The books
The TV shows | buy at Amazon.co.uk
About this website
This wonderful archive of Fry & Laurie scripts once had a home as part of the now-defunct GeoCities website. I visited it a lot.
Partly because of the announcement that GeoCities was to close, but mostly out of devoted fandom, I downloaded the website and repurposed its preformatted text – partly by hand but mostly via regular expressions – to preserve its usefulness for the long term. It's not a straight port. Here are some of the ways in which it differs:-
- There’s now a unique page for every sketch, rather than just those that appeared in the books.
- Previous & Next links allow you to skip from sketch to sketch in the book/programme order.
- All sketches — as well as book & programme indices — are available as XML for developers to play with.
- There’s a custom print stylesheet which strips out all the administrative debris.
- Where available, I’ve embedded video from other sources on sketch pages.
- The URLs are persistant and (fairly) guessable. The listings even use web-scale identifiers (ISBN for books, programme numbers for programmes).
That old GeoCities website contained this note:-
To the best of my knowledge, all of these books are no longer in print.
and a fairly lengthy disclaimer: None of the scripts found in this archive resulted from any work on my part. I have only created a means of accessing them. I was fortunate to have met an internet correspondence several years ago, who was kind enough to share his set of scripts, which he had painstakingly converted to html. I greatly appreciate his generosity.
Both of those statements continue to apply here.
This website is an intermittently ongoing labour of love designed to safeguard a long-standing treasure of the web and bring Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie’s older work to a wider audience; it’s not – save for a couple of Amazon Associates links – an attempt to cash in on their hard work. I really hope you enjoy it as much as I continue to. Here are some of my favourites:-