Roberts - Soupy Twists!

JEM ROBERTS was born in Ludlow in 1978, gained his first professional writing gig as a teenage games journalist, and has over twenty years of magazine toil under his belt. As a comedy performer, he has inflicted his noises on audiences from Edinburgh to Glastonbury Festival, solo and with his troupe, The Unrelated Family. His love of Im Sorry, I Havent a Clue led to his first officially authorised book, The Clue Bible, in 2009, and a lifetimes obsession meant that the ultimate guide to Blackadder had to follow, with 2012s The True History of The Black Adder . In 2014, he became the official biographer of Douglas Adams, with The Frood marking his third release from Preface Publishing. Soupy Twists! is his fourth work of comedy history. Also published by Unbound in 2018 is Tales of Britain , the first British folktale treasury in over thirty years, which Roberts performs all over the UK.

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Clue Bible: The Fully Authorised History of Im Sorry,
I Havent a Clue

The True History of The Black Adder

The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams

Tales of Britain

For Jo, and Jo.

TIME hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,

A great-sized monster of ingratitudes!

Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida , Act 3, Scene 3

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,

Live registred upon our brazen tombs,

And then grace us in the disgrace of death;

When in spite of cormorant devouring Time,

Thendeavour of this present breath may buy

That honour which shall bate his scythes keen edge,

And make us heirs of all eternity.

Shakespeare, Loves Labours Lost , Act 1, Scene 1

You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh water is always flowing past you.

Heraclitus

Your Cambridge was built of people, not of bricks and stone and glass, and those people have severally dispersed into the world. They will never be assembled together again. The circus has long since folded its tents and stolen silently away and you are standing on the village green wondering why it looks so shabby and forlorn Now pop off out of my sight. You smell of mortality. I dont need you to remind me of my age, I have a bladder to do that for me If you have been, hello.

Professor Donald Trefusis

I think it was Donald Mainstock, the great amateur squash player, who pointed out how lovely I was. Until that time I think it was safe to say that I had never really been aware of my own timeless brand of loveliness. But his words smote me, because of course you see, I am lovely in a fluffy moist kind of way and who would have it otherwise?

Say please, dont make me say it twice, Lets all get some manners here, lets try to Be Nice, Cause Im a good ass motherliker.

How unauthorised biographers manage to sleep at night, knowing their subject actively does not wish them to do their job, I do not know. However, writing officially authorised biography also has its difficulties, and never more so than when chronicling the doings of massively beloved famous artists, who just happen to have never quite developed the rhinocerine thick skin that tends to be a by-product of years of fame and fortune. A few celebrity demagogues never need thick skin, they create their own universe with them at the centre of it, but to delight in engaging with the wider world, while being deeply bruised by its buffets, is an unfortunate cocktail of traits.

Stephen Frys numerous dramas on Twitter and elsewhere, not to mention Irish threats of blasphemy charges, have shown the perils of being heralded as a spokesman for almost everything dont presume safety in nuance. Fry is the most sensitive of souls, almost unavoidably exposed on all sides by his sheer desire to honestly engage, and be himself. The immediacy of social media intensifies a tug of war and love with the public that has always been part of the Fry & Laurie story from the very start, their positions of undeniable privilege have put them on the back foot, paradoxically requiring them to fight their corner harder than most comedians. Even the most blindly committed adorers of the two gentlemen will concede that Stephen & Hugh havent always been the most reliably breezy of fellows. In differing ways, and no matter how much laughter they have generated together and apart over the last four decades, neither colleague habitually eyes existence with absolute equanimity.

They are not, therefore, the kind of chaps anyone would imagine lightly taking the decision to hand their life stories over to a third party. Luckily for them, Soupy Twists! is a celebration of laughter, offered in tribute to one of the funniest double acts of all time, while both colleagues are still around to be dreadfully embarrassed by the attention. This is not a whitewashing hagiography, but nor, thankfully, is it a dustbin-raking expos it is the story of the creation of a singular cocktail of humour by two friends, and as such its real area of fascination stops around twenty years ago, as Fry & Laurie began permanently to follow their own solitary paths. As much as possible, the duos story is told by themselves and their closest collaborators and friends, and hopefully by the end we will know our two heroes better than ever; they will speak with candour and amused honesty, but let the armchair psychiatrists do their own work.

As to those collaborators, friends, and other crucial creatives who steered Soupy Twists! into your grasp not to mention the many benefactors listed at the back of the book, as they are mentioned there, but thank you For Unbound, deep gratitude must go to John Mitchinson, Mathew Clayton, Georgia Odd, Jimmy Leach, Mark Bowsher, Philip Connor, DeAndra Lupu and Anna Simpson. Im indebted to the kind staff at the BFI, the BBC Archive and Cambridge University Library. But after the main men, the greatest roles have been played by the ever-gladdening Jo Crocker and Elizabeth Fergusson, who represented Fry & Laurie respectively, and ensured that any of the proceedings could proceed, with extra thanks to Fergusson's successor Joshua Woodford.

I was delirious with pleasure in managing to gain audiences with Paul Shearer, Emma Thompson, Kim Harris, John Lloyd, Jon Canter, Nick Symons, Roger Ordish, Robert Daws, Fiona Gillies, Richard Curtis, Brian Eastman, Deborah Norton, Jon Plowman, Maurice Gran, Jo Laurie and of course, Jo Crocker. Further thanks-awfullies for numerous suggestions and fan memories go to Tom Boon, Paula Clarke Bain, Dave Lee, Darrell Maclaine-Jones (especially for designing the cocktail icons), Steve Medcraft, Andy Tubb, anyone whose comments helped, plus Pam and all the House fan base. But above all, of course, for putting up with all this necessary nosiness and cheek-reddening celebration, everybodys thanks go to Stephen & Hugh.

Haters, by and large, are by definition going to hate. But Stephen has a particular favourite tale which has always encapsulated his ideal, and it is one we should all hug to ourselves and aim to live by: Theres a wonderful story that I always treasure of a young undergraduate who gets elected to a junior fellowship of an Oxbridge college at the turn of the last century. As he arrives at the seniors common room, theres an ancient old don who says, Welcome, welcome young man. A word of advice Dont try to be clever. Were all clever here. Only try to be kind, a little kind