It’s my pleasure to announce my first podcast entitled Stephen Fry窶冱 PODGRAMS, a new series with the first twenty-five minute Podgram (podcast) disclosing the stories behind my working life of the past two years and journeying through the trials and tribulations of breaking my arm whilst filming on the Amazon river in January.
Created by me and the team behind the official website The Adventures of Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry窶冱 PODGRAMS launches with the first episode BROKEN ARM on Wednesday 20th February.
In this podgram I discuss the
Thank you very much admin people for creating this space for us to comment. Very decent of you. We DID start to comment at the end of the previous blessay but we were a little uncomfortable doing that and, as well trained small animals (speak for yourself Susan!) we would prefer to play in the right pen. Well, I don’t care where I play really but I respect the others’ sensibilities here.
Thank you to rademisto for helping a couple of us to know how to see the visuals that went with the ‘cast.
From Andrew, site producer – Comments are welcome here as ever. If you’d like to share your expanded views on the podgram, why not check out the Stephen Fry Forum? It’s a terrific online community to share like-minded thoughts with others. Of course, comments are and always will be welcome here. We’ll also see what we can do about getting an MP3 version of the podgram. All the best, Andrew
I saw the M4A container and was about to throw my eyes to the heavens in despair at your Apple-centricity. I am pleased to report, however, that it downloads and plays fine on the N95.
…apart from the lack of artwork, that is
Oh yes, this would be great but is it ok to comment here?
Hm and Neil about the M4 I had the same thought
Since it’s just speech, I converted it to an 56kps MP3, which is about 1/3 the size of the original M4A, and threw in the above art file for good measure. A bit annoying nonetheless: I subscribe to about 15 podcasts and this is the only non-MP3 feed.
Come to that, you could just view/listen on a desktop using Quicktime Player, but that kinda defeats the object. A quick, simple download direct to a mobile device with no mucking about is what I love about podcasting.
There was actually an interesting discussion on The Register about formats, following the announcement that Play.com are now offering drm-free downloads in MP3 format. I was pleasantly surprised that the people clamouring for AAC+++ and FLAC formats were largely shot down in flames. With mass storage getting cheaper it seems daft to argue over the odd megabyte, and only about three people in the country or liars can tell the difference between a high-bitrate lossy format and lossless. Bandwidth, of course, is a bit of an issue with Apple due to the iPhone’s lack of 3G, but then I tend to download podcasts at home over the WiFi/broadband anyway, which iPhone owners can also do. The point is that there are a lot of players out there that can play MP3s. Using the latest, bleeding-edge formats that only work on a few players will surely become subject to the law of diminishing returns sooner or later.
Excellent news. Of course myself and the poster Ramone47 are going to take the glory for Stephen’s podcast as we suggested the very same thing back in October ’07.
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I keep misreading this as “Stephen Fry’s POGROMS”.
[...] programledaren och macfanatikern Stephen Fry har i dag premiﾃδ､r fﾃδｶr sin podcast, “Stephen Fryﾃ｢竄ｬ邃｢s PODGRAMS”. Den ﾃδ･ker rakt in i [...]
Neil and Robertas, I had the opposite reaction
loving all things Apple as I do *she says as she smirks at the Apple wallpaper on her work PC*
Andrew, thanks for helping Stephen set this up. The Podcast was great, except that bit about the radial nerve. That STILL makes me shudder…
Hurrah and huzzah.
good show…this actually made my fat little day.
Though….think the broken arm has given you a bit of an ”erm” and an ”um”.
But an ”erm” and ”um” from that sultry voice is like a little ball of orgasms.
ho ho ho,. too rude? too bad. Use your rhino skin to oversome the embarassment.
Tssss Canis a friend of mine just got a brand new iPod touch and I can understand the fascination, although it is a bit worrying to me that I have started to find shiny new gadgets appealing… I never thought I’d be that sort
Bumbler – about the erms and ums I thought the recording started to skip (you know like vinyl record, people born in the 70s will know what I mean
And Zazou I dont care who takes the credit, as long as podcasts keep coming and kudos to you boys
And Susan to continue our conversation from the other post, your parting advice did make me giggle I have to say, dont sit on any strange toilet seats I say thats some good advice…
And I completely understand what you are saying, but as someone who is behaving like live-to-work sort lately and who has been typing away at all hours of the night with a pounding headache due to blocked nose I’m afraid I’m dishing advice because I refuse to take it myself… if that makes any sense 
If I had one resolution this year it was to find that elusive life-work balance and so far I have been failing miserably… ah well I hope Mr. Fry manages his time better then I do, especially if he has surgery coming up.
It was lovely to listen to this podcast over my morning coffee. Thanks for letting us know how you are, and I do hope you make a speedy recovery. (For me there are few things worse than being ill or physically impaired; it’s the ultimate personal inconvenience.)
EEK!
So Chuffed Could Orgasm!
And um, And um, And um, also pleased with the Fact that I Am Probabley Youngest Subscriber! XD
Oh how I do love podcasts. Especially as they sync so easily with my MacBook and iPod. And there are so many worthy pod castings to listen to, these days.
I was struck by how my mind and memory decided to suggest to me that Mr Fry’s podulating recalled echoes of John Peel, with his genuine and unaffected manner of delivery over the airwaves. I was always a fan of John so it would be lovely to hear a similarly engaging audio broadcast, especially by the fascinating and lovely Mr Fry.
BTW, I should say thank you to Susan P. who mentioned me above as having given a wee bit of guidance for the artwork. It is always nice to receive a thank you, however small the task one has carried out!!
It’s so lovely of you to have made this podcast despite the pain and stress you must be going through. I wish you all the best with your recovery and hope you don’t worry too much about letting other people down through taking time off to recover. Worry about yourself you need to get better.
Yay! This is the first podcast I’ve ever felt the need to actually subscribe to…
Good luck with the specialist tomorrow, and do make sure you get a doctor’s note before you brave airport security. I know from a friend who has a plate in her arm that they can be a real PITA when the metal detector goes nuts and you try to explain why.
Stephen, don’t apologize for complaining about your surgery/ghastly ordeal because you think an arm break isn’t a big deal. I hate when people say “oh, but that’s just a minor surgery…” that is such bollocks! Every surgery is a major surgery as everyones body reacts in a different way to surgery and recovery. Don’t be so hard on yourself!
P.s. I was on the elliptical listening to your podgram when you said “this would be a perfect thing to listen to when getting some exercise.” Indeed it was, the only thing that kept me going on that machine!
I used to generally listen to Just a Minute (some episodes of which feature Stephen) when in the gym…
“Yay! This is the first podcast Iﾃ｢竄ｬ邃｢ve ever felt the need to actually subscribe toﾃ｢竄ｬﾂｦ”
Dare I say …. Me too!
Which is odd, since I am a confirmed technophile. Podcasts just don’t do it for me. Certainly not in the orgasm sense }:-) But for Mr. Fry, I can at least say I am happy to open my ears.
Oh – and please let me reiterate.
Ouch!
Well, so much for promoting open source OS, Stephen. Being a Firefox user with Ubuntu, I can’t open the link. The usual “copy link location” to VCL doesn’t work either.
Here is my experience with this podcast’s tussle with Ubuntu.
Subscribed to feed with Rhythmbox, episode downloads fully then status changes to Failed.
Noticed that its an m4a, open file with Totem. Plays fine except the slideshow pictures are garbled rubbish. I’ve seen this before – possible something to do with a GStreamer bug triggered by some non-standard width and height.
Opened with MPlayer, video displays with an aspect ratio of 387691:1. Manually resize video and start watching. Eventually give up when I realise that blinking too rapidly makes the playback skip back to the start. And MPlayer doesn’t allow me to seek.
Back to Totem, bugger the slideshow.
Just: Woohoo! Podcasts! I shall listen to it as soon as it finishes downloading.
And manatees are adorable. I always thought their tails were funny-looking too. Hehe.
[...] of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway). If you’re doing some sort of exercise regime any doctor will say a brisk walk of 22 minutes is… …we live in the past or in the future; we are continually expecting the coming of some [...]
Sorry all. I digress…
This is another subject entirely, but I am sooooo relieved, I had to write.
Stephen, yesterday Wikipedia killed you. No fooling- I have a hard copy! It says you died yesterday. Presumably from complications due to your shattered arm?!
I was devestated, but today they brought you back. You can officially say that you’re bigger than the Beatles now as you rose from the dead in 1 day and Lennon is yet to make an appearance…
Just don’t do that to me again!
So much for the first one…
Again, sorry all. I digress.
This has nothing to do with this blog, but I am so relieved that I must write.
Stephen- yesterday Wikipedia killed you. No fooling- I have a hard copy. They said you died yesterday, presumably from complications due to your broken arm?!! Anyway, I was devestated. However, today they brought you back. You can now officially say that you’re biggere than the Beatles as you rose from the dead in ONE day and we have yet to hear from Lennon…
Just don’t do that to me again!
Well, after reading some comments I am glad and blessed that I could just click and listen and didn’t need to fret as I can do.
rademisto – I am a great follower of old fashioned courtesy.
I heard the suggestion about exercise but I can’t do walking exercise per se but I do swim. I can’t recall if there are underwater sound units available to the general public. I wouldn’t use one but it’s intriguing to consider.
robertas.. the admonition to wear clean underwear, take a clean hankie and not sit on strange toilet seats came from my mother – and I dare say came from a generation of mothers. I’ll never forget having gone to a party in my teens and the toilet paper running out. The family holding the party wound up supplying newsprint and of course after using this I had black stains on my underwear. What a grilling!! I received from my mother. Heaven forfend what I must have been up to but the newsprint explanation just didn’t sound kosher to her! I still laugh when I think about it.
Now, back to the animal world. On the other blessay commentary section I spoke of my current interaction with a magpie. It fascinates me how quickly they learn with such a tiny brain – and when I mean learn, he appears to understand not to step over the balcony edging just from me having held my arm out pointing and saying a stern “No’. Interacting with flora and fauna helps me make certain sense of my world. I feel its grounding. But I look at him fluffed up and I consider the colours that emerge from him and the fashions. I can just see a designer dress in his overlapping colours of black and white. He is waterproofed also. He copes way better in the rain than I do!
I think so many movies and creative works in the sciences remind us that what we have on the earth is really what we need: so inspiring. The amazonian plants that are natural medicines; the insect shapes that have become a frightening shape in a sci-fi film and so on.
It will be interesting to hear more of Stephen’s exploration of man-made habitats also as he wends his way through the US.
To those having trouble playing this file on non Mac platforms…
In Ubuntu with Firefox I right click on the link, “select save Link as” and download.
VLC plays *.m4a files just fine.
tc
Stephen Fry is Podcasting!…
Now, normally I hate podcasts, but this will clearly be an exception…….
For those of us who are a) luddites and b) trapped in the horrible world of PC/Windows, does anyone know of an easy way to convert this to mp3 so I can finally listen to Mr Fry’s adventures with the broken arm?
Chocolate internets to anyone who can help me
Hello Mr Fry
I didn’t know you were so close to me when you broke your arm… hope you are much much better now! Wonderful to have this Podcast, it’s a pleasure to hear such beautiful voice with such interesting words! I’m really enjoying that!!! Hope to hear (and read, of course) much more from you!
Paulo A. Bueno
hey there! weighing in on the can’t download/listen problem in ubuntu . . . i run debian etch & have never seen an ipod or listened to a podcast – had no idea what they were or what to do. i think that ubuntu is debian with a skin (?) or gui interface (?) on it? so this may work for you: i went to
http://packages.debian.org/, searched for podcast, & found hpodder:
http://packages.debian.org/etch/hpodder
after downloading & installing it (however you do that in ubuntu) you open a terminal & type: hpodder add “url” hit enter & it will create a new dir & download the podgram, as well as subscribe you to it & also keep track of it. next podgram, just open a terminal & type in hpodder & it will get the new one automatically. then i used mplayer to play it & both the audio & video worked just fine! (there may be a gui podcatcher on the list, which you may prefer . . .)
that is, mr. fry, i assume they do – what with all of the above i’ve gotten to listen only to a couple of minutes of it – i am very excited abt the podcasts & look forward to many more!
Thank you for providing me the most wonderful distraction from this essay I’m being forced to write on the most-depressing novel The Well of Loneliness. You are the absolute best!!
Enjoyed it thoroughly after some headache re:converting into MP3. A more perfect person for podcasting I can’t name. It’s a gorgeously fitting medium.
Hope your arm knits back together with all due haste.
Hope that when you make it to Iowa for your documentary that you’re not bored silly because there’s a fat lot of nothing going on here. Reading the back of a can of spam is more exciting. Thanks for the podcast…you’ve made my night. Feel better soon!
Aside from the obvious physical pain and mental frustration at a physical handicap, I think breaking one’s arm falling off a boat in the Amazon makes a much more exciting story than “I broke my ankle because I stepped down funny after I skipped a 3 inch high step”. (It’s really an awful story, particularly when you’re asked to stand up in class and tell people what you did during the summer.)
I *love* the podcast.
(For pc users like me, the easiest, no-fuss method to listen to the podcast is to listen to it with VLC player.)
excantare: the pointlessly large M4A file can be transcoded to a format like MP3 with an app like dbpoweramp. I could make an argument that the large M4A file is a waste of bandwidth and thus energy, since it could be provided as a much smaller file.
Mike: in (slight) defence of the M4A format… M4A isn’t a ‘format’ in the sense of a codec, but is a ‘container’. I suspect the reason for the large file size is the attached photos (which those of us with non-Apple mobile devices can’t see anyway): the audio track is probably (I haven’t looked) an AAC+ or something like that, and will actually be slightly smaller than the equivalent MP3. I’m with you that simple MP3 is a better format for audio podcasting because more people can do more things with it (I can stream it around my house using uPNP, for example), but you can’t reallly claim that it has smaller file sizes.
And for people asking about conversion… I use Easy CD-DA and love it; it will convert just about anything to just about anything. However, I should emphasise that you can view the M4A, with accompanying photos, on a PC, using Quicktime Player.
Loving the podcast. I’ve only listenend one podcast before and that was Eddie Izzard visiting the EU headquarters, I think it was. So far, so good.
I agree with smac8129 but whoa. Busy man, you are. I can’t comprehend how you do all this!
Best of wishes and be well!
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I think the forum would be a better place for this comment, but it doesn’t want to let me in. I had assumed it was the same login as the blog comments but doesn’t seem to be.
Anyway… I finally got around to listening to the podcast and thoroughly enjoyed it, thank you very much. I found your honesty and openness talking about your injury very touching, and wish you all the best for a speedy recovery.
However, the point I’d like to pick up on is your script for Peter Jackson, and the touchy subject of Guy Gibson’s incredibly un-PC black labrador. I really can’t wait for the film to see how you’ve tackled this one, and would like a soap-opera-type teaser released to the tabloids, please. The last time I saw the 1954 film, all scenes involving Gibson interacting with or calling the dog had been edited out, which led to an impression that one was watching a French surrealist film from the 1970s, with a black labrador occasionally crossing the screen for no apparent reason. The scene where the unfortunate mutt was knocked down and killed a few hours before the raid was so badly cut that they should really have omitted the whole thing.
I’m also keen to see how much of the story of 617 squadron is covered. Armchair historians like myself now believe that the work they did later on with the Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs was far more important than the dams raid.
Again, thanks for the podcast, but as you can probably tell, I’m very keen to know about your Dambusters script.
(BTW, italics went screwy on my above post about Quicktime: sounds as if I’m accusing anybody that didn’t know this of being thick. Apologies.)
Neil:
The issue with Gibson’s dog reminds me of J.R. Ackerley’s wonderful memoir “My Dog Tulip” where the dog’s name was really Queenie…
Re M4A, I really didn’t want to get into the whole codec/container thing as most readers here wouldn’t get the distinction … and so I just said “file”. That said, I made it into a 56K MP3 file and added back a pic, and the result was still under 9MB. With all the pics it should still come in at under 10MB. I think the original is at 128kps which is really unnecessary for human speech, even with SF’s musical voice.
I try to avoid Quicktime Player because it falls into that “whoreware” category with RealPlayer that spams you for upgrades all the time, and because Apple for a period forcibly bundled it with iTunes, and that in turn with pointless services loaded to handle iPods even if you didn’t have one. It’s as if Apple decided that if it had to have products living in a Windows residence, they should be as ill-mannered as possible.
…as ill-mannered as possible…
hehe… now that I can’t argue with.
People can, and do, argue about codecs and containers until the cows come home. Probably better to argue about cows until the codecs come home.
Thanks for the transcript, Fryphile – macless as I am, I still must find out how to convert that m4a thingummy into a listenable format …
Anyway, a truly horrible story. And downright typical of Stephen Fry that he starts reprimanding himself for being in pain and feeling wretched and miserable.
Of course there are worse things in this world, Stephen.
But you cannot and need not and must not try to balance all human suffering in this world by turning into a modern protomartyr. Silently suffering the process of being simmered in the great pot of pain. It is indeed neither your task nor your duty to maintain cosmical harmony.
Your pain and dark thoughts may look small in relation to those of people famishing, losing their loved ones, being tortured, dying with cancer or whatsoever. Yes, they look small and are small indeed.
But they are a huge and overwhelming burden for you at the moment, just for you – and this it what counts. Not for mankind, but for yourself.
Yes, difficulties will arise from this. You cannot change this. Like anyone else, you are but a fragile creature.
Regard and accept this as the challenge that it is.
And take care of yourself!