How can you not adore Stephen Fry? Comedian, actor, gadget nerd. And now, hey gets to drive around the US as a British Borat. Fry’s American travelogue is directed by Michael Palin’s usual collaborator; Fry’s plan is to visit every state in the Union, driving his own London taxi and scattering bons mots along the way.
I’ve considered it something of a crime that Fry’s US career is fairly limited (a few episodes of shrinking on Bones) while Hugh Laurie kicks ass on a goddamn weekly basis with his uncanny faux-midwestern accent on House M.D.
The Brits are lucky, since this sounds like an great show. Let’s hope it makes it to BBC America. The book Stephen Fry in America, though, sounds even more interesting. The excerpt I found on his blog had me chuckling through the first few paragraphs. Too bad it’s not out in America until 2009 (oh, delicious Morrissete-irony).
I was so nearly an American. It was that close. In the mid-1950s my father was offered a job at Princeton University – something to do with the emerging science of semiconductors. One of the reasons he turned it down was that he didn’t think he liked the idea of his children growing up as Americans. I was born, therefore, not in NJ but in NW3.
I was ten when my mother made me a present of this momentous information. The very second she did so, Steve was born.
Steve looked exactly like me, same height, weight and hair colour. In fact, until we opened our mouths, it was almost impossible to distinguish one from the other. Steve’s voice had the clear, penetrating, high-up-in-the-head twang of American. He called Mummy ‘Mom’, he used words like ’swell’, ‘cute’ and ‘darn’.