Travel & Humanitarian Photos
I don’t think I’ve heard anything funnier for a long time than Stephen Fry talking about his loathing for dancing “I hate that slovenly mixture of sexual exhibitionism, strutting contempt and repellent narcissism that it involves” in the second of his recent podcasts, or “podgrams” as he uniquely calls them.
So it was with great delight that I noticed his most recent podgram appear in my iTunes playlist this morning. Once downloaded I took a break from the office to take a walk to Sainsburys, going the long way round in order to allow time to hear Stephen’s latest rant in full. You have to love Stephen Fry and if you don’t then there’s clearly something wrong with you. You have to admire the unashamed manner (if not the sound) with which he spends much of the first five minutes of the broadcast coughing into the microphone. You have to admire the way he returns to the microphone after a break mid-way through the podcast and apologises for the background sound of a toilet cistern filling up. It’s all very normal and natural and every-day yet simultaneously flighty and fanciful and other-worldy.
He talks about one of his favourite subjects in this Podcast, Oscar Wilde, and paints the sort of glorious metaphor that we love him for. He suggests that our view of Oscar Wilde is similar to the view of the Empire State Building that you get when looking through the rear window of a taxi speeding down Fifth Avenue at night when the lights are all green. The building seems to grow more in stature the further away you get, much like our appreciation of Wilde has increased as the years have passed by. It’s now 108 years since Wilde’s death and in the taxi metaphor we’re probably approaching Washington Square in terms of our perspective of the man.
I can’t even begin to do the thing justice. Subscribe to Stephen Fry’s podcasts and revel in the frippery.