Stephen Fry

In 1995, following a breakdown and suicide attempt, Stephen Fry was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He had no idea what the term meant, never having heard the it before. Tonight, he presents the first of two programmes exploring his condition. There are preview clips here.

When younger, I never really liked Stephen Fry (mainly fear: he can be very intimidating as Melchett). As I grew older, with only a few vague memories of A Bit of Fry and Laurie and those performances in Blackadder, I could never understand why he was so lauded (as Dead Ringers put it, 'Stephen Fry: The stupid man's thinking man.'). Then, a few years ago, on hearing a recording of him discussing religion with Christopher Hitchens (and later, seeing The Hedge Sketch), I became a convert, when at the end of a wonderful hour and a half debate (nee conversation) on the various idiocies of religion, Fry's eloquence, erudition and wit came together in a beautiful summation of Humanism:

“I think it’s fair to say that almost every failure of humanity is the failure of imagination to some extent, the failure to penetrate the minds of others. [There was a line of GK Chesterton’s that] the trouble with atheism, as far as he was concerned, was that the trouble was that when you stopped believing in God you don’t believe in nothing, you believe in anything. Perhaps we do live in a culture where reason’s not glorified … however, I don’t think we should allow religion the trick of remaining that the spiritual and the beautiful and the noble and the altruistic and the morally strong and the virtuous are in any way inventions of religion, or particular or peculiar to religion. It’s certainly true that you could say the Christ who said, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,’ that’s a wonderful thing to have said, and anyone who said that would win a great deal respect and interest, it’s one of the most beautiful phrases ever uttered, but there is no, absolutely no, monopoly on beauty and truth in religion. And I suppose one of the reasons that I am so fond of the Greeks, and one of the reasons that the great radical and poet Shelley wrote his Prometheus Unbound is because he understood that if you were to compare the Genesis myth which had bedevilled our culture, the Western European culture, for a very long time indeed, for two-thousand years, it was essentially a myth in which we should be ashamed of ourselves. God says who told you that you were naked? What possible reason have we to believe that we are naked, or that if we are naked there is something to be ashamed of, that what we are and what we do is something for which we should ever apologise, we should apologise for our dreams, our impulses, our appetites, our drives, our desires? These are not things to apologise for. Our actions sometimes we do apologise for, and we excoriate ourselves for them rightly. But that’s the Genesis myth.

The Greek Myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from Heaven and gave it to his favourite mortal, Man. In other words, the Greeks were saying that we have divine fire, whatever is divine is in us, as Humans. We are as good as the Gods. The Gods are capricious and mean and foolish and stupid and jealous and rapine and all the things that Greek mythology shows that they are. And that’s a much better explanation, it seems to me. And for that the God’s punished Prometheus and chained him to the corpuses, and the vultures chewed away his liver as it everyday regrew as he was immortal, of course … and Shelley quite rightly understood … that that mythological ideal, that the champion of a real humanity and a real Humanism, as we have come to call it, is that we are captains of our soul and masters of our destiny, and that we contain any divine fire that there is, divine fire that is fine and great. It’s perfectly obvious that if there were ever a God, he has lost all possible taste. You've only got to look at - forget the aggression and unpleasantness of the Radical Right or Islamic Hordes to the East - the sheer lack of intelligence and insight and ability to express themselves and infuse others of the priesthood and clerisy here, in this country, and indeed in Europe. God once had Bach and Michelangelo, he had Mozart, and now who does he have? People with ginger whiskers and tinted spectacles who reduce the glories of theology to a kind of 'sharing'. That’s what religion has become, a feeble and anaemic nonsense; because we understood that the fire was within us, it was not in some idol on an alter, whether it was a gold cross, or whether it was a Buddha or anything else … that we have it; the fault is in us, but also the glory is in us, not in our stars. We take credit for what is great about man, and we take blame for what is dreadful about man. We neither grovel nor apoligise at the feet of a God, nor are so infantile as to think that we once had a father as human beings and therefore we must have a divine one too. We need to grow up."

Anyone who saw Fry's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? earlier this year can attest to his aptitude for presenting moving, humourous and informative (worthwhile) television, and this, I'm sure, will be no different. (The series, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, begins tonight on BBC 2 at 9pm, and concludes at the same time next Tuesday. An Mp3 of the debate on religion is available to download here - scroll to the bottom of the page.)