The BBC Radio show had become something of an institution in the 45 years since it was first broadcast. In 2012 there had been some special commemorative episodes made for television. This was one of those.
Just a few minutes earlier I had imagined being a panelist on the show and extemporising for sixty seconds, without hesitation, deviation nor repetition on Leonardo da Vinci and finding myself commenting - possibly to Fry himself - about the stigma that Leonardo would then have had to have suffered because of his illegitimacy and how it would have prevented his becoming a Florentine student of Law or Medicine,
"Autre temps, autre moeurs."
At 20:53 of the clip, a challenging Fry corrects Paul Merton over a previous reference of Fry´s to Oscar Wilde´s novel The Picture of Dorian Grey re the subject on which Merton was trying to speak: The Portrait in my Attic. Fry points out that in Wilde´s novel the portrait is actually kept in a school room upstairs.
He then says that people don´t tend to have school rooms these days;
He then says that people don´t tend to have school rooms these days;
"Autre temps, autre moeurs."
The picture of Dorian Grey has become warped and hideous for it served as the repository of all of the faults Grey ever evinced. Of his stigmata. Whilst his physical body retained the pristine beauty of a youth of twenty-three.
Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for homosexuality. For that, then, was a crime.
Stephen Fry is gay.
