Fry lights up pipe-smoking award

Comedian, novelist and raconteur Stephen Fry today received the Pipe Smoker of the Year Award 2003.

The star, whose huge talents have seen him pursue a diverse career including writing screenplays, acting and directing films, became the 39th recipient of the prestigious award at a ceremony at the Savoy Hotel in central London.

He joins an illustrious list of past winners, stretching back to 1964, which includes Eric Morecambe, Sir Harold Wilson, JB Priestley and Tony Benn.

The award, voted for by The Pipe Smokers’ Council, was created to honour distinguished enthusiasts and raise cash for charity.

Fry, 45, said: “It is a singular and distinct honour and I’m entirely delighted.

“It makes me feel all grown up because pipes are very grown up.”

But the famous polymath who has just completed directing Bright Young Things, his adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, revealed he first began puffing away not at tobacco but at tea.

“I was about 14 and used to borrow my father’s pipe and smoke tea. I had read somewhere it gave you a buzz.”

Fry, though, became a real tobacco-smoking tamper, scraper and reamer before going to Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1979.

He said: “I really started smoking properly before university while teaching at a prep school, Cundall Manor in North Yorkshire. I was closer in age to some of the boys rather than the teachers so I wanted something to make me feel grown up.

“The boys used to call me the ’towering inferno’.”

Fry now has around 20 pipes, his favourite an Astleys pipe with Sherlock Holmes brand tobacco, though he prefers a shorter, straighter clay or briar as opposed to the famous detective’s curly calabash pipe.

But the two quintessential Englishmen do share the same reason for puffing away – to help them concentrate and solve a problem. “That is what most pipe smokers tell you, it helps you concentrate.

“If I am writing in the morning, I line up five to six pipes along the desk, and you then smoke one after another, each one taking about an hour.

“The comfort is when you are doing something, unlike cigarettes you can clamp it in your teeth and do other things, whether tinkering on the piano, writing or solving problems. They are great aides.

“After smoking them, then you go through the ritual of poking and pulling and cleaning them.”

The actual award, a gold-mouthed pipe, will be presentedguid post-lunch ceremony this afternoon.

He has already received a special commemorative, fully working pipe to echo his interests – a BBC 1950s “Type A” box microphone atop three books, on writing, pipe-smoking and cricket.

Fry added: “I am the most famous puffer in Britain – and you can take the ’er’ off that.”