There are few, if any, inhabitants of the world of showbusiness whose net has been cast wider in the quest for creative fulfilment than Stephen Fry. Over the decades this iconic Cambridge colossus has brought his effortless charm, intellect and classical, aristocratic Englishness to just about every arena possible: writer, actor, comedian and presenter, TV, film, stage and books, fiction and non-fiction, comedy, drama, documentaries, panel shows, memoirs and novels.

Nothing, such a polymath essays, should come as a complete surprise, and yet his latest endeavour, hosting both the British and Australian versions of long-running American quiz show Jeopardy!, doesn’t seem an obvious fit. He spent many years asking tricky questions on QI, but that was in the company of his fellow comedy professionals, and a format attuned to his particular skills: jolly conversation and storytelling. But Fry overseeing the quickfire trivia barrage of Jeopardy!? Bantering with the general public rather than showbiz elite? How did such a thing come about?

Loading

“It’s a very good question,” Fry muses, “and the answer shows the disorganised state of my mind and ambitions, really – that things just happen in my life without any planning or any consideration.” As the legend goes, Fry was having a friendly dinner with his American agent, and the matter of their mutual love of Jeopardy !– and the startling (to the agent) fact that Britain didn’t have the show, came up.

“Two weeks later, he calls up,” Fry goes on, “and says, ‘Well, British TV’s very excited about the idea of your doing Jeopardy!’. I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yeah, they love the idea of your hosting it.’ I said, ‘But I never said that.’ He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to do it?’ And I thought, ‘Well give me a chance, I’ll have a think.’ So I had a chat and asked my husband what he thought, and he said, ‘Well, we do like it ...’ The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be fun.”

The story demonstrates a few things about Stephen Fry. Firstly, that he is a natural storyteller, aided by that famous voice and a manner that simultaneously exudes oratorial confidence and friendly warmth, seemingly taking immense joy in the art of conversation. Secondly, that for all his achievements, his approach to his career has never been one of precise planning or long-term thinking. Could that be the secret to the infinite variety of his back catalogue?

There are a lot of really smart people out there who ... are not members of anything that anyone can sneeringly call ‘an elite’.

Stephen Fry

“The pompous or life coach answer might be that I’ve always been fortunate enough to think of myself as, if I can put it this way, as a verb, not a noun. I haven’t thought of myself as an actor or a writer, a documentarian or whatever, but just this fellow who does things. I just love doing things.” There are some things, of course, he doesn’t do. He wouldn’t take a role in a musical for example – “I would just have to say, look, I can’t sing. It would be embarrassing.” But by way of an impressive Clint Eastwood impression – “A man’s gotta know his limitations” – Fry opines that it’s by knowing what you can’t do that you allow yourself to embrace the vast possibilities of what you can. “It’s by knowing your limitations that you are wide and free. When you understand your limitations, you realise the huge area of freedom that you have, because it gives you a kind of confidence to believe in the things that you are not limited to.”

The idea of Stephen Fry as verb, not noun, leads this interviewer to musing that his surname is already a verb, and that perhaps future dictionaries will include a second definition alongside the standard one: “Fry, verb: to enjoy a career of wide and fulfilling diversity”.