Stephen Fry in America. Stephen Fry, His Book, and His Take on California

In the UK Stephen Fry has been famous since his Fry and Laurie days, episodes of which are fortunately available on YouTube. The Laurie there is Hugh Laurie, who’s become a well-known actor in the US as Dr. House. (Yes, he is British. A Cambridge man, like Stephen Fry, part of a close trio of friends that also included Emma Thompson.)

Stephen Fry has since written four novels (The Liar -- reprinted as Revenge: A Novel --, The Hippopotamus, Making History, The Stars' Tennis Balls), a book on poetry (The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within), and two autobiographical books (Moab is My Washpot and The Fry Chronicles), as well as numerous articles. He’s also a well-known face on British TV and has starred in quite a number of films as well. I most recently saw him give a fabulously colorful performance in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. He’s been gaining notoriety all over Europe for his comedy routines and film acting, which also include a wonderful performance in the film Wilde. As reviewers say about such situations, he becomes Oscar Wilde. It’s pretty impressive.

He’s also written and narrated in documentaries, and is outspoken about being a gay man and a manic depressive. He also lends his voice as a narrator in movies and in audio books. He reads all the Harry Potter books, for instance, and was the voice in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

As he’s also a fan of computers and the Internet from the days when there was no such thing as the World Wide Web, and he got drawn to Twitter, where he has millions of followers and, as such, wields quite a bit of influence raising awareness of various causes he believes in.

To learn more about Stephen Fry, follow him on Twitter, I guess, watch him on YouTube, and read his books. I wish the articles he contributed over decades to newspapers and magazines were available somewhere, too. He’s a fun man with a fine intellect and a sense of humor covering a whole range from dry to slapstick.

Now that you know a bit about Stephen Fry, here’s what he has to say about the US in his book Stephen Fry in America.

First of all, he loves America. He was nearly born there when his father was offered a job at Princeton University in the 1950s. (He says as much in the Introduction to this book.) So this long exploratory travel of the US in order to film a documentary was a long time coming. Stephen has been fancying himself as American, too, ever since he was ten. In this book he explores both his Britishness and perceived notions of what the British think Americans are like. It makes for an interesting read. He doesn’t hesitate to be critical of both countries, as well as fascinated by many positive aspects in both.

Here are some of Stephen Fry’s comments about various states in the US. I hope you do read the book. No review, however shaped, can do the writing justice, with all of Stephen Fry’s humor and his insights into British English and American English differences. In fact, it’s quite a field trip for anyone interested in these two varieties of the English language. Also, Stephen Fry in America is a wonderful travelogue. Not very detailed, as he has fifty states to cover, but quite revealing of nice things to visit and experience in each state.

As I said, I won’t be writing about all fifty states, because I did attempt it once and it made for a poor article. Instead, I’ll write about one or two-three states per article. And no, I won’t cover the whole book, as I don't want to detract interest from Stephen Fry’s wonderful American travelogue.

That said, read on about Stephen Fry in California.

Stephen Fry starts off the California mini-chapter listing some of the celebrities, from Nixon and Schwarzenegger to Carlos Santana and Tupac Shakur, and then goes on to give some most amazing facts. Did you know that only eight countries worldwide have a stronger economy (as reflected in the GDP numbers) than California?

He’s in love with San Francisco, and writes, “I do not share the fashionable disdain for Los Angeles expressed by so many Britons, but love LA as I do, San Francisco is, to my mind, about as perfect a town as there can be.” He adds, in typical fashion, “If you can overlook, that is, its habit of being destroyed by earthquakes every two hundred years.”

He meets in San Francisco with Jonathan Paul Ive. Doesn’t ring a bell? You may have seen him in the recent movie on Steve Jobs. “Jony Ive” is the famous designer of the Apple iMac, the one who came up with the transparent blue box idea when Steve Job was called back to run Apple in 1996. Jony Ive went on to design/supervise the design of the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, iPad Mini, and iOS 7. As Steve Jobs said, “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

After his cherished meeting with Jony Ive, Stephen Fry goes on to visit Napa Valley and a shooting parlor in Ukiah (haiku in reverse, he observes, upon which he learns that the town actually hosts an annual haiku festival). He also rides along in Mendocino County with a small town’s sheriff, whereby he learns about cannabis farming and even gets to watch the police descend on a suspect.

Even though he covers California in only a few pages, there's more, of course, in the book, and not just fact-wise but also comment-wise.

Here's the first of two articles about Stephen Fry's TV documentary Stephen Fry in America. It's part travelogue and part social commentary, and all very interesting. It's also about Stephen Fry in parts, of course, as this is not just some run-of-the-mill documentary with the filmmaker disappearing behind all sorts of major tourist attractions.

My first article about the 6-part BBC series covers the first three episodes. Here are the states he covers in this first half of his America documentary.

Episode 1 (New World / New England and the East Coast): Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New York State, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, D.C.

Episode 2 (Deep South / South East and Florida): Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida

Episode 3 (Mississippi / The Deep South and the Great Lakes): Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota

Stephen Fry in America: The First Three Episodes of the Six-Part BBC Series