I have just returned from a tour of Australia and New Zealand, on whose citizens I inflicted An Evening With Stephen Fry. I first ‘played’ Australia in 1981. The Cambridge Footlights Revue that Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer, Penny Dwyer and I had put on in Edinburgh attracted the attention of an Australian impresario called Michael Edgley. Would we be interested in taking our show around his country? Tony had another year of university to go and in the end Hugh and Emma joined up with the previous year’s Footlighters, Robert Bathurst and Martin Bergman. That summer Ian Botham had sensationally and all but single-handedly wrested the Ashes urn from the Australians’ grasp, so we called our show – something of a red rag to a bull – Botham, the Musical.
My first stop this year, as in 1981, was western Australia’s capital, Perth. The citizens – Perthians? Perthonalities? – like to tell you that theirs is the remotest capital in the world, standing as it does more than 1,300 miles from the nearest major city, Adelaide. The proper response to this is tactfully to bark out from behind your hand, as if masking a cough, ‘Honolulu’, which they will tell you doesn’t count. I have yet to understand why not. When we arrived here 43 years ago with Botham, the Musical we were sent down to the WACA, Perth’s legendary cricket ground, to do some publicity to whip up interest. What we had not expected was to be bowled at by Terry Alderman and Dennis Lillee. The former was charming and shook our hands, but the latter paced up and down, moustache bristling in outrage.
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