Relative values: Stephen Fry (part 1)

I lived in fear of my father until I was about eighteen, fear of the eyebrow and the sniff. In public I had to swallow twice, then cough, and the voice would come out all croaky whenever I tried to speak in his presence. It was very hard to prove myself because he did tend to frown at anything I did with any degree of competence, like learning the entire Guinness Book of Records by heart.

Relative values

 The television used to be in my father’s study, so I'd have to sneak in when he wasn't there. I think he found my addiction annoying because, as a child, he'd had a phenomenal range of interests, like building speedboats and stripping down motorbikes. Although I was an indiscriminate viewer, I did always want to be part of television. I was an insomniac as an adolescent and I spent a lot of time listening to the BBC World Service. I'm sure that's how I came by my rather strange voice.

Mу father is a great problem-solver. Just belore I was about to sit my maths O-level he found out I could barely add up; I simply hadn't grasped the principles. So he set out to solve the problem of my number blindness, and within a week we were doing things that would have been part of the A-level syllabus.

He balled me out for the minor things, like watching too much television and my messy bedroom, but the big things were always a matter for serious talks. To their eternal credit my parents were much more concerned about my happiness and state of mind than whether or not I was embarrassing their friends.

Relative values: Stephen Fry (Part 2)

After I'd left my last school, I pinched a wallet full of credit cards and went ape-shit in about five different counties. The police eventually caught up with me in Swindon. I was given two years' probation, and served a couple of months at a prison called Pucklechurch in Avon. After public school, it was a breeze. Prison turned a corner for me. I enrolled at a sixth form college in Norwich, and went on to sit the Cambridge entrance exam. I won a scholarship.

We do talk and argue all the time when we're together, but now we have quite civilised arguments about the art of science and the science of art.

I do hope he derives some enjoyment from my work. Our relationship is still spiky enough for me not to get many signs that he does. He has always worked phenomenally hard, sometimes even on Christmas Day. While he's not poor, I do feel guilty that the rewards for what I do are so much greater than his, and I'm aware of the absurdity of the recognition for flinging your face around.

It's a splendid marriage, they adore each other, and I've never known them have a cross word. I'd never had to deal with people openly rowing in public. I think sex is terribly stupid, but I now think marriage is actually rather a good idea.

He's rarely given me advice, it's mostly been by example. He is always polite to people, giving them his full attention. Both my parents have a gentleness and fundamental decency which I'm proud of.

Relative values: Alan Fry (Part 1)

I don't think Stephen and I have ever agreed about anything. We've always had a turbulent relationship. I was conscious in his early years of getting in his way because I've always had a big spread of interests; everywhere Stephen looked, there was father telling him how to do it.

When Stephen was small he did virtually nothing except glue himself to the television set while our other children were out and about, doing things. On a fine summer's day he'd draw the curtains and frowst away six inches in front of the black and white screen. As a result he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of films and television from the Sixties.

Relative values

 We were always trying to cajole him into doing things is ordinary little boys did, blissfully unaware that ordinary little boy he was not. When he was about 13 he announced that he wasn't going to marry because it was silly, that he was going to be a writer, and that he'd always have plenty of money. As I was struggling to pay his school fees at the time, I was very cross indeed.

For a variety of reasons he left most of the schools he ever set foot in, which was distressing for his mother and me because we very much wanted him to fulfill whatever it was he had in him. Although we're very different, we both find it difficult to conform; I was never any good at working under people. Stephen found at school that he didn't like being forced into this mould of schoolboy. His mother always had a simple faith in him. that he'd turn out all right in the end; I suppose I didn't really.

In the times when he'd come home from school, we were virtually running a mini-school, in which I taught him maths and physics and a bit of French, and his mother, who is a historian, taught him that.

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.