Stephen Fry's ability to entertain is matched by his power to irritate. Photo / AP
Oh Stephen, what have you done? Your latest memoir - yes, this is his third one and he's not long turned 57 -really is a prosy, slim and forgettable load of fluff.
The first of his autobiographies, 1997's Moab Is My Washpot, was a genuinely moving, terrifically charming journey through
his childhood, ending with his imprisonment for fraud at 17 and his triumphant and redemptive admission to Cambridge two years later. The next, The Fry Chronicles, published just four years ago, was an entertaining enough survey of his university years and early career. This, of course, is the Cocaine Memoir.
The Fry Chronicles ended with him hoovering up his first line of the A-class drug. This is what happens next. Unfortunately, what happens next is a lot of name-dropping, a tiresome amount of hobnobbery at the Groucho Club - the place to be seen in 90s London, darling - and endless and dull banging on about his work with or without Hugh Laurie.
There is little insight into his writing process or relationship with Laurie, but then there is little insight into much at all: his years of celibacy, the entertainment biz or why he found himself such a terrible powder hound. From what I know of the period he covers here, late-80s to mid-90s, London was lost in a blizzard of cocaine, so it is perhaps not surprising that Fry, a star-about-town, in his 30s at the time, did his best to hoover up as much as he could. But really I'm none the wiser after nearly 400 pages about why it all went to his head, as it were.
His work rate back then was genuinely amazing given he was pie-eyed so often: radio plays, TV series, journalism, books and films. But it becomes just a passing parade and a drab one.
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