Watch a documentary about Stephen Fry, who has turned 50. It focuses on his qualities as a jack-of-all-trades, and pretty much declares him master of them all. John Sessions calls his novel The Hippopotamus a modern classic, up there with anything by Amis, Faulks, and so on. JK Rowling calls his autobiography one of the best she’s ever read. Prince Charles also sings his praises, citing Fry as the kind of person there should be more of: clever people who share and encourage rather than belittle or show off.

Phil Jupitus is a fan of his 80s radio sketch show Saturday Night Fry, as am I. Not only was it extremely inspired and witty, but it was an impressively early example of Fry sending up his own public persona:

A: ‘Ere! This tea tastes funny.
B: That’s not tea. That’s a potion which turns you into a parody of Stephen Fry.
A: So it does! Well, isn’t that a turn-up (voice changes into the actual Fry) … for the trousers. En passant, it’s a fascinating but worthless observation that the word ‘trousers’… (etc)

And this was in 1988, before A Bit Of Fry & Laurie and Jeeves & Wooster.

He’s a good example of one of my credos: the art of creating a deliberate persona based loosely on your natural self, then wielding it as both a shield for your anxieties, and a sword for dealing with the world. See also Wilde (obviously), Crisp, Warhol and more recently and most vividly, Russell Brand.

I’ve been listening to episodes of David Baddiel’s Radio 4 debate programme, Heresy. One from last year includes Russell Brand just as his career is properly taking off, and Baddiel comments on his newly-honed public persona:

Russell Brand: …and I think the Queen should sometimes hand out photographs of what she looks like while she’s having it off.
Baddiel: Having it what?
Brand: Having it off, having it away, you know. Monkey business, how’s yer father, that sort of stuff.
Baddiel: “‘aving it ‘orff?” Are you from the 19th Century?
Brand: Yeah! I likes it there, David.
Baddiel: You’re a Cockney bloke from the 19th century…!
Brand: Well, that’s when our nation was epitomised. I don’t think we’ve really progressed since then. So I thought I’d just linger there for a while, if I may. (to audience) I should never have done those ‘Rippins’, though!
Baddiel: But when I first met you, you were NOT stuck halfway up a Victorian chimney.

Re-invention in motion. A year on, and it’s impossible to think of Brand as anything other than this uniquely anachronistic ‘Artful Dodger Of Camden Market’ character. It suits him. But back to Stephen Fry.

As well as projecting a strong public persona, Fry is a commendable polymath, dodging the phrase ‘Best Known For’ as regards any single work.

And it’s the polymath inspiration that I’m musing on as I sit in a deckchair the next day, by the bandstand in Embankment Gardens. I’m surrounded by dozens of others, similarly deckchaired, all reading newspapers and books, but deliberately so. We are extras in a pop video.

The band are The Schema, aka Rhodri Marsden, another polymath. He’s a blogger, a GIF designer (or something to do with computers and image design anyway), a musician with Scritti Politti, a recording artiste in his own right as The Free French, and a freelance journalist. This pop video is part of a feature he’s doing for a newspaper about DIY music-making in 2007. He’s created a whole new band, written and recorded a song, distributed it online, and made a video, all so he can write about it in the press. Or is it the other way around? Is he a journalist who makes music, or a musician who writes for the papers? If the question can be posed at all, it’s usually a good thing.

Likewise the video director, Alex de Campi. She directs films (in a beret, I’m pleased to report) but also writes graphic novels. With no apparent bias to one or the other.

For the shoot, I have brought along a prop magazine: Your Hair Monthly. Which is mostly pictures of hairdos, with alliterative captions. ‘Crazy crops for sizzling summer’. That sort of thing. Bit of a waste of time, though, as I arrive too late for the crowd shots, having been caught up in morning chores. But I do manage to record some lip-synching as part of a rotation of guest singers.

David B and Anna S are there, as is Travis E & Emily, Angelique C (her hair now in Blond Transition), Rhoda B, Sarah PV, Ed J, Melissa, Jo B. Afterwards, many of us repair to a Charing Cross pub and are joined by Ben H and Jen Denitto (back from Scarlet’s Well playing in Denmark).

One of the video actors, Ed, is charming and friendly and comes up to me between takes. He reminds me of the more vocationally-geared thesbians I used to socialise with at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Actors who are just keen to do as much as possible, the more varied the work the better.

We discuss this in relation to the differences between a polymath and a dilettante. Dilettantes dabble. They ‘have a go’. Polymaths do their best in all the fields that interest them, and stick with it beyond ‘dabbling’. Or at least, that’s the spirit.

Standing on the bandstand, I gaze out at the trees in Burlington Gardens, and think about the old nature-related metaphors, applicable to polymaths. How trees just grow as tall as they individually can, without thinking it’s a competition, or thinking about comparisons, or worrying about being attacked.

It’s a very hippy-ish and luvvie-ish train of thought, I know. But it’s helpful when one slips into the whole ‘why bother’ mode. And I come away from the video shoot in a perfectly moan-free mood, for once.