Stephen Fry

Fry and Laurie Reunited, G.O.L.D., review

Michael Deacon reviews Fry and Laurie Reunited, G.O.L.D.'s documentary about Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's comedy partnership.

Fry & Laurie - Reunited | TV Review

GOLD couldn't have gone far wrong with this well-judged and timely reunion, with public affection for Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie - once one of comedy's biggest double acts - sky high at the moment.

'Fortunately, I never fancied him... it would have been embarrassing,' confided Stephen Fry on Fry And Laurie Reunited, happily putting to bed a question that had thankfully never occurred to me, as it might have put an altogether different spin on all those Blackadder slapping scenes. No, Hugh and Stephen are just frightfully good chums.

Though it did at times descend into the showbiz love-in suggested by the title, this Reunited still amounted to a rather superior slice of nostalgia.

It's 15 years since the duo, who met at Cambridge University's Footlights (aka the BBC's in-house comedy training scheme), last appeared together. So getting them together for a chinwag was something of a coup for Gold, a channel eager to escape the twin yoke of Spandau Ballet and Nescafé.

For a while, they could easily have settled for chewing up and spitting out A Bit Of Fry And Laurie, their rather good sketch show that was here turned by hagiographic showbiz fawners into a missing chapter of The Bible. However, they took a tilt at different careers and it paid off. As Dr Gregory House, Laurie has become the world's most watched TV star (no idea how they work that out), while Fry tweets on everything from darts to ecological destruction ('I do wish he wouldn't put himself about so much,' said Hugh - but not to his face).

You can't begrudge them their careers but their obvious on-screen chemistry did make you wonder about all the comedy sketches we've missed because they didn't stick together. Though it didn't always work - and Reunited had the decency to recall the long-forgotten Alfresco from 1983, a show beaten into a pulp by The Young Ones - Fry and Laurie set a standard for the comedy sketch duo that has rarely been matched since.

And though they had a jolly time taking the mickey out of their shared past, the chances of a fully fledged on-screen reunion, usually the hook for this kind of TV encounter, thankfully seemed like a total non-starter. Fry and Laurie are no fools: they know there's no going back.

Rather than a simple clip show, this is a specially-convened summit between Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, together on screen for the first time in 15 years. It's hard to make much out over the gales of self-deprecation but, over 90 minutes, the friends discuss their working relationship and history together, vamping on some old themes for the benefit of the camera. Fry is never far from our screens, so the real revelation is Laurie, whose less widely exposed wryness is hilarious. At Cambridge the pair met in Fry's room. "A2," says Laurie, "also the Folkestone road . . ."

In the back of a cab on his way to meeting his best friend Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry muses: "When you know someone really, really well you never actually talk about things." Both Fry and Laurie put that right in a hugely enjoyable, clip-strewn chat, their first television appearance together in 15 years. It's a loose, freewheeling, vastly funny get-together with Laurie, confident and no longer the self-effacing adjunct to Fry (that's what being the biggest TV star in the world does for you), leading things brilliantly. "I think I made a girl laugh in a bar," says Laurie of his Cambridge comedy years. "So many stories start that way " Fry giggles helplessly as the pair reminisce in what Laurie describes as "a beautifully prepared conversation pit" in lovely Eltham Palace, south-east London. They look back at old A Bit of Fry and Laurie sketches, talk of their love for one another, and Laurie offers a word of caution to the unwary about his techno-fan friend: "If Stephen asks you to look at something on his computer screen, run for your f*****g life."

Since Fry and Laurie last shared the screen 15 years ago, Stephen Fry is now such a national treasure he's now owned by the National Trust, and Hugh Laurie is now the highest-paid actor on US TV. Not bad for a pair of Cambridge graduates, eh? In this special, when they're not giggling, they talk about their friendship, double-act, and ask each other all sorts of impertinent questions.

We always loved A Bit Of Fry And Laurie. Even after we bought the DVDs and realised that some of the sketches were dated. Even after Stephen Fry did Kingdom. Even after House got really, really creaky. We still loved Fry and Laurie.

So to see them re-united in Eltham Palace for a chinwag about old times sent an excited shiver even through our cynical frame. And it is lovely to see their genuine affection. It really is. They recollect amusingly and Stephen Fry even has the grace to look genuinely horribly embarrassed at times, in a manner he wouldn't if being interviewed.

But there aren't enough sketches and the talking heads (Whitehouse and Higson apart) are irritating or irrelevant. Why Gold thought the first person we'd like to see talking about them is Jools Bleeding Holland is anyone's guess. The most interesting bits are when they're apart, discussing each other's further careers. Laurie, in particular, is good talking about Fry. "I wish he'd say 'no' more." Don't we all, Hugh. Don't we all.

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie reunited

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie are being reunited on television for the first time in 15 years.

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in pictures

A photo gallery of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie look back over a partnership that was formed 30 years ago and then flourished with Jeeves and Wooster, Blackadder and A Bit of Fry and Laurie. They haven't worked together for 15 years and so this celebration of the pair's achievements as the comic double act allows them to reminisce about their careers, their friendship and reasons for their success. With some this might be tedious and luvvy; not so with Fry and Laurie, who inject warmth and humour into this documentary about two people who genuinely appear to thrive in each other's company.