Clearly Fry is in the Too Famous To Edit category, as the maundering about how insecure he was / is and how terrible it is that people thought he and the gang were brash and confident when they were full of self-doubt etc. could have done with some serious trimming back. I think we are in the territory of the old thing told to freshers etc. 'everyone is just as nervous as you'. To which I can only say hmm.
Nonetheless, it is interesting because of lots of incidental details. I didn't know / had forgotten / hadn't absorbed that the play that Fry famously did a bunk from was written by Simon Raven. Also, of course, it is amusing to be reminded that Hugh Laurie was in the Cambridge crew in the Boat Race. I had known this but I think it is the sort of fact that is too wacky to keep in ones mind for long.
It is weird that I don't at all remember Alfresco, their first TV show, on ITV. Maybe I was having too much of a life to be watching TV at the time, but I don't think I knew about it at all.
The Cambridge described seems a world away from the Oxford of what would only be 6 years later, certainly the description of the sets of rooms seemed much more opulent than anything I ever came across in Oxford, even in the richer colleges. Obviously there may be a degree of hyperbole but his description of Cambridge in the 70s sounds more like descriptions of Oxford in the 50s. To some extent I guess that the big sea-change was the colleges on the whole going mixed, and he was one side of that and I was the other.
