Panning Fry

Well the BBC gave it a news item, and Clue is back. With Stephen Fry in place of the late and much-missed Humph, for the first of this (the 51st!) series. So what was it like?

Not bad - Victoria Wood was a brilliant guest, as she uses enormous wordplay in her act and fitted in perfectly. Uxbridge English dictionary was near-perfect - "Chatelaine" particularly. Oh, and she can sing.

The best for me was the moment when she suddenly and to be honest inadvertently launched into a quick Joyce Grenfell impression. Smashing. I also enjoyed Barry Cryer's "Clement Freud memorial buzz" in Just a Minim.

But the big question of course was did it work without Humph? Well, the script was strong, as good or better than most of those from recent series. All of the panellists did well. But Stephen Fry had an almost impossible job. He had a Humphish script and all he could do was deliver it. It was just so much less funny. As I listened I had a curious double effect: I could imagine, almost hear Humph reading out the same lines and getting the laughs. SF just did not have his delivery, and sounded somewhat out of his comfort zone. We'll see how the other two guest presenters do, but I do feel Clue is now a little bit more ordinary...

This isn't a particularly radical view, I know. Many of the comments on the ISIHAC Comedy Blog have been saying the same.

Fry has also been annoying elsewhere. The Saturday Guardian gave him a column-cum-avertising feature for the latest i-Phone and firmware upgrade. Tiresome in the extreme. He is full of love for these little shiny baubles, but doesn't - to me at least - really show that much understanding. For example, he is a eulogist for the Apple apps, but never mentions that actually their popularity is essentially modelled as an extreme power series. Most of the vast panoply of offerings are used by very few people indeed, if any. Clay Shirky is better on this sort of thing (See "Here Comes Everyone" and his discussion of the activity of Wikipedia editors). Presumably the Guardian only ran the piece because it was by Fry, a Famous Person. And, for me, one who is beginning to come across as a kind of all-pervasive cross between Thora Hird de nos jours and Douglas Adams. Not, to my mind, a particularly workable combination.