Stephen Fry is seriously considering parenthood, he will admit to Kirsty Young in his appearance as a castaway on Desert Island Discs on Sunday.
The 57-year-old writer and performer tells the BBC Radio Four presenter that he and his husband of five months, Elliott Spencer, have discussed the question and that he feels he does not have time to waste.
“We do talk about it,” said Fry. “And then I think I am such an age now … But maybe that is rather good. But we had better get on with it, if we do.”
The comedian and actor also tells Young that he suspects his friend Prince Charles would not “be especially pleased” by his confession that he took cocaine in Buckingham Palace, made recently in the third volume of his autobiography.
“But he would not point the finger towards the door and say, ‘never again’,” said Fry. “He is not a judgmental or a prissy man.”
In his own defence Fry underlines that he was fighting an undiagnosed mental health problem at the time and that he found he could change his mood with alcohol and street drugs, although he knows it was “a bad idea”.
“Once I was properly diagnosed, the need seemed to fall away,” he adds.
He is, he says, still in the “blissful”, “honeymoon” stage of marriage and he selects a romantic track sung by Ella Fitzgerald, Do I Love You?, to remind him of his husband during his seclusion on the imaginary island.
He also chooses the theme of long-running radio soap opera The Archers, Barwick Green, and a version of a Georgie Fame song performed by his friend Hugh Laurie.
Discussing his mental health problems and the conflict between the part of his nature that seeks society and the one that craves solitude, Fry tells Young that he suspects it is the “transgressive” nature of performing and of good comedy that attracts him.
He is an entertainer and not, he feels, a proper intellectual and he wishes he was an artist of any description; something he admires above everything else.
As a young man Fry remembers meeting Damien Hirst at the Groucho Club in Soho, London, and being fascinated by how sure of himself and of his own purpose in life Hirst seemed at the time.
He had, Fry recalls, an artist’s capacity “to look at one thing and concentrate and not to care what others think”.
Alongside his statutory eight chosen tracks, Fry departs for his desert island with a copy of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets and a large array of painting equipment as his luxury.
