Relative values: Alan Fry (part 2)

He has a phenomenal memory, just staggering. Also, everything he does is highly original and unexpected. After we'd had one almighty row about something terribly important, like the state of his room, I noticed the house seemed oddly silent and it soon became apparent that Stephen was no longer there. At about ten o'clock that evening, we had a call from the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital saying they had a young man they believed was my son, suffering from loss of memory! He'd walked to Norwich, about ten miles, spent the afternoon watching colour television in the Royal Hotel, and then at about six o'clock, wandered into the casualty department of this hospital, holding his head and saying: ‘I don't know who I am.' I arrived there to find this huge for m on a trolley, overlapping at either end, moaning gently, and claiming not to know who I was.

It's a big and complex mind, and it would diminish my son to say that I understood him. He's not secretive exactly, but he is strangely private. One sees that paradox in a lot of people who tramp the boards; out of the limelight they tend to be private and shy. We don't agree about alternative comedy; I like my comedy to be bland and untroubling, just to sit there and chuckle. But we both adore John Cleese. I roll about at Fowlty Towers and Michael Frayn's play Noises Off made my ribs ache.

I sometimes feel like saying to him, ‘Stop doing this pappy and ephemeral stuff on the box and get down to some serious writing’, but it's not really any of my business. It's just that I feel he spends a lot of energy doing things that aren't worthy of him.

At an early age one puts ones father on a pedestal; it's not until much later on that one discovers what feet of clay the old fellow really has. Stephen was perhaps a little slower in his disillusionment than he ought to have been. I'm sure if I were attacked he’d be a tiger unleashed in my defence and vice versa. Basically, he's very generous and kind Everybody likes him.