T.W.
Monday 15th November 2010 4:55pm [Edited]
15,786 posts
From current Private Eye...
'When Stephen Fry's comments to gay magazine Attitude about women not liking sex as much as men were picked up by the Observer, his immediate reaction was to throw a hissy-fit and stage his 94th exit from Twitter - but not before making it clear what had happened: "Some f**king paper misquotes a humourous interview I gave, which itself misquoted me."
The claim was rapidly disseminated both by fawning re-tweeters already disinclined to distrust the "mainstream media" and by a mainstream media so obsessed with Stephen Fry it clears its pages every time he opens his mouth and inserts his foot in it.
But nothing of the sort had happened.
Paul Flynn, the experienced feature writer who conducted the interview, transcribed exactly what Fry had said and presented it in Q&A format. He has the recordings to prove it. The Observer reprinted them perfectly accurately and contacted Flynn to check them.
In fact, as Fry mad clear when he returned to the social networking site five days later, he had not read either article. "I have literally no idea what has been said about me over the past week. When I say that I do not read papers I mean it.... I conversed with a profiler. I can't remember his name and I haven't actually read the article he wrote as a result. They sent me three copies of the magazine and I looked at the photo on the front cover and now the magazines lie piled up somewhere... I almost never watch the programmes I make nor do I read articles about me or interviews that I've given."
Oh, and he did actually say what he was quoted as saying, but everyone should have understood that he was just "taking a thought for a walk - I was 'playing gracefully with ideas' to repeat Oscar's great phrase."
So did he feel the need to apologise to Flynn or Attitude for a claim which could harm both the hack's career and the magazine's fairly fragile sales? No, of course not. Instead he claimed that he had only granted them an interview because "I though it was a harmless way of supporting a specialist periodical... I only agreed out of kindness. What an idiot I am. A misplaced sense of community spirit that went ludicrously awry."
They must be terribly grateful...'