More Fool Me (20 page)

I also admire the tradition of the Prime Minister having to visit the monarch weekly and use him or her as an echo-chamber. I tell Americans that it is the equivalent of their President once a week being obliged to pay a call on Uncle Sam, assuming that that universally recognizable symbol of the nation were a real, bearded fellow in striped trousers and spangled coat. If a man as powerful as a President or a Prime Minister has to explain what he is doing, what he has enacted, how he has responded to this crisis or that, to someone who represents the nation in a way he or she cannot, I think it keeps them from going too power-crazy.

Many people, to return to the man in question, know more about military history than the Prince of Wales; many know more about architecture; many know more about agriculture; many know more about painting; many know more about flying; many know more about sailing; many know more about riding; many know more about horticulture, cheeses, geography, botany, environmental science and so on and so on and so on. You see where I am going. I can honestly say that I have never met anyone who knows more about all those things. This makes him, at least as far as I am concerned, good and interesting company. He was way ahead of the curve when it came to many environmental and agricultural issues, but there remain many things I fundamentally disagree with him about. Homoeopathy for one, and what seems to me his dangerous instinctive distrust of science and fondness for ‘faith’ for another. I am much more disposed to like some modern architecture than he seems to be. But if disagreements over such matters were causes for scourging and falling out, then who would ’scape whipping, as the man said?

I first got to know him quite well when I found myself at one of those line-ups after a comedy show of some kind in 1990 or thereabouts. He had heard, I think through Rowan Atkinson, that I had a house in the country not far from the royal residence at Sandringham in Norfolk.

‘I believe we’re neighbours,’ he said.

‘Indeed, sir,’ I said. (Oh! Remind me to tell you a story about Penn Jillette. You’ll love it.)

‘We absolutely adore Norfolk,’ the Prince said. Quite the right thing to say.

‘You must come and visit me over Christmas,’ I said, knowing that this was the season when the royal family spent most of their Sandringham time.

‘Indeed, indeed,’ he murmured as he moved on to the next bowing comic in the line.

I thought very little more about it. That Christmas in Norfolk I had a houseful. Something like fourteen people, I believe. I had somehow managed to provide stockings for them all on Christmas Eve (a fantastical effort of wrapping and Sellotaping on the snooker table, an ideal surface for Christmas) and made a chestnut soup, roasted a turkey and provided the approved pudding, bedight with Christmas holly on top, as Dickens phrases it. A week of game playing, film-watching, snoozing and light walking had followed. It was a period when I was off the powder and all the better for it.

One morning I was making hollandaise for Eggs Benedict, a breakfast dish I pride myself in having mastered to the point of professional excellence. Hollandaise, like mayonnaise or any emulsified sauce, takes concentration. The melted butter mustn’t be poured too quickly into the egg yolk or the mixture will split. A thin, steady stream is called for. This I was achieving when the phone went.

‘Someone answer it!’

Fourteen people slumbering, showering or shagging … not one of them, it seems, capable of answering the bloody telephone.

‘Will someone just … oh never mind!’ Abandoning that consignment of hollandaise to failure, I strode to the phone and yanked it from its bracket.

‘Yes,’ I barked testily.

‘Um, can I speak to Stephen Fry, please?’

‘This is he.’

‘Ah, it’s the Prince of Wales here.’

A moment. A heartbeat, no more. And in that short series of milliseconds my brain had instructed my mouth to say: ‘Oh fuck off, Rory.’

But somehow one always knows when one is listening to the real thing, not to Rory Bremner or any another impressionist, no matter how skillful. That same brain sent an even faster order to overtake and countermand the first.

‘Hello, sir!’ I managed to choke. ‘I’m afraid you caught me trying to make a hollandaise sauce …’

‘Ah. I’m so sorry. I was wondering, um, wondering about taking you up on that offer and, um, coming for tea?’

‘Of course. That would be marvellous. Absolutely splendid. When did you have in mind?’

‘How about New Year’s Day?’

‘Fabulous. I look forward to it.’

I replaced the phone carefully in its cradle. Hmmm.

I stood in the hallway of the house and, like Rik or Mike in
The Young Ones
, called ‘House meeting!’ at the top of my voice. Slowly people appeared at the heads of stairways and grumblingly made their way down, like the guests in the fire-alarm scene in
Fawlty Towers
. It was probably about eight in the morning, and I am long used to the dislike and annoyance my being a cheerful morning lark engenders. Most people are owls and take a lot of getting up.

‘Look, sorry everyone, but the day after tomorrow the Prince of Wales is coming for tea.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Ha fucking ha.’

‘You woke me up for
this
?’

I held up a hand. ‘Seriously. He really is.’

But I had lost my audience, who were already tightening their dressing-gown cords and trudging back up the stairs.

It was only when, on the following day, a dark green Range Rover appeared that I was finally truly believed. Two detectives and a dog got out, cordially welcomed a proffered tea and poked around … for what we were unable to ascertain. After this cursory security screening of the house and a multitude of chocolate Hobnobs they had gone. My house guests swarmed around me.

‘Well!’

‘Oh my lord!’

‘What on earth am I going to wear?’

All of us adults were traditionally and pleasingly left-leaning without being rude, yet now we found ourselves to be as flushed and excited as a kennelful of beagle puppies hearing the clink of the leash.

We all arose early the next morning. Why I didn’t photograph Hugh Laurie hoovering the drawing-room carpet I have no idea. It would be worth millions in blackmail money today. Ah well.
^*

Everything is polished, swept, cleaned, washed, waxed and prepared. Teapots are at the ready, kettles half on and half off the hottest ring of the Aga. Bread, crumpets and muffins piled up for toasting. Butter softened. Jars of homemade blackcurrant jam and lemon curd (two Christmases’ worth of presents from my brother’s sister-in-law). Sandwiches are cut. Honey! I know he likes honey in his tea! A pot of runny honey is found somewhere. Has it gone off? Honey can’t go off, I am assured, a fact that is many years later confirmed for me by a
QI
elf. A wooden honey spoon is discovered in a drawer. The drawer also reveals a better tea-strainer, a proper silver one, not the rather naff Present From Hunstanton which was all I thought I had. Another teapot and a big Dundee cake for his police security men, who will be able to eat in the kitchen. Oh God, have we overdone it? Battenberg cake … hell, he might think we’re taking the piss. Battenberg was his family name once.

We leave the kitchen and crowd into the drawing room, which has a view through the drawn curtains of the driveway. It is dark, of course, and has been since early afternoon. It is only a week and a few days since the shortest day of the year. Hugh, who is diligent at this kind of duty, takes the log basket out to reload it. The fire is roaring splendidly, but you cannot have too many logs. Jon Canter, writer and friend, checks the candles that are artfully disposed around the room. I am still twitching one curtain and looking out into the night. Kim and Alastair are twitching another curtain and giggling like Japanese schoolgirls.

Headlamps, as in Dornford Yates novels, stab the air and sweep the hedgerows. But they are bypassing the driveway. We all look at our watches. Was it after all some gigantic hoax?

Then, before we even seem to know what is upon us, the gravel is crunched alive with the sound of two cars skidding to a halt before the front door.

‘Right,’ I say, ‘let’s …’

They have all scrammed. Skedaddled. Vamoosed.

‘Cowards!’ I just have time to shout before gulping, breathing deeply and placing myself on the mat. The front doorbell is rung. If I open the door immediately it will look as if I have been waiting like an uncool cat, which I have been and am, but I count to fifteen to dispel the idea and, just as the second peal begins, swing open the door with a smile.

‘Your Royal Highness …’

‘Hullo. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve brought my wife.’

Out of the shadows steps Princess Diana. She lowers her head and looks up in that characteristic fashion, captured so many times by Mario Testino and a thousand other photographers, smiling from under her lashes. ‘Hello, Stephen,’ she sweetly murmurs.

I conduct them into the drawing room. They look around and say approving things about my house. It has six bedrooms and is by no means a cottage, but it would fit comfortably into a half of one Sandringham wing. Well, it is all mine, inasmuch as I earned it and didn’t inherit it, so I can’t be that ashamed. I am not sure ‘earned’ is the right word, but this isn’t the time to go into that.

Slowly the house guests emerge like shy, hungry zoo animals at feeding time. Introductions are effected, the policemen shown into the kitchen by the back door. Is that rude and disrespectful? They don’t show offence, but then they wouldn’t. Of the Dundee cake not a crumb was left behind, so I must assume they felt at home.

Back in the drawing room. Hugh and Jo’s first child, Charlie, is just at the toddling stage. He lurches zombielike towards the television (yes, there is a television in my drawing room, which the Prince and you persons of tone and breeding must think grotesquely common, but there we are) and switches it on, a child entirely of his generation. Jo screams out ‘Charlie!’ and the Prince of Wales, one assumes unused to being addressed in this forceful, matronly manner, jumps sitting down, a clever trick. Meanwhile, to my mortification and that of his mother,
EastEnders
comes on to full blaring cockney life. She leaps to her feet to find the remote control. (That reminds me. Very funny Queen Mother story. Remind me to tell you.)

‘No, leave it on,’ says the Princess. ‘It’s the special New Year’s edition. I want to find out what happens to Ange.’

The Prince is relaxed and cheerful, the Princess charming and beguiling. She wears cowboy boots that suit her very well. The Prince does not wear cowboy boots, which suits
him
very well.

The honeyed tea and the buttered crumpets and the toast and the cakes last out until it is time for the royal pair to depart.

At the front door the Prince thanks me and bids everyone else farewell. Princess Diana holds in the threshold for a second longer, checks over her shoulder that her Prince is out of earshot and whispers softly in my ear, ‘Sorry to leave early, though secretly I’m quite glad. It’s
Spitting Image
tonight, and I want to watch it in my room.
They
hate it of course. I absolutely adore it.’

And there you have her in a nutshell. By telling me this she was putting me in her power. It was a statement then worth tens of thousands of pounds. ‘Princess Di Loves Anti-Royal Smut Puppets!’ All I had to do was pick up the phone to any tabloid. But by confiding in me she had made me in some measure her slave: to be trusted with such intelligence was to be appointed one of her special courtiers. Even as intellectual, sharp, brilliant, knowledgeable and impossibly well-read and sensible a man as Clive James was utterly devoted to her.

I closed the door and leaned back against it in that afraid-it-will-soon-be-opened-again-but-I’ll-defend-it-with-my-last-breath manner much noted in fast-paced Leonard Rossiter sitcoms.

‘Well!’ I said.

‘Well!’ said everyone else.

‘Awfully nice couple,’ said Jon Canter, ‘awfully nice. I didn’t get
her
name.’

For the post-mortem we opened a whisky bottle in the drawing room, caring nothing for clearing up the tea things.

‘Unbelievable,’ said one of the heterosexual male house guests, of which there were a more than ordinary percentage that Christmas. ‘Did you see how she looked at me? I was in there … she was practically looking up at the ceiling as if to suggest we go upstairs. Jesus!’

‘What are you talking about?’ another man interrupted. ‘That was me she was giving the eye to.’

‘No
me
!’

In the PR war the Prince of Wales never had a chance. His tireless work, his initiatives, the Prince’s Trust alone, none of these could compete with so perfect a piece of seductive nature.

For his fiftieth birthday (this is one of the stories I was going to tell you) I emceed an entertainment at the London Palladium. Afterwards I stood once more in the line-up. Next to me was Penn Jillette, one half of the brilliant Penn and Teller, American magicians, pro-science, sceptics of the highest rank.

Penn turned to me as he watched the Prince slowly coming down the line.

‘Do I have to call him “Your Majesty” or any of that shit?’

‘No, no. Not at all. If you were to use a title it would be “Your Royal Highness”, and from then on “sir”, but there’s no need. After all, I haven’t called you Penn once in this conversation until now, have I, Penn?’

‘Oh, OK, just so long as he understands that we don’t talk like that. And what about bowing? I have to bow? We don’t bow in America.’

‘No, no,’ I reassure him, ‘no bowing necessary.’

‘Cuz I’m an American, and we don’t bow.’

‘Yes, he knows you’re an American.’

‘I won’t get put in the Tower of London or anything?’

People always think that sojourns in the Tower of London, like knighthoods, are somehow in the gift of members of the royal family.

I reassured him on these points. No Highnessing, no kowtowing.

At last the Prince reaches Penn, who immediately falls almost prostrate to the floor. ‘Your Majesty Highness. Your Royal Sir …’ and so on and so forth, babbling like a gibbon on speed. The Prince passes on to me and whoever was the other side of me without turning a hair. Seen it all before.