From Stephen Fry’s Podgrams, Series 2 Episode 3, Language

“And the worst bunch of this semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heavens sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing word out of a thing word every chance he got. He tabled the motion and chaired the meeting in which nouns were made verbs.”

“There are a series of men and women, whose whole job is to stop you from having people filmed in cars not wearing seatbelts or making phone calls. It’s called compliance. Compliance with what? Compliance with being an arsehole? Compliance with stupidity? Compliance with making this country a shithole? I cannot believe anybody would allow this to happen. I cannot believe that they wouldn’t just say, ‘No, I’m going to film it the way it should be.’ What’s the point of having cars, and backgrounds, and extras? What’s the point of trying to make it realistic? Why not just do it against cardboard, if you’re not allowed to do it as it really would be done? Because what? Because you’re setting a bad example?! Well what kind of example are you setting by betraying your country or shooting people in the face?! I don’t know where to begin and I don’t know where to end. I want to take the people responsible for this and squeeze the life out of them. I never want them to get up again. I want them to understand how insane they are. And I have a horrible feeling that they’re shaking their heads and saying something about how it’s wrong to set a bad example to children or something. Whereas, shooting people in the face, how many times do I have to say this, apparently isn’t setting a bad example. Oh my God I want to explode with fury. And the awful thing is they win. The directors and the producers of the program comply. Why don’t they just tell them to fuck off?” —

Stephen Fry’s Podgrams, Series 2 Episode 2, Beauty of Soul: Oscar Wilde
Stephen Fry discusses why Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales continue to exert the same pull over the imagination and emotions as they did when he first read them to his children in the 1880s.