I normally love Stephen Fry (I watch QI religiously) but I didn't actually enjoy the episodes that I watched. He was in the central west and while he was very pleasant to the people he was with or who were showing him around he was a bit mocking/snide about them once he left. I thought when those people came to watch the show they would be disappointed and maybe hurt.
Perhaps I jsut caught the wrong episodes, but it was enough to turn me off.
“Making so bold” as to mention something about “Stephen Fry in America”, but not to do with cheese – I don’t watch television, but have read “the book of the series”; a particular item in which, greatly pointed up for me the mocking / snide aspect which Iris mentions.
In the section for one of the Pacific North-West states (I think, Oregon) – Fry interviews a man who claims to have had a close and frightening encounter with the putative giant ape-man creature said by some to live in those parts, commonly called “Bigfoot”. This is a topic in which I have an interest – as to “existence or not”, I’m basically on the fence. Fry is an outspoken advocate of mainstream science, and hater of what he sees as unscientific / irrational notions – he very clearly thinks that the idea of an unknown-to-science giant primate roaming around the western parts of North America, is crazy.
He has every right to hold this opinion. However, in the book, he does an in my view totally vicious, and personal, hatchet-job, on the “bigfoot-witness” guy – heaping scorn and ridicule on him and everyone with similar notions on this matter, and expressing disquiet and alarm, about such people being allowed to breed. Publicly proclaiming (whatever he might think in the privacy of his head) sentiments such as this, about folk who merely hold a – likely eccentric – belief (maybe supported by perceived personal experience), which does no harm to anyone else – IMO, that stinks. Reading the just-described, caused my – hitherto quite high – regard for Mr. Fry, to plummet way, way down. He may be clever and witty beyond description or telling; but I discern in him, a wide thoroughly-nasty streak.