As a fully-fledged adult, I have grown up with a wide range of talented entertainers of a similar age. Many emerged on television as part of an established duo or bunch of friends who cut their teeth as performers and writers on the university stage. For instance, Whitehouse and Enfield, French and Saunders, Mayall and Edmondson are long-standing household names for those of my generation. But few come posher than Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.
Whilst Fry spent most of his public school adolescence getting expelled or imprisoned, Laurie followed the traditional upper-class passage of privilege from local ‘prep’ to Eton and finally Cambridge University. There, his educational achievements were suppressed by extracurricular activities but I reckon he’s come out of it all pretty well. Like Peter Cook, Eric Idle, Clive Anderson and various Goodies before him, young Hugh became President of Footlights where he and then partner Emma Thompson encountered a largely reformed Mr Fry, and the rest is history.
Stephen could have sneaked into my list of TV Treasures but for sheer length and breadth of output I’ve leaned towards Laurie. In 1983, the two appeared with Thompson in Alfresco, ITV’s early toe dipped into the waters of what was to become known as alternative comedy. I watched a few instalments without being hugely impressed, unaware of the colossal careers most of those contributors would enjoy. They also included Robbie Coltrane and Ben Elton, the latter clearly falling short in the acting department in the collection of sketches!
Instead he excelled at comedy writing and was partly responsible for The Young Ones, which I did watch. Religiously. He even wrote roles for himself and the old Footlights alumni in the classic episode ‘Bambi’. That included the University Challenge skit pitting ‘Scumbag College’ (Rick, Vyvyan, Neil and Mike) against the wealth-flaunting aristos of what else but ‘Footlights College’ featuring Laurie as ‘Lord Monty’.
Lots of actors have over the years made upper-class twits their speciality. However, few have portrayed them with such childish and wide-eyed gusto as successfully as Hugh Laurie. The pinnacles of his aristocratic inanity were showcased in Ben Elton’s brilliant Blackadder canon of the late Eighties. As the foppish Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third, he propelled the simplicity dial to eleven but who could blame him for his bewildered befuddlement when faced with Samuel Johnson’s vocabularian verbosity? Two years later, Blackadder Goes Forth saw his George as an upper-class WW1 officer, his stiff upper lip and cheery demeanour protecting him from the blatant horrors of the trenches. He was so stupid that he even allowed himself to cross-dress (as Georgina) and be wooed by Stephen Fry’s incompetent General Melchett. Rather successfully, it transpires….
That same year, the pair were reunited in the sketch show format for A Bit of Fry and Laurie. I felt it promised more than it delivered, but sometimes caught the zeitgeist, be it in the world of yuppie businessmen or coaching cheating footballers. I wonder if a young Neymar or Wilfred Zaha were in Hugh’s class? The football theme also cropped up in a 1991 Comic Relief news bulletin skit. Indeed, in the early days, he was a regular sight on Red Nose Day before other obligations took priority.
At the start of the Nineties Hugh Laurie was extremely busy on TV, but he was also making a name in other entertainment media. There were various film roles, and one sweltering summer evening in 1990 I was with a group of friends watching his hilarious performance on the Theatre Royal stage in Gasping by – who else?- Ben Elton. Alongside Bernard Hill and Jaye Griffiths, he portrayed another upper-class twit in the yuppie satire but showed a gift for knockabout physical comedy too. He was clearly more than a mere sketch comedy phenomenon.
I confess I can’t remember it, but my 1993 diary records my enjoying an ITV crime drama series All Or Nothing At All. Hugh starred as a feckless financial adviser, not with Emma Thompson but her mum Phyllida Law. Not a Fry in sight. The same was true when he appeared alongside Reeves and Mortimer in the 2000 reboot of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in the guise of a shady doctor at a psychiatric retreat. Both parts suggested Hugh Laurie was shifting gear from posh, loveable prat to posh, devious crook. It suited him like a sleek, shiny Armani.
In the first series of Spooks, he was back in upper-crust goodie mode, although of the rather more intelligent kind. Which is a relief because he was the amiable head of MI6. His character’s work with the CIA also heralded the actor’s migration to the USA for a new and unfeasibly lucrative phase.
Apparently, so good was his accent that Hugh Laurie was considered a quintessential American when first auditioning for the role of Dr Gregory House. No matter. He got the gig and proceeded to star in House for eight long seasons, becoming in the process one of the highest paid stars on the US network. Who’d have thought it? Thankfully Channel 5 snapped up the UK broadcasting rights and I could take the opportunity to experience the Brit’s superb performance for myself. The character was a beguiling melange of eccentric pill-popping hospital specialist, irascible boss and frequently obnoxious human being. His saving grace was a Sherlock Holmes-ian brilliance when it came to spotting rare infectious diseases, albeit after a few near-fatal misdiagnoses, in each episode. With greying stubble and walking cane, this was a new-look Laurie, and he pulled off the difficult task of making such a walking contradiction both credible and charismatic. I persevered on and off for a few series before the format began to seem repetitive, and didn’t once see him on subsequent American hits Chance, Veep or Avenue 5. On the other hand I did witness his nice turn in 2019’s Catch-22 adaptation, including the funniest scene of the whole series. I was torn: it was reassuring that a Brit could succeed across the pond but a little disappointing that he needed to arm himself with transatlantic drawl to do so.
It’s been evident for ages that Hugh Laurie is a real Renaissance man: not just a comedy writer/performer, cartoon voice artist and serious actor, but also Cambridge Blue at rowing (his dad won an Olympic gold in the same sport), novelist. passable guitarist, drummer and sax player, successful jazz-blues singer (but not my cup of Tetley’s) and accomplished pianist. In retrospect, his musical skills have slipped into quite a few comedy programmes over the years, from Comic Relief Country singer to tickling the ivories on Jeeves and Wooster.
More recently he’s slipped back into the bodies of egotistical bastards, and has deserved all the plaudits. He was superior to any Bond baddie in 2016’s The Night Manager and an engaging duplicitous, ambitious Tory politician in 2020’s Roadkill. More Blackadder than Prince George, perhaps, but his Peter Laurence was another great Hugh Laurie character to be treasured.
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