Idea IS the format

We go back twenty years, Fry and I. Blackadder II was by far the funniest thing on television when I was a kid, and A Bit of Fry and Laurie the perfect accompaniment to pubescence and public school. Then came a movie called Peter’s Friends (and not much of a movie, as I vaguely recall), and later Wilde, a part Fry was surely borne to play, and of course that time when he popped off to Belgium after critical mauling in London’s West End.  (I always rather liked him for that, even though he took some flak at the time.)

(Steve Forrest for The New York Times)

Later I enjoyed reading The Liar, not so long after I met Emma, and less so Making History, given to me by my mother.  I’ve watched him present a hell of a good Bafta ceremony, and I think we can all agree that there probably isn’t a man alive better equipped to present a show as meanderingly inconsequential and spontaneously brilliant as QI.

Stephen Fry in America is the latest installment in Fry’s polymathic progress.  I watched the first in the series this evening, in which he travels from the lobster pots of New Hampshire and ice cream parlours of Vermont through the idyllic wilds of New York State, via a Boston tea party and some Washington stand-up, all the way to the wise-guys and blackjack tables of the Big Apple itself.

It was a relief to find Fry so softly spoken throughout, avoiding any of the sneering superiority we Britons are often prone to in dealing with our cousins in the west.  He conducted himself instead with an air of benevolent curiosity, judging those he encountered and their way of life within a frame of reference entirely of his own construction.

I might have missed the programme entirely, if not for another recent development in the life and times of Fry.  Some time on Thursday I noticed that he was on Twitter, with a couple of hundred followers.  Within twenty four hours his following had increased by a factor of ten, as word spread that the man micro-blogging could have been invented for was now extending his already formidable online adventures to encompass this new form.

Fry’s arrival on Twitter happily coincided with his departure for Kenya, presumably as part of a new episode in his well-documented travels.  Anyone questioning the authenticity of his claim to being the real Stephen Fry need only sample the following soundbytes to set their mind at ease:

What you realise, once you start to track the various tendrils of ’stephenfry 2.0′ is that he is a bona fide geek, more than capable of applying that formidable mind to technology just a readily as to areas of the arts with which he is more commonly associated.

Indeed, in a way that is increasingly close to my heart, he has become incredibly adept at combining the two, exploring the potential of new tech as a medium for creativity and community, especially when used in ways for which it was not necessarily originally intended.

Fry should be a fine advertisement for Twitter, and Twitter a fine advertisement for him.  In a medium in which humour, substance and succinctness are a triumvirate of ruling monarchs, expect him to be a most favoured courtier.