Richard's Online Journal

[12/10/08] Stephen Fry In America

I just switched off the first part of this, after almost an hour of staring in bemusement at the screen. What happened? I’m a big fan of Fry’s work in pretty much every form. QI is one of my favourite shows, I enjoy his books, can’t wait for the podgrams, devour the blog posts, loved the recent documentaries, and I’ll tune in for a few minutes of next week’s episode to see if there’s some drastic improvement, but right now, I’ve got to call this offering one of the most superficial, vapid, poorly paced programs I’ve seen in a long, long time. And I’ve seen the whole second series of Hex.

They watch TV in America! DJs emcee in America! Samples are free in America! I’ve had a pee in America!

First of all, if you’re going to do a travelogue, you really need to spend more than a few minutes per state. In almost an hour, we barely got more than ‘Ben and Jerry is in Vermont, Maine has lobsters, New York is also a state’. Fry pokes his nose into each, a suitably media-friendly employee delivers a few lines, and then it’s off off and away to the next state with all the ceremony of making a mark on a list.

The storyline connecting these vignettes, at least in this opening episode, is more or less non-existent - Fry’s question of what he’d have been like as an American barely lasting past the intro, never mind being the focus. There’s no rhyme or reason behind what the cameras are aimed at in each state, whether it’s a submarine or a rich family’s summer lodge, save what caught either the editor or researchers’ attention. That leads to some… oddness, notably the scene where Fry specifically asks a deer hunter not to shoot at deer while he’s around, claiming that he doesn’t want to see one being killed. Ignoring the sheer pointlessness of hooking up with a hunter in the first place, fair enough, I’d feel the same in that situation.

Except that barely ten minutes earlier in TV-Time, he was personally throwing live lobsters into a boiling pot. Medic! Check the editor’s pulse!

Individual segments don’t fare any better. Take the Ben and Jerry’s bit, where Fry gets to make his own ice-cream. The fact that ice-cream is cold hardly seems like a titbit worthy of the next series of QI, does it? Where are the questions about… oh, I don’t know… the history of the company? The role of ice-cream in American culture, as mentioned in the segment’s introduction? The loss or not of its individuality after Unilever sank its fangs in there? Why are we watching an interview with some random oik instead of having Fry chew the fat with Ben and Jerry themselves? The Fairtrade associations of their banana ice-cream? The response to Free Cone Day? The origins of those bizarre flavours that made their name and the ones that didn’t make it?

Forget it. All we learn from this segment is that Stephen Fry likes walnuts.

EDIT: And toffee.

The worst bits are the historical snippets. There’s one that works really well, as he interviews a pastor who delivers some very funny bits on the Pilgrims and dips a little into the American mindset, but it’s too damn short, and stands alone. Later, we’re stuck with a version of the Salem Witch Trials that number-drops the 150 accused and nineteen hangings, but steers clear of the fascinating history of it all in favour of nipping into a shop for a chat with a self-proclaimed witch in truly horrifying eyewear, and then off to a Halloween (Samhain) party that Fry skips out on in favour of bed.

And that’s all we really get on Salem, and indeed, Massachusetts itself. No facts, no opinion, nothing to make the segment even remotely stand out of the crowd. Just for starters, I can’t remember a recent documentary that talked about witchcake, or the judges in the case being specifically advised that it was better for ten witches to escape ‘justice’ than for one innocent person to be condemned.

Isn’t that more interesting than some silly people arsing about in fancy dress?

“Madame, your glasses fill me with scorn and pity and a mild quivering of the bowels. I do apologise. Please, continue your mad ramblings.”

The Boston Tea Party fares no better, dropping ‘no taxation without representation’, but nothing about the actual political situation (Britain trying to weasel its way into getting the colonists to accept that it had a right to tax them, along with details of what the money was being used for, or the lack of representation in the UK at that time), fun trivia like at least one of the Founding Fathers - Benjamin Franklin, I believe - saying the lost money should be repaid, or anything else you won’t already know.

Instead, he goes to a tea party.

Christ.

There’s not only no attempt to dig deeper into things or ask questions that might actually shed light on something other than the media-friendly facade the interview subjects are trying to push, it’s actively avoided. Mitt Romney fielding softball questions is hardly indicative of the political process, especially when Fry comes across as deeply smitten by his ability to push a charming facade and oblivious to being utterly blanked the split-second Romney realises that he’s irrelevant to his campaign stop. A trip to a clubhouse full of gangsters is wasted on namedropping Robert de Niro and explaining a con so phenomenally old, you could probably cut its head off and steal its power via the Quickening. Every stone is left unturned in the search for information, with Fry’s questions so spectacularly softball and facile, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that his interviewees got to write them themselves in exchange for allowing the film crew into their world. Jon Stewart does harsher interviews than this.

Okay, there’s one possible exception involving the Kennedy family. But it doesn’t get much in the way of an answer, so no harm done, eh?

“If I offended you, take solace that one of my legs will soon be snapping like a dry twig. Quite badly. Bones and everything.”

I expect more than this, not just from Stephen Fry himself, one of Britain’s great wits and founts of information, but from the people editing this stuff together, pacing it out, and serving it up. Nothing about this series, at least in its first episode, comes close to justifying itself. There isn’t the scope of Palin’s adventures, or the rather less open-minded journeys of someone like Paul Merton (in India/China), the whimsy of Dave Gorman (Unchained America) the wackiness of Louis Theroux, or the off-beat stuff done by Penn and Teller (Magical Mystery Tour).

Instead, it’s generic, patronisingly simple, and Fry is utterly superfluous in his role as host. It may as well be anyone offering these observations and asking these questions. Hell, it’d probably be better, because then there wouldn’t be so much frustration due to them never bloody being the right ones!

Whether it’s just that they weren’t asked, or ended up on the cutting room floor, I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s the latter, because it’s rare that I see a Stephen Fry anything I don’t enjoy. I’d be interested to see the tie-in book, if only to see if it moves away from this viewers-are-morons stuff in favour of something with Fry’s usual wit and sense of investigative interest… something more akin to Bill Bryson’s amiable ramblings than a program so driven by the research team, they may as well just get in front of the camera and present the damn thing themselves.

Definite thumbs down. Down what, I leave to the imagination.

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