“I have been trying to remember when I was last here,” begins Stephen Fry as he strolls on to the ADC stage. “I think it was a Tudor, but it might have been a Plantagenet King.” This was the first in a very long string of witticisms that kept the audience on their toes all afternoon. “I thought I’d come back,” he continues, “to talk to you about my time here at Cambridge. Particularly with respect to Drama: that fickle goddess who we all serve with such passion, commitment and sacrifice.”

Stephen’s career got off to a rocketing start back in 1981. He, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson were all in the Footlights tour show, The Cellar Tapes, which went on to win the first ever Perrier Comedy Award and be televised by the BBC. I first wonder whether having Hugh, Emma and him all up in Edinburgh felt like an extraordinary concentration of talent at the time.

“I don’t think so,” he replies, “for Hugh and I it never occurred to us that we could have a profession in… this business we call ‘show.’ I was content to stay here: growing tweed in the corner of some college with hair growing out of my nostrils by the age of 30. Hugh had a stranger ambition. He wanted to join the Hong Kong police force. He liked the ironed white shorts, and he’d read somewhere – this is very Hugh – that they were corrupt. He fancied himself going in and being the incorruptible shining light of the Hong Kong police force.” Lucky for us, then, that neither pursued these dreams; surely a parallel universe containing hairy-nostrilled-Fry and Hong-Konger-police-cadet-Laurie would be a somewhat impoverished version of our own.

“So no,” he goes on, “at the time it just doesn’t occur to you that you’re anything special. Because many of you grew up with us on your screens, we don’t seem like ordinary people. But, believe me, we are. Except,” he pauses mischievously, “I never go to the lavatory.”

What do he and Laurie lend each other in their famous collaborations? “Yes, well, Emma introduced us. She said you’ve got to go and meet this Old Etonian chap Hugh. So she took me to his rooms at Selwyn, and he was there with a guitar in his hand. He said, ‘I’m writing this song, but I’m a bit stuck.’ We did some lyrics together, finished the song and then right away he said, ‘Now let’s write a sketch.’ And this was before I’d had a cup of tea or anything!” You get the sense Fry is still a little put out at this appalling affront. “That was our first meeting,” he continues, “and from then I was absorbed into the Footlights. After Cambridge we did A Bit of Fry and Laurie.”

The 1987-95 BBC sketch show is, along with Jeeves and Wooster, perhaps one of Fry and Laurie’s most renowned collaborations. “We’d set ourselves a hard task, because we felt that every sketch should be a new one. We hadn’t realised the cunning Harry Enfield/Fast Show/Little Britain technique of doing the same seven sketches every half hour. But,” he says, with just ever so slightly feigned sincerity, “that’s no criticism on these magnificent comedy enterprises.”

Was his background with Footlights a burden when he was first starting out? “It sort of was. People always say, ‘Footlights are shit this year, have you heard?’ ‘Oh yeah, I heard they’re shit too.’ It’s the same every year. When we had our show in Edinburgh we could overhear people saying that in the street.”

Check out The Cellar Tapes on YouTube, and you can see for yourself that Footlights were anything but shit in 1981. “You feel hated,” he explains, “you feel hated because you’re at Oxbridge for a start. The real advantage of going to Oxbridge is that you never have to deal with not having gone. Being one of those people who say, ‘Yeeeah I thought of Oxford,’ ‘I’m sooo glad I never got in to Cambridge.’ Of course it’s meaningless: there are people here who are so stupid that you wonder, not just how they got in to Cambridge, but how they manage to sit the right way on the lavatory! So yes, there’s always a bit of that with Oxbridge and Footlights.”

At this point I invite the audience to jump in, and one of the members is immediately inquisitive: “You’ve said you have a need to please, but at Cambridge you did a huge number of shows: so how did you manage to please any of your supervisors?”

“Well,” Fry recounts, “fortunately doing English I didn’t have to go to any lectures. I was a master of going to the UL at the last minute and finding an essay on Middlemarch from some literary quarterly. My supervisor would say, ‘Such a profoundly good essay on Middlemarch,’ and there’d be a little voice inside me saying, ‘Ha ha, I haven’t read it!’ I didn’t do so well with dissertations, but I could swing through an exam like nobody’s business.”

Somebody then chirps up with: “Do you ever want, instead of doing lots of things really well, to do one thing really brilliantly?” “That’s very tactful of you,” Stephen immediately ripostes, putting his famed razor sharp wit to use. The audience member explained that he was a student playwright himself, and asked: “How do you move from doing stuff here at a very small level, to doing stuff on a much larger scale?”

“Don’t be cynical,” Fry replies, “don’t think it’s about the world and corporate structures. Put your effort in to your friendships. Find your sense of humour, your political anger, or whatever you want to do. In a strange way, success is like,” here, Fry pauses, “a living salmon; the harder you hold on, the further it flies from your grasp.” Aside from fish-based analogies, Fry feels luck to have attended the University. “I’ve been very fortunate: and this place, this place within this place, this very Theatre, has had a lot to do with it. The friendships I forged here have continued to this day. So do focus on your lives and your friendships, because that’s where the answers lie, in my opinion.”

In a place that can often feel so stiflingly obsessed with success in the negative sense (which teams do you play for? How many plays have you been in? What grade did you get?), it was refreshing to hear one of Cambridge’s most illustrious alumni rubbishing such cynicism.

Fry Me to the Moon

• 1957: Born in Hampstead
• 1977:      Studies English at Queens’ College
• 1986:      First series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie
• 1993:       His first novel, The Liar, published
• 2003:     Begins presenting QI
• 2006:     His first documentary, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, wins an Emmy
• 2008:     Travels across all 50 US states in Stephen Fry in America
• 2010:   Will be starring in Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice In Wonderland

Stephen Fry’s visit to the ADC last week was part of Upstaged, the ADC Theatre and Committee’s new programme of workshops and events. To find out more go to www.adctheatre.com/upstaged.