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As opening questions in celebrity interviews go, it’s a bold one. You can’t imagine Norton, Ross or Winkleman beginning with it. But the latest guest on The Assembly, Stephen Fry, is just settling into his chair when he’s given this as his starter: “You tried to kill yourself a couple of times. Are you happy to be alive now?”
The Assembly, of course, is not a standard chatshow. This is the one where a famous person is interrogated by a group of young adults with neurodivergence or learning disabilities, who are less inhibited by the ordinary protocols of TV interviews. Every question is simultaneously something no conventional interviewer would ever contemplate saying, and something we are immediately interested in seeing the guest react to. Celebs enter that bright, high-windowed room overlooking the Thames with a mix of joy and trepidation, knowing that the artifices and pretensions that usually protect them don’t apply here. “I’ve seen you guys,” says Fry on his way in. “Smiling assassins!”
But, while the prospect of an interview where the guest is asked direct questions – rather than being lobbed softball anecdote prompts – is clearly a relief for viewers, it lifts a weight from the celebrity too, giving them a chance to remind everyone why they are on their pedestal. In the case of Fry in his later career, his talent is as a popular communicator, an explainer of simple but profound ideas, especially around religion and mental health. He readily talks about suicidal ideation, drawing a comparison with how one might feel remembering a broken limb: the pain was extreme, but that moment and that person seem alien to him now.
Many of the questions on The Assembly are jewels in their own right, even before they’ve been answered. “I read that you are bipolar. One of my family has that. How can I help them, please?” is a beautiful thing for one human being to ask another and, again, Fry is equal to it, rehearsing an accessible but effective analogy about bipolar disorder being like a rainstorm raging: “The sun will come out at some point … it’s not their personality, it’s the weather inside them.” In between the two questions on Fry’s darkest moments, he is asked, “Can you help me to meet Céline Dion?”, “How much have you spent on cocaine?” and “Are you a top or a bottom?”, but the bathos of the impertinent inquiries only deepens the pathos of the serious ones.
The rule that the Assembly gang can do whatever they feel extends to some of them not asking anything. So a budding thespian called Luca gets up and performs The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth instead. And he does perform it rather than just reciting, pitching it somewhere between a Shakespeare soliloquy and a dramatic spoken moment from the book of a musical. TV has rarely seen anything like it, and Fry, to his delight, clearly hasn’t ever.
He’s blindsided in a different way by smiling assassin Jacob, who knows exactly what he’s doing when he stands up, brandishing a piece of paper: “You’ve done adverts for Heineken, Alliance & Leicester, Twinings, Pioneer…” There follows a recitation of an absurdly extended list of businesses, not unlike the comic set piece in Fry’s 1991 novel The Liar where the hero, Adrian, shouts random brand names into a microphone in an effort to make a documentary about his Cambridge college unbroadcastable on the BBC. Jacob continues: “Walkers crisps, Marks & Spencer, Honda, Virgin Media, Trebor Extra Strong Mints, After Eight mints …” He has realised this is one of those jokes that is funnier if it goes on for longer than anyone expects. But eventually it ends: “ … Direct Line, EE and Whitbread.” Having earned a growing, rippling laugh by listing every Stephen Fry advertising job he could find, Jacob pauses before delivering the knockout blow. “Is there anything you wouldn’t do for money?”
This plays to happy uproar, not least from Fry himself, who is willingly subjecting himself to a show that slaloms between the remorseless probing of Radio 4’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair and the cheeky skewering celebs used to get from Dame Edna Everage or Mrs Merton.
At the end, Fry is treated to a song, this being the last trick The Assembly has prepared in order to gently dismantle the guest. Nina Simone’s I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free might not be an obvious choice for a comfy white TV personality, but earlier in the encounter Fry has spoken about the fear and trauma that antisemitism still causes him. And, as he recognises the opening bars, there’s a look in his eyes that’s similar to when he was talking about his bipolar disorder. Appearing on The Assembly, though, is a liberating experience. As the song’s tempo picks up, he gets up and dances.
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