Stephen Fry is good at taking himself seriously while pretending not to take himself seriously. But slowly, as he gets older and grander, his self-effacing mask is slipping. He’s becoming less and
less of a comedian, more and more a sanctimonious bore. Look at the way he has taken it upon himself to denounce, with such gravitas, Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain. In his interview with the BBC yesterday – see above – Fry insists that the Pope should be free to come to Britain. “How could I hold my head up if I objected to that?” he says. What Fry cannot not accept, he explains, is that the Pope’s time in the UK should be treated as a state visit.
Fair enough, I suppose.

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