STEPHEN FRY

A notice to staff and parents, a little housekeeping…

Hello all. I have flown to Nairobi to start work on the five films I am making with Mark Carwardine for the BBC. Mark Carwardine, you may remember, wrote Last Chance To See with my late great friend, Douglas Adams. This was a pioneering, prophetic book which saw the pair travelling the world in search of eight critically endangered species. Twenty-five years later Mark and I are revisiting the same places and looking for the same animals to see how world wildlife has fared in a quarter of a century. We already made one film in Brazil earlier this year, searching for the shy and endearing Amazon river manatee. It was during this expedition that I broke my arm. Who knows what will happen in Africa? Well, I hope that whatever does befall, you will be the first to know and witness it, for I intend to make use of the superior options available on this all-new re-skinned, revamped, reworked website to keep you as up to date as possible.

The new Stephenfry.com 2.0 is out of its box

I have written a general hello which greets all who visit, but I will add for you, loyal blessay subscriber, an extra warm welcome. I aim to provide more and more content on this site as time goes on: before long there will be greater opportunities for you to contribute too, in new and different ways. Visitors will find on the new site a little activity status bar, which will let them know where I am and what I am up to: I should be able to keep it up to date even when out of range of digital networks, thanks to twitter’s text service. I shall try to refresh it at least daily. I shall also, over the next few weeks and months as I travel the world, be uploading little Flip and Vado films of myself like the one of me packing for Africa that is already up.

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Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls,

I’m acutely aware that I owe you a podgram and a new blessay. It’s been weeks and possibly months since I last offered you anything.

The thing is, I’ve just returned from America, having finished an epic documentary series on every single state. Having arrived back in Britain, I have hit the ground running and have spent the past eight weeks writing a book on the series plus I’ve been filming a new series of QI here in London.

In the meantime I gave a speech about the BBC and the future of broadcasting recently and for the moment, what I spoke about is all I can offer you. Please stay tuned for in the coming weeks I will have a new podgram plus news on exciting developments for the next version of Stephenfry.com.

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Stephen Fry is filming a series for the BBC in the United States of American and its beauty and wonder continues to inspire him.

In this third episode, he discusses the merits of Oscar Wilde’s view on American violence and good wallpaper.

Download the latest podgram “WALLPAPER”. Available in both .m4a (audio visual) and .mp3 (audio only) formats.

Producer note, Andrew here: Grateful thanks to the guys over in the Stephenfry.com/forum. They’ve transcribed Podgram 3 for you to read. As ever, please be patient as I manually approve comments from new users.

Note on “comments”, Andrew here. On Monday we upgraded the security of this blog and disabled some commentary sections of around 40% of Stephen’s blogs. We’re sorry that you have been unable to comment for three days. We are now working through the blogs and enabling the commentary sections. However, some of the older blogs will close off comments. We’ll start with September and October 07.

Thanks to Susan P alerting me to this.

Hello there. Firstly may I thank all of you who have downloaded and listened to my first podgram. Since it was little more than an incoherent stream of reminiscence poured into a microphone by a man with no functioning right arm with which to type, the piece was not available to be read as a text blog. From now on, however, always assuming I am careful enough not to incapacitate other useful parts of my body, podgrams will also be accessible in classic text-blessay form at www.stephenfry/blog. The choice is yours – eyes or ears. Or both. Or indeed all four. You may have noticed too that the podgram was delivered through a heavy cold and a fog of sleeping pills and analgesic opiates: apologies for the concomitant croaky dopiness.

Download the latest podgram “BORED OF THE DANCE”. Available in both .m4a (audio visual) and .mp3 (audio only) formats.

The PODGRAM is free via the iTunes Store or RSS feed subscribe link on the podcast page.

You may wonder why the podgrams can’t, like the blessays, be downloaded directly from stephenfry.com. Why must one go through the leviathan that is the iTunes store? I am afraid that no host that we can find is capable of dealing with the 1 terabyte plus of traffic engendered without crashing. And so we turned to the might of Apple to help us out. The problem we always return to is bandwidth. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. Who would not prefer to pootle along the country lanes in a flowered gypsy caravan, rather than blast down the motorway in a colossal juggernaut? Trouble is, when you’ve a certain number of deliveries to make a van just isn’t big enough. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. I sound like a 30s schoolgirl with a lisp. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. What is she saying? Something to do with sandwiches perhaps? Or bandits. Bandits eating sandwiches and wearing bandages? We’ll never know.

Americans are no more irony illiterate than Britons or anyone else

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