Having just heard a bit out of the Bafta awards in Britain from the other night. I'm not going to see any of the movies and didn't go looking for it, I just happened across it and saw that Stephen Fry was involved so I clicked on expecting to see a train wreck. And with Stephen Fry there's always some really stupid gaff, revealing something rather unappealing beneath the smarmy Brit show-biz patina.
It makes it all the more bizarre that someone there, I don't know who, made some remark about Stephen Hawking being the only man smarter than the demonstrably stupid Stephen Fry. Is it in his contract that someone has to pretend to think that Fry is smart? I've heard him debate and the guy is a stream of conventional Brit-atheist slogans and phonied up assertions of history with nothing else behind it except some really hammy Brit style acting conventions. But, then, what else have they got but that, in the end? And from other news from the Baftas, it wasn't the only faux pas he made. I'm sure there must have been some writers in the room who are smarter than Fry, not to mention actors, directors, producers, ushers, go-fors, etc. As someone else said on another occasion , and just one of many, that he said something really stupid, Fry is one of those people who are a stupid man's idea of what a smart man is.
Fry is smart the way Hitchens was: he has the Oxonian accent/attitude, so he must be smarter than the rest of us.
ReplyDeleteQED.
Having read your links now, I have to add I admire the British willingness to slam people in public. Apparently the line about Fry being a stupid person's idea of a smart person is well known across the Pond (here I associate it with Newt Gingrich, but apparently it traveled to us from the home country), and widely repeated.
ReplyDeleteApparently they don't have as much tolerance for assholes as we do; or at least they are willing to label them properly in public.