Master intellect, brilliant wordsmith and prolific tweeter Stephen Fry, finally made it back to Australia after several decades of absence. Here for his show Qi, where contestants get points for answers that are ‘quite interesting’, and lose points for stating the bleeding obvious, I was left pondering how he’ll remember this recent Aussie sojourn.
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© The Ponder Room
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While clearly ”deeelight-ed’ with the progress we’ve made in his absence, he was far less impressed when the AV equipment in his second Perth Burswood show refused to play ball. Nonetheless Fry carried on with professional aplomb, and as a result the audience was left satiated, and with a far greater understanding of what it takes to put the hit show to air.
This was thanks in part to the cheeky, childlike nature of Alan Davies. It was obvious that these two have a great relationship. Plagued with pneumonia, Alan delighted in incessantly pushing Fry’s buttons. It was like watching a schoolboy constantly poking a wise old bulldog with a stick, until the dog simply sighed and begrudgingly wandered off to sit elsewhere. Fry’s strategy oscillated between humouring and ignoring Alan.
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© The Ponder Room [Peter Rowsthorn Alan Davies, Stephen Fry, Myf Warhurst , Jono Coleman]
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It would appear that Fry adopted a similar strategy when his long Qantas flight home was diverted to Dubai… he simply tweeted that ‘an engine had decided not to play.’
On hearing this I pondered….
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With Fry joking about there being ‘another queen in town’, and the impact the Royal Family has on ‘normally sane’ people, I pondered whether the AV problem was actually due to the show’s content intermittently triggering a CHOGM security alert. For some reason I had visions of an over zealous CHOGM security expert crouched in a small windowless room in the bowels of the West Australian Police Department. A bank of twenty tiny TV screens before him, every time Fry made disparaging comments about the Royal Family, or the word ‘queen’ was uttered on stage, he’d push the red button to his left, thereby sending an electric shock directly into the seat and consequently the left buttocks of the AV technician working on Qi.
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If so, was the same technology employed to further track Fry down and eventually pinpoint him in the pointy end of the Qantas plane. Knowing about the recent Qantas problems, the Royal Family seized an opportunity for anonymous revenge…. ‘one thinks Mr Fry may benefit from a stop over in Dubai Phil.’ Perhaps this also explains why the Queen was smiling so much as she left Perth.
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Will this go down as Fry’s technology horribolous tour? At least he will have a ‘quite interesting’ tale to add to future stand up routines.
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Oh to have his patience.
