to explore this peculiarity of this darkness that can shroud a mind so completely. But also that is part of an illness that I hadn't really understood. I'd heard the phrase manic depression, and I'd never really heard the word manic. Manic depression is two illnesses.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Depression, which is a dark, depressed, lowered, as in depressed state. And mania is an elevated state of energy and full of bounce and vigor and a desire to communicate with people. And depression is the exact opposite. You just want to line Ben, pull the duvet over your head and never speak to anybody. Whereas when you're in a manic state, you're always on the phone boring people. So there are two poles, and hence it's also known bipolar. There's the one pole of mania, hypomania, and the other pole of a depressed state. And so I wanted to find out more about it, and that's where I went back to school and discovered that the psychiatrist when I was a boy had written bipolar, question mark.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  And I discovered that so many people lived with this problem. And I also discovered something quite extraordinary, because I asked everyone I spoke to. I did a little button with my finger. I said, I'm drawing a button on this table with my finger. If you press this button, you will never get a depressed episode again, one of those awful, terrible depressed episodes. But nor will you get a manic episode, one of those heightened, elevated, jubilant episodes. Do you want to press the button? And almost none of them wanted to press the button. And it reminded me of a thing that W. Jordan, the poet, had written about. Don't take my devils away, or my angels will fly away too.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  And I don't know whether that's a true thing, but it's a fear that we have inside us, that even an illness like manic depression and how serious it can be is part of us and gives us a secret power, gives us something extra. It's dangerous because it is highly... The word doctors use is morbidity. In other words, you know, people, especially if it's undiagnosed. If you start finding that you're crashing in moods and becoming miserable and everyone's finding you a pain in the arse, or you're absolutely wild and full of crazy plans and, you know, buying things, going on shopping sprees

• 52:36Speaker 00

  or being sexually exhibitionist or inappropriate. But people find that even more annoying. And if you don't know that it's actually an illness, then you just mask it with alcohol and narcotics of one kind or another. And they mask it pretty successfully, but they have their own problems, to say the least. And people can then slide down, leave their families. The families can no longer tolerate their substance abuse, for example, and they end up on the streets. And then there's a lot of discovery for them to know that they first have to get off the substances that have been masking the problem and then to face the problem. And it's a really, as we know now, a huge endemic problem, it seems,

• 53:19Speaker 00

  in our culture and country. Amongst young people, it's expressed with a rash of self-harm that is just so, so upsetting to see. Children hurting themselves. And and if you ask them why they do it, it's always the same answer. It's it's to dis to displace the other pain inside them. It's because the pain in there is worse. So you do that to take away from it. And that for a child is is just heartbreaking to imagine.

• 53:50Steven Bartlett?

  Post diagnosis of manic manic depression. What were you advised to do and what did you do to make life better with the understanding now and the awareness that you had this condition?

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Well, firstly, I went on a sort of exploratory journey of of medication. My psychiatrist tried me on a number of things. Sodium valproate, which has since become somewhat somewhat of a disgraced pharmaceutical, particularly when when it's been given to people with various forms of epilepsy. And then lithium, and I was on lithium for for quite a number of years. And and then slowly I became aware of some of the kind of folk wisdom that has been around in our species for a very long time, but which was initially very irritating. I'll give you an example. There are certain kinds of people who, if they hear someone's depressed, say, well, go go walk it off.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  You know, just go for a nice walk. And you think, hang on, this is an illness, just saying, go and walk it off. And yet, once you've confronted it and once you've tried to control it, once you've understood what it is, a chronic condition, i.e. a bit like asthma or or diabetes, something that's with you and that may not go away and may come back again and isn't necessarily under your control. You then do discover that there are therapies in life like exercise, gardening, making music, knitting. I mean, it doesn't almost matter what it is. It is like, as I say, a folk wisdom of taking yourself out of yourself and also believing in a future.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  It's incredibly important. The first thing I did, I think, that was a breakthrough for me was that I lost some weight. I mean, I'm always fighting weight, but I was really pretty pretty big back then, and I managed to lose about four stone. Now, it's not that losing four stone is in itself a vast achievement, but it tells me that I can control some part of myself. My physical body is not is not a rogue that will just do whatever it wants to do. I can say, no, I'm going to make you a bit sleeker. And if I can do that with my body, maybe I can do things with my mind. Maybe I am, you know, captain of my soul, master of my destiny and all of that. So, yes, I started walking every morning, you know, when I was in London, going around Regent's Park

• 56:16Speaker 00

  and listen to audiobooks, just choose all kinds of books that either I hadn't read for years or I'd always meant to read, you know, whether it was Dostoevsky or Agatha Christie. It wasn't about high literature necessarily. It was about just having a story in my head and walking and walking and looking and saying, wow, I've had seven miles this morning. That's amazing. You feel you're doing something. So it's really been a slow process of allowing myself, I suppose, to to to be who I am and not to fight for my place at the table. I suppose I've accepted that through immense good fortune, I am where I am. I don't need to say yes to everything that I'm asked to do. I don't owe it to the, you know, to to myself

• 56:59Speaker 00

  to to have to work all the time. And so I am sometimes capable of saying, looking to myself in the mirror and saying, you're quite happy today, aren't you, Stephen? And then I'll go, no, don't say that. It's the worst thing you could say.

• 57:17Steven Bartlett?

  You've got almost thirteen million followers on Twitter.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 57:20Steven Bartlett?

  What's your relationship been with social media? Because, you know.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Oh, up and down.

• 57:25Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, Twitter, it really is a cesspool at the best of times, just negativity and abuse and trolls. So reflecting on the, you know, the experience you had when you were thirty seven with that critical feedback. I mean, Twitter is not. Not a great place to be if you want.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  No, indeed it isn't. I mean, it is supportive too. I mean, I I I I've learnt how to use it in a way that is not likely ever to upset me anymore. There was a time when I was fully engaged with it and, you know, you call it assessable and and I've used similar images in the early days. It was like a lovely swimming hole in a in a in a in a in a glade, in a lovely wood somewhere, where people of goodwill and from from around would swim about and you'd bump into them and go, hi, how are you? And you'd just chat and then suddenly you notice, oh, there's a turd floating on it. What the hell's that doing there? And then suddenly there'd be a bit of broken glass when you put your foot down and or an old rusty pram or something.

• 58:20Speaker 00

  And you realise that it did become, as you say, a kind of cesspool. And and that's a terrible shame. It's immensely useful to have that many followers because it means, you know, I can satisfy a few publicity requirements with one stroke of the pen, as it were, just by by tweeting about them. And it will reach a bigger audience than if I spend four hours doing a profile with a journalist who always want to get under my skin and ask annoying questions. So it's a lazy, good publicity tool. Um, I'm I'm slightly worried that that, I don't know, that I may have to leave it if Elon Musk takes over.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  I'm not sure that I want to be involved in his Twitter. It doesn't sound like a nice, happy place. I mean, I'll consider I might just simply stop using it in any other way except to post things for charities or or work that that, you know, but rather than engaging people, I just, I'm not sure I'll want to see some of the tweets that float up from the kind of people that Musk encourages. I mean, I may be wrong. It it it and it's not that I want it to be a left wing thing, not a right wing thing. I mean, I'm fully, um, of course, aware that it should reflect society as much as possible, but.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  Um, do you know what I wanted to do in this sort of ways, go on one of those? Doesn't Piers Morgan do something? Is it GB News he does or one of those things? Yes. Um, and you, you, I've sort of wanted to go on now, you'll have to hold your ears now. Sort of was go, hello, how are you, you old cunt? It's fucking great to see you, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt. And him to go, you can't say that. Oh, I thought this was the home of free speech, isn't it? I thought, I thought this is the fucking home of cunting free speech, but it isn't. Oh, so free speech is negotiable. There are bits that you can't say and bits that you can. You know, because that's, that's the point. I mean, free speech is of course important, but it's not.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  It's not the end point. The end point is human beings living together in peace and harmony and happiness as much as possible. Without war and violence and envy and resentment and bitterness and. Or starvation and poverty and all those sort of things. That, that's the end point. And it's probable that that end point is better arrived at. If we live in a society where you're free to speak and share ideas and think freely. And you're not told what to say. So in that sense, free speech is very much one of the key things on the way to it. But for some people, key speech has become the end point. I want to live in a society where I can say anything. Doesn't matter if people are starving and the gap between rich and poor is wider than it's ever been.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Uh, the only thing that matters is I can say what I want. Well, that's. I just don't think that's what John Stuart Mill and all the original figures who. Wrote on liberty and free speech. I don't think that's quite what they meant. And I don't. Think it's what I see as the, the, you know, the be all and end all. But, um. So, you know, I'm worried that. There will be a rise in the kinds of anti, you know, kind of racist and transphobic. And indeed, anti feminist on the other side and all kinds of other nastiness will prevail and. Musk would go, yeah, that's, that's what we call free speech. I'm a free speech absolutist, he called himself.

• 1:01:51Steven Bartlett?

  It is, I mean, it is concerning. It is concerning generally. I I've made the decision that I just don't, I don't tweet. So I just post the podcast when it comes out and that's it.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Steven Bartlett?

  Because, you know, it's a losing battle. You referred to like pieces of shit floating past in the, in the once lovely lake and then a piece of glass. I'll end up having an argument with a piece of shit and I don't, or a piece of glass and I just don't wanna.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  I, I think, what, what I think of is like, if, if at school you're captain of the chess club and you put the team up on the notice board and you pin it up on the notice board and you then go away.

• 1:02:23Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  What you don't do is put the notice up and then hide behind a pillar and listen to how people respond to it. Oh, I see the, oh, what's he put that up for? He's a wanker, isn't he? And all that. I mean, just put your notice up and walk away. Yeah.

• 1:02:36Steven Bartlett?

  And now, to the credit of Twitter, you can have settings where one of the settings I have on my Twitter feed is that I can't see any tweets, tweets directed at me from anybody who hasn't got an email address verified, hasn't got a phone number verified, doesn't have a profile picture.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Brilliant.

• 1:02:51Steven Bartlett?

  So I, I don't get many tweets because, you know, it filters out a lot of the, the stuff. So my, my notifications are pretty nice. You know, they're pretty straightforward. And it's because in the past, it has been a distraction. I don't want to fall into holes, you know, and spend hours of my life wasted trying to chase down a troll.

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:08Steven Bartlett?

  With this journey of mental health, I know you're, you're the president of Mind, I believe, which is a phenomenal charity that everybody, everybody probably knows for the, for the work they've done. And the important work they've done over the last decade is mental health has risen in public sort of consciousness. Um, I, one of the things that I think about a lot is how the battles we fight for our entire lives, there's sometimes a frustration around our inability to cure ourself of those things. So, you know, I sit here with people or I speak to young people and even in my own life, I've come to realize that a lot of my like real deep battles, maybe they'll never come a day where they're cured. With my traumas, these, you know, the ways that I react to something, my triggers, maybe they'll never be cured. And as I've read

• 1:03:52Steven Bartlett?

  through your story, even up until. Ten years ago, I could see that you were still having moments of real lows.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Steven Bartlett?

  Real depressive lows. You know, I listened to, I think, a podcast episode you did where you said, when you were fifty five, it was your, I believe, your third suicide attempt in your life.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Yes, Fred, that's right. Yeah. No, no, I think, I mean, it is in that sense what doctors call chronic, like asthma. You, you can, you know, have an inhaler on you and usually be sort of safe and you know what you're allergic to, what triggers an asthma attack. But you never stop being an asthmatic. And the day could come when you least expect it, when of course, it's always the day you've forgotten your inhaler, where suddenly you just get this enormous attack and you can barely breathe. And it might have been ten years since you last had such one. I'm sure anyone listening who has lived with asthma will know, know what I mean. And, and it's a bit like that with, with, you know, you, you've, you, at your peril, do you think you've conquered it?

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  You, you are living with it and coping with it and managing it. And most of the time, one manages it. But sometimes you, you hear it, the, the, the, you know, the, the hoofbeats back in the, in your brain of, of the coming storm. And you do everything you can to avoid it. And tell friends now. I mean, that's, it's so much easier said than done. I, I, I have a, a theory. I call it my genital wart theory is we, we all say how important friends are. Gosh, we need friends. Friends are the people you can say anything to, aren't they? But actually, they're not. If you had a genital wart, you wouldn't show it to your best friend.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  You'd say, oh, oh, Tom, hey, have a look at my blonde feet. They would go, shut up. Similarly, you wouldn't show it to your mother, you know, or to your sister, you know, and that's family. But you show it to a stranger, a doctor. So can you look at this and tell me if it's normal or all right? And they'll go, oh, that's fine, don't worry. And you feel okay. So if that's true of some little physical part of yourself, it's also true of the, the mental part of yourself that although you have family and friends who are supposed to be there for you, it's actually very difficult, even though you know it's the right thing to do, to share with them what you're thinking. It's very hard. And they'd be upset nearly always when, when you have a crisis, if it gets as far as suicide, obviously even more so. But then they say, why didn't you come and tell me?

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  They're actually angry with you. You know, I'm there for you. Why didn't you come? Well, because it was a general war in my mind, as it were, and you just feel, and you have to try and overcome that. But, yes, it, I have to be aware, it won't necessarily go away. It's, it's, um, the, the other thing I often say is, it's, it's like the weather and, and, and, um, the weather is real, you know, you can't ever say, so I'm going out, it's not really snowing, and it's not a blizzard outside, I'm going to wear a T-shirt, T-shirt. You, you have to accept that the weather is real. But you also have to accept that you didn't cause it.

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  I didn't make it snow, it's, and, and nor do you have to, uh, sort of welter in the problem of thinking, well, that's it, it's snowing now, it's gonna snow for the rest of my life, it's always gonna be cold. It will actually pass. Again, nothing to do with you, you can't make it pass. And it's those are the storms in your head. The mistake is not to think it's real, ah, I'm just imagining it. No, it's really raining in your head, it is. Oh, what did I do to make it do this? You didn't make it rain. It's not your fault. And, oh, it'll never go now. It will, the sun will come out, you don't know when, it's not under your control. Those are three things, they're not absolutely, hooray, but they're just enough, if you cling on to them, to make you realise sort of what's going on.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  That it's out of your control, that it's real, and that it will pass.

• 1:07:42Steven Bartlett?

  And what is the mind, he talked about the hooves of the horse coming.

• 1:07:45Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:07:46Steven Bartlett?

  Is there, is there words associated with, with those moments? Is it, because you said earlier on about what's the point?

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  Yes, that, that is often the one, what is the point? And it's also just a, it's like, I mean, a- all of us who, who had it, and I'm sure many of the people listening will have different, you know, metaphors and comparisons, it's, it is like something being sucked out of your sort of, energy sector, and, and that you feel drained, and you're convinced your face has gone white. And sometimes you look in the mirror and it has gone white, there has been a physical response to it, you're utterly white. And people who love you and know you well see it in your eyes straight away. So, so my husband will say, whoa, what's the matter? I'll go, I don't know, I don't know, I'm just gonna go and lie down, I just don't know. And he'll, he would have seen it instantly. And I look at them, myself in the mirror and think, what, what is he seeing?

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  It is a common thing, and I'd noticed this during the, um, During the documentary, if you take a magazine and you know, cover half your face and look at your right eye and then cover the other half and look at your left eye, or even take a photograph with in that way and then look. It's amazing how I found people with who've had mental health histories that have not been happy have a often have a more extreme difference in their left and right eye. Then if you look at my left and right eye, one is rather cold and calculating and one is warmer and friendlier. That's usual with people, I think.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  I don't know any empirical science behind it, but I did notice that almost everybody I interviewed had an extreme version of that. And I don't know what that means or whether it's anyone's ever ever done any research onto it. But there are, you know, there are signs and signals that come.

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  It's, you know, like some people get, I get itchy under the chin when I'm going to have an asthma attack, for example, unmistakably itchy under the chin. But with with mania, which is often worse. I mean, I interviewed someone who with mania, you want to concentrate, you want new projects, you've got amazing ideas in your head, you're risk taking and entrepreneurial and grandiose.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  And I interviewed someone in America who who's I interviewed the wife that the husband sadly did take his own life. And so I was talking about life with him and she said, it's a terrible thing to say, she said, but I was always happier when he was depressed than when he was manic. When he's depressed, he's just, you know, lying curled up in a ball. Obviously, I didn't realize he was going to take his life to go that far. But when someone's manic, they are just out of control. They're so embarrassing, they would do such weird things. She said, she said, you'll laugh, but it was awful at the time. He had a car, a nice car, it's like one of the original Mustangs or something. And he took it apart piece by piece on a large piece of cloth in his garage, as an American would say.

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  And each piece, you know, the pencil or marker, he did a little mark for where that piece goes and he wrote what the name of the piece was. So the whole thing, and he started chroming all the bright work and making it all perfect and all the engine parts were out. And then he had a change of state. And it moved away from this optimistic, bright mania. And he just kicked the cloth and all the pieces and everything just piled into a heap of junk and the car couldn't be rescued. And there's a sort of metaphor for something there, I don't know what it is, but she said that, you know, that that's the problem. But when I've had mania, I had a manic episode right in the middle of someone's memorial. It was quite extraordinary.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  And and it frightened me because the power of it was so intense. And I I I ran home and I called my doctor, my psychiatrist, Billy. I said, Billy, I'm, I have to tell you, I've had visions and I feel the closest I can describe it to is like Joan of Arc. I feel irradiated by some extraordinary power and light. It's the most extraordinary thing and I I just don't know what I'm gonna do. He said, I'm coming round. He came round and he said, this is very dangerous. He could see me and I had, I had, I'd started cooking and I'd started tidying, I'd done three different jobs.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  And the cooking thing, I'd done a plate with quail's eggs, halved, so elegantly around the edge of the plate. It was so beautiful. Everything was amazing. I said, I don't know why you've come, Billy. I have never been happier and more in charge of myself. He said, no, you're not well. You are really not well. I can see you. He said, your eyes are absolutely kind of off the scale and I want you just to take this. And he gave me some, what was it called? It'll come to me. And it sort of calms you down. It's an antipsychotic, essentially, I suppose, or an anxiolytic or something like that. That was, that was one of the more extreme manic moments I'd had. And and actually was pretty frightening because it took me a long time to get down from it. And and I am the last person in the world to say that they feel like Joan of Arc, you

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  know, like someone who has had some extraordinary transcendent, you know, religious experience. But that's, that's how I felt.

• 1:13:03Steven Bartlett?

  You've, you've accomplished so many unbelievable things in your career in spite of all of these struggles that we've talked about. The list is actually too long for me to to even, I wouldn't know where to start. As I look down onto this little iPad in front of me and all of the milestones, the the books, the the roles you've played, the the scripts you've written, et cetera.

• 1:13:25Steven Bartlett?

  Why, why and how, why and how you, you know. And it's always a difficult question because it requires us to abandon humility for a second potentially and, and say something nice about oneself, but why, why you?

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  I think the first reason, and it would be the same if you spoke to a certain kind of musician, is because I write and, and I have always written since I was a little boy, I used to write stories. And when I then was at Cambridge and there was this thing of comedy, it was natural as with you and on my own to write monologues and sketches, to perform. And because I'd written them, I, I sort of wrote them for myself to perform, but the writing was at the bottom of it all. And then acting jobs on their own came along, which I didn't write or other people wrote or I could just sort of add bits of writing to. But I was always a writer. And if you look at musicians, the reason we venerate Bowie and Elton John and, you

• 1:14:23Speaker 00

  know, Lennon Cohen, everybody, they write their music. Doesn't matter how fantastic their voices are. Yes, we love Nat King Cole or someone who is just a beautiful voice, but the pantheon of great artists are those who create their own work by, they write it, they write the songs, they last forever if you write the song, Paul McCartney or whatever, you know. I mean, you just think even something like when you see that postcode lottery and that, who's that knocking at my door? And you think that's Paul McCartney when he wrote that cannot have been thinking, but he wrote and every day he writes to this day because it's, that's what he is, that somehow that's the voice in him telling him that's what real work is, is the writing and the creating.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  And I love acting and I love presenting and reading audiobooks and things like that. Immense fun, but the real work is always sitting in front of the blinking cursor and, and, and writing things. And everything else is, is gravy and fantastic gravy at that. Not because it's easier and, and, and you know, I'm not sort of saying acting is easy. It's just for some reason in my head, you know, the Protestant work ethic, the Jewish work ethic, call it what you like, is the one that says, you know, sitting alone, concentrating until bubbles of blood fall, come out of your ears, that's work.

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  Acting, as Shakespeare called it, is play. He was a playwright and he called actors players. Do you think we're all artists? This is a really good question and I always used to say no. I I was very friendly in the heyday, well, I still am, uh, with, for example, Damien Hirst. And in in the nineties, I was very much an obituary as a Groucho Club and and and, you know, the Tracy Emmons and the, um, and the Damien Hirst would come in along with the Oasis's and the Blurs and and so on. It was very much the the the place where those incredibly energetic and new kinds of artists were were would assemble. And, you know, I'd get drunk with Damien a lot.

• 1:16:34Speaker 00

  And I would sometimes say, I want to be an artist. And he'd say, you are an artist. Anybody can be an artist. I said, no, they can't. He said, what do you mean? I said, and I would say, I'm an I'm an entertainer. I'm frankly a bit bourgeois. I I want to please people. And if I don't please them, I get upset. I've I've done it wrong. For for for me, the aim is to see delight in the face. Uh, but for you, it's to make something that matters to you. And if it disgusts people or horrifies them, you can, you're often full of glee. Uh, it's not you deliberately make them to hate it. Uh, there are enough people who love it to make you extremely rich. The time he was only slightly rich, but now, of course, he's worth a huge amount. Uh, and I said, that's what a real artist is. And my other artist friends, not not all from that same generation, Maggie Hambling

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  was a wonderful painter, uh, in Suffolk, and she's done my portrait several times, whatever. And she's a real artist. She, there's a toughness about her, a refusal to compromise, an absolute, what's central is her and her work, and that's true of artists. Artists are bloody minded. They bite the hand that feeds them. I'm pretty easygoing. Uh, if a, you know, a commissioner wants me to do something, I'll ask him how how he'd like it done. I'll try and put my my own voice into it, my own tone into it. But I don't have the artistic drive to make it something out of me. There's a fantastic confidence and supreme.

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  Almost contempt for society that artists have.

• 1:18:03Speaker 00

  And that's why they're so unpopular with the Daily Mail's and the bourgeois people, because they don't please, they don't provide what is comfortable or easy and what people would like or pretty or, you know, it's always, oh, disgusting of throwing a pot of paint into the public's face. That was said a hundred and fifty years ago. You know, it's always been thus, and artists are special, I think. I mean, I like makers or craftsmen, artisans, you know, that who make beautiful things, whether it's shoes or, you know, Tom Daley knitting a nice pullover, whatever it might be, is a beautiful thing to see, but art is, to me at least, and it may be a part of the kind of education I've had

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  and that has privileged art above all things, but art is special to me. It has a special place and does special things. It usually very simple, and that's the genius of an artist. We die. We, the flesh, this case we have, dies and rots. And we know this, and mostly we don't particularly like to be reminded of it. Artists find it the most fascinating thing in the world. So even if it's Van Gogh with showing the petals falling off the sunflower, there's death in there. And as for Francis Bacon and indeed Damien Hirst and almost all painters, they paint death. They paint the truth about what we are becoming.

• 1:19:29Speaker 00

  And painting is sometimes the last bastion against death. I'm going to make something permanent because everything else dies. That's, again, Shakespeare's sonnets, you know. This will last, everything else will die, but this poem will stay here. I made something permanent against death, decay, entropy, all the horrors of the universe that drag us down. You know, my nipples are dropping two inches every year as gravity takes hold, and it will for all of us, and art keeps them propped up, if you like.

• 1:20:06Steven Bartlett?

  I very much, I've been going back and forward about this point about art because I've realised, as probably as I've got older, that expression in some artistic form, whether it's knitting that jumper like Tom Daley does, is so great for our mind.

• 1:20:19Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:20:19Steven Bartlett?

  And, you know, you've talked about a few things there, even when you're talking about social prescribing, just some way to express ourself through the medium of music or painting or creation seems to be, it seems to be so human and so innately important to all of us.

• 1:20:37Steven Bartlett?

  But at the same time, I hear what you're saying regarding artists and their conviction to create from their own perspective versus to conform. I guess, I guess maybe the difference there is that's being a great artist.

• 1:20:49Speaker 00

  Yes, I think it's true. Yeah, there are, there are qualities and degrees.

• 1:20:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, there's a spectrum of.

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  I mean, there are, there are people have tried to define, I mean, an artisan, a craftsman

• 1:21:03Speaker 00

  can make the same thing again and again, identically, and it's genius. They're making four chairs, each chair is the same. An artist never does the same thing again. They, they might have a theme that they do, so you, you know, you can get a lot of artists who, you know, who, who like to paint a particular subject, whether it's Bedlingfield terriers, famous Scottish artist used to do, Craigie Asherson.

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  He liked to do little Bedlington terriers and he liked, there's usually a star somewhere, but everyone is different. Everyone is a variation on a theme, whereas an artisan is happy to make things that are perfect and the same each time. A craftsman and, but they're both good for the mind. In fact, probably being a craftsman is better for the mind. There's, I remember Rowan Atkinson said to me once years ago, he's a very wise man indeed, and thinks a lot, very, very thoughtful. And, and he said, and I'm sure he wasn't the first to say it, and there are many different names for this. He said, but it only ever works on stage if you are relaxed, but it only ever works on stage if you are concentrating.

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  If you concentrate without being relaxed, you're just stiff, you're trying too hard. If you relax without concentrating, you're all over the place. But when both happen at once, you are master of time and space. And you are in control, you're concentrating on every detail and every second of the audience's response. And your timing is perfect. And yet you are relaxed enough to allow them to enjoy it without feeling any strain. A sportsman called that being in the zone. Hmm. Um, and it's immensely important to get that blend. And one of the ways to create it is, I think, not to do art, because that's just too frightening. But to do crafts.

• 1:22:55Speaker 00

  And that can include painting, it can be painting by numbers, it can be just a general sketch where you're not trying to make it art. But once your tongue is stuck out, you know, you've got that concentrated but relaxed on you. And it could, as I say, it could be knitting, carpet making, it can be anything you choose. But something, or a jigsaw even, but something where you've made a change to what was there before. You brought materials together that weren't there before. And you've done it in a way that has just given you, that you've listened to the radio or the television's on in the corner. Or you've got a playlist going and it's, it's a, it's a magical thing. That flow state. Yeah, and, and, and if, if anyone's thinking of how they might do that.

• 1:23:37Speaker 00

  One of my favorite films is a film called Running on Empty, a Sidney Lumet film with River Phoenix and Judd Hirsch and those others in it. And it, it's about this family that are on the run because they attacked a, a weapons laboratory during the Vietnam War. And unfortunately, there was a security guard in there who got killed, although they didn't, they tried to do it when it was empty. So they've been on the lam from the FBI for like fifteen, twenty years. But that's the backstory. Anyway, that means that they, they don't have much and they're constantly having to go on the move when the FBI might be close. And the River Phoenix's character is a musical genius, as it happens, not this relevant to this story. But he meets this girl and they start to fall for each other. And at one point, they're walking along the beach and he's picking things up and says, oh, this might do.

• 1:24:23Speaker 00

  And she says, what's that? And he says, in our family, for Christmas or birthdays, we're only allowed to give something we've found or made.

• 1:24:35Speaker 00

  And I I almost wept at how beautiful an idea that was. I know it's so obvious, we live in a ridiculous, crass, commercial world where we score everything by its monetary value. But to say we're only allowed to give each other things we've found or made. And so he'd found this stone and this piece of wood or whatever, driftwood or whatever it was, and he was going to make something out of it. And his parents would be thrilled to have it because you've given them time and concentration. But you've also had the pleasure yourself of doing the making. So maybe someone listening will say to their family, hey, Christmas is coming up. We're only allowed to give each other things we've found and made.

• 1:25:10Speaker 00

  And especially at a time of of of, you know, financial crisis, who wants to go into this slightly sick-making nonsense of just going into shops and spending vast sums of money that, you know, on shiny things and when you might just find a piece of driftwood or something that looks like a hedgehog and turn it into a pipe holder or a soap dish, you know, that's all I'm saying. It sounds so cheesy.

• 1:25:35Steven Bartlett?

  No, it's a really, really beautiful idea and it's very much aligned to to the relationship I have with my partner, to be honest. We, you know, I'm sure I'm sure everybody knows I have the means to buy whatever, but

• 1:25:47Speaker 00

  Indeed.

• 1:25:47Steven Bartlett?

  I can't think of a recent Valentine's Day, birthday, just had my birthday, where anything has exceeded the a hundred pounds because it's all like scrapbooks and really sentimental, personal stuff. And thankfully, I'm with someone who wants that and would actually be probably disgusted if I got them a shiny thing. I genuinely, I've said this before, my partner would be genuinely disgusted if I got a shiny thing or like a designer thing, like the look I would get, you know, so I I. Here's a question. If you're if you're if the good life in your own subjective definition of whatever that means, if the good life, your best life was a, I've asked this question, but I'm going to ask a variation of it to you, was a recipe constituting of a bunch of different ingredients.

• 1:26:32Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think you need or is missing from that list of ingredients for you to have the dish of a good life?

• 1:26:42Speaker 00

  Wow. That's an amazing thought. I mean, there is a part of me that obviously feels, I say obviously, that feels in another world, if I'd timed things right, I might have had children. And that's an experience that an enormous number of my fellow humans undergo, and it clearly gives pleasure. I have many godchildren and now nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews. And, but I'll never experience that a child growing up. And that, I mean, it's slight sadness.

• 1:27:22Speaker 00

  It allows me fantastic, ironic, sarcastic, in fact, conversations with people sometimes where someone goes, "Oh, this nonsense about global warming."

• 1:27:36Speaker 00

  And I'll go, "No, I'm with you. I don't have children either, so I don't care what happens to the world." And they'll go, "Well, no, I've got kids." I say, "Oh, do you hate them then? You hate your children, so you don't want them to have a nice world." "Oh, well, I don't know. I mean, yeah, that's fine." And they'll go, "Oh, look, don't be stupid." And I go, "Well, that's..."

• 1:27:54Speaker 00

  Silly of me, but, but it, yeah, I mean, that's probably the biggest hole in my life experience. I've been fortunate enough to have done so many things and to experience so much and met so many people I've been thrilled to meet and had opportunities that are just unbelievable, really. And of course, I've had opportunities. I suppose to have had children. I mean, you know, I could have sorted something out. I could have, and you know, Elliot and I could, you know, we talked about it a bit, but we never, we never talked about it to the extent of, "Right, so we're going to a clinic tomorrow to talk this through to some expert." You know, we never quite got that far. It was always just, "Yeah, it would be nice, wouldn't it?"

• 1:28:34Speaker 00

  And so that's probably the...

• 1:28:37Speaker 00

  I mean, otherwise, of course, there are regrets in life because

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  as you get, I'm now, from the twenty fifth of August, nearly your birthday onwards, I was, my birthday's twenty fourth of August, so from that day onwards, I was closer to seventy than sixty, because it was my sixty fifth birthday on the twenty fourth of August. So a- as you move towards the seer, the yellow leaf, as Shakespeare put it, oh, so embarrassed. Shakespeare calling, saying, could you stop quoting me? It's my sister, it might be important, because, Joe, yes, sorry, I'm still at the, um, oh, God, am I late?

• 1:29:12Steven Bartlett?

  Sorry.

• 1:29:12Speaker 00

  Shit, I am, yes, you're quite right.

• 1:29:15Speaker 05

  The driver is saying at the moment, he's worried about getting you back.

• 1:29:18Speaker 00

  The driver's worried about getting me back in time, I understand. Thank you, darling, bless you. We're having such a good time, I had no idea how the time was passing.

• 1:29:27Speaker 05

  Please give my love to Mr. Bartlett.

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  I am.

• 1:29:30Steven Bartlett?

  Hello, Joe.

• 1:29:31Speaker 00

  Joe loves you, Bartlett. You're the Bartlett pear, the juicy Bartlett pear, yeah.

• 1:29:38Speaker 05

  Please, please apologize for me interrupting, I know, I know you're happy because you're having a nice time, but I felt I should do my duty.

• 1:29:45Speaker 00

  You bet, I really appreciate it, thanks, and I'll, I'll text them, and them in the cab on the way there. Gosh, I'm sorry.

• 1:29:52Steven Bartlett?

  No worries at all.

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Steven Bartlett?

  Listen, Stephen, thank you, thank you so much for your, your time. We do have a quick closing tradition, just where the last guest asks a question for the next guest.

• 1:30:01Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:30:02Steven Bartlett?

  So I'll just rattle this one off to you, um, and I absolutely can't read their writing. What is it that motivated you once you?

• 1:30:13Steven Bartlett?

  Do you have any idea?

• 1:30:16Steven Bartlett?

  What is it that motivate, what is it that motivated you once you already had it?

• 1:30:22Speaker 00

  Oh, do you mean, once you've reached a goal, why do you keep at it?

• 1:30:26Steven Bartlett?

  You got to the point in your life where you would achieve so much, most people would be satisfied with retirement and wrapping it all in. What then became your motivation in your life?

• 1:30:35Speaker 00

  Just the honestly pleasure, the fact that I still enjoyed it so much that when I met new people who wanted me to do a new thing like this, this dinosaur um program, I'm doing dinos, yeah, uh, living, you know, doing this new technology, being with the dinosaurs, so exciting. It was just a whole new thing for me. And, and I'd never done anything like it. And so I just said yes. And even though it meant like, huh, am I gonna get it, how am I gonna get a week to be in that studio and do this and enough stuff and prepare for it and so on. Turned out to be a wonderful program and unique kind of technology demonstrating these dinos. So, so that is an example. It's just, and

• 1:31:17Speaker 00

  similarly, doing this Apple TV show, which I'm doing now in America called The Morning Show, which is, which is good fun. And uh, just occasionally, it's, it's the thrill of the variation, you know? So it's the variation between doing a documentary and then suddenly having to spend four or five months just working on a book. And then, uh, then doing some slutty piece of uh, uh, TV or film with big stars in it, uh, feeling like, ooh, I'm in Hollywood, you know? It's not that I'm calling The Morning Show slutty, because that's the least slutty thing I've ever done.

• 1:31:53Steven Bartlett?

  I've actually had the privilege of seeing all of the above, other than your upcoming movie, which uh, which hasn't been shot yet. But when I saw dinosaurs, it was um, it brought me right back to my childhood and watching Jurassic Park with awe and as if I was stepping back in time to a, to a place in our history. Thank you so much for your time, Stephen. I really appreciate it. You're someone

• 1:32:09Speaker 00

  A real pleasure. And do I have to leave a question for your next guest?

• 1:32:12Steven Bartlett?

  If you could, that would be amazing. Gonna give you the book that I oversee here. Thank you, Stephen.