The Crystal Cube
The Crystal Cube was a mockumentary television pilot written by and starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, broadcast on 7 July 1983 on BBC Two at 22:10. The pilot was one of Fry and Laurie’s first television appearances and the first show they had written themselves. However, the BBC chose not to take it to a full series, and Fry and Laurie did not get a chance to make their own programme for the BBC until 1987, when they created the pilot for A Bit of Fry and Laurie. — wikipedia
Starring: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane, John Savident, Arthur Bostrom, Roy Heather, Paul Shearer & Fanny Carby
Hugh and I emerged from our meeting stupefied but armed with a commission. John Kilby, who had directed The Cellar Tapes, would direct and produce the pilot show that we were now to write. We conceived a series that was to be called The Crystal Cube, a mock-serious magazine programme that for each edition would investigate some phenomenon or other: every week we would ‘go through the crystal cube’. Hugh, Emma, Paul Shearer and I were to be the regulars and we would call upon a cast of semi-regular guests to play other parts. … Back in Manchester filming Alfresco, we began to write in our spare time. Freed from the intimidation of having to match Ben’s freakish fecundity, we produced our script in what was for us short order but would for Ben have constituted an intolerable writer’s block. It was rather good. I feel I can say this as the BBC chose not to commission a series: given that and my archetypical British pride in failure it hardly seems like showing off for me to say that I was pleased with it. It is out there now somewhere on YouTube, as most things are. If you happen to track it down you will find that the first forty seconds are inaudible, but it soon clears up.
– Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles
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