A very interesting day. A couple of hours with Stephen Fry tonight. Half an hour with Phill Jupitus this morning. In between, a very nice extended lunch at the pie shop with the rest of the team to mark Julian’s 14 years at the mag.

So the day started hideously early. Half five, to be precise. Cold. Dark. Unpleasant. Even a long hot shower wasn’t quite enough to balance the appeal of another hour in bed. I was at the office just after seven (even at that time the Cleveland Street toast shops were open) and out again at eight for the short walk to 6music in Broadcasting House for the breakfast show.

Turns out there’s a friendly nest of Mac fans there. Phill Jupitus had a PowerBook in his bag, his producer had an iPod, the intern had a Mac of some sort… they all got very excited by the Mac mini I’d brought along.

I think it went OK. I nattered for 20 minutes or so, but it’s difficult to tell how it sounded unless you’re listening in. Paul recorded it on Skyplus, and it’s on the BBC listen again player, so I’ll have to catch it some time before it expires.

It was very small in there. About the size of the old LBC. Smaller than the new studios. Quite modern, though (as you’d expect for a station that age), except they seemed to play a lot of their music off CDs; at least as much as they did from hard disks, which I found surprising.

Tonight, though, there was no music. I was over in Bush House for a recording of Book Club. It’s a monthly programme about, obviously, books, presented by James Naughtie (everyone called him Jim). Each month you have to read a different book, and then the author and a small group of readers come along to ask and answer questions. Tonight it was Stephen Fry talking about The Hippopotamus, to be broadcast on the first Sunday in March.

I was a little bit early, so mooched around in the rain for ten minutes, and then wandered inside to meet the producers. They’ve smartened up the foyer of Bush House since I was last there, and the security has been beefed up, too. All sorts of locked glass doors and people in fluorescent jackets.

The rest of the book club types looked like regular book club types. Wild hair, corduroy trousers, a poorly-kept beard or two. As we sat around waiting for Stephen Fry to arrive I asked who had come the furthest. ‘I’m from just down the road,’ I said, pointing in the general direction of the office.

‘I’m from Sheffield.’
‘I’m from Maidenhead.’
‘I’m from Tel Aviv.’

‘Tel Aviv?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t come just for this, did you?’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘It was a good excuse to come to London.’

Oh…

There was a bit more silence.

‘So has everyone read the book?’ I asked.

There was a bit of head-hanging from those who didn’t know it so well.

‘I translated it into Hebrew,’ said the woman from Tel Aviv.

‘That’s quite a responsibility,’ I told her. ‘Do you have to send it back to the original publishers so they can check you’ve made an accurate translation?’

‘Oh, no. Not at all. You can do pretty much what you want. In fact, I’ve added some bits of my own in the Hebrew version. Hebrew can be far more filthy than English.’

But she didn’t elaborate.

They took us downstairs to where Stephen Fry was standing around being as tall as everyone always says he is. It was probably exaggerated by the fact we’d been crammed into a small, low-ceilinged corridor to drink terrible, terrible, terrible wine and shake hands with him and Jim Naughtie, but even taking that into account, he was as sky-high as Chris of the Phin had said he was. He’d seen him walking the streets near the office, this morning, no doubt in the slippers he was wearing tonight, and stopped him to tell him I’d be coming along tonight.

Now we weren’t supposed to read out our questions, so I dropped my notes on the seat beside me, but I’m sure someone else sneaked a peek, because someone else asked the only one I’d properly prepared, so I had to quick-think another one on the spot. It went down quite well.

‘All the characters in the book except one seem to develop and move on by the end because they’ve had their delusions shattered, but Ted doesn’t seem to have changed at all. Why is that?’

Only trouble is, I think the way I said ’shattered’ it came out as shit head, so it will probably be trimmed out before it gets anywhere near the radio.

In spite of that, though, he said it was a good question, and that he’d been wondering that himself yesterday when he’d re-read it for the first time since it was published.

Even if it does all get trimmed out, that doesn’t really matter. I went along because of who it was and what he was talking about, not so I’d get on the radio. It was quite surreal sitting there as he read extracts, especially when I’ve heard him reading the same bits on the audio book six or seven times by now. Perhaps more.

Of course, it all flew by very quickly, and an hour and a bit later I found myself wandering out of Bush House with the controller of Radio 4, who had come along to sit in. I had thought he was blind at first, but he got into the driving seat of a Saab, so I guess not.

I had hung around for a bit to have another quick chat before wandering off, so we talked about Apple stuff. He’s a friend of Jonathan Ive, and he asked me if I’d seen Tiger yet.

‘The shuffles are sold out at the Apple Store today,’ he said.
‘Mac minis are going quickly, too,’ I said.
‘Then there’s hope yet,’ he replied.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Media, Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.