Extracted from Stephen Fry's speech at the Golden Quill Award, 16 January 2000: "The British press with their customary grace, insight, delicacy and spirit have not always given Kenneth the credit we know he deserves. They insist on second guessing his motives. Is he trying to be Olivier? Is he trying to be Orson Welles? It is one of his more remarkable gifts that he never seems to let that get to him. I remember when Hugh Laurie and I were working on a film Ken directed - Peter's Friends - and Hugh and I (as we were) sitting in a corner trying to imagine the kind of reviews that say a Time Out reviewer would give this film. And we were working ourselves up into a frenzy of self-hatred and horror at what we'd imagine that they would say. 'This incestuous wank. This, this awful ghastly Oxbridge yick.' You know we were getting so upset about what we imagined. This is before we'd even turned over the camera for a single frame. We were already imagining how ghastly they were and, uh, Ken had overheard us and he just said "Dahling!" he said, I won't try to do the impression of him. He said, "people who read and listen to reviewers in Time Out constitute point nought nought one percent of the population. If you're worried about what reviewers are thinking, you're allowing them to dictate to you. If you really have contempt for them have some memory that nobody else cares about what reviewers think. And if you are the only person who does, then what does that say about you?" And I thought about that for a bit and I thought he's absolutely right. It is nonsense. It is very easy in our profession to get terribly upset and to allow ourselves to be dictated to by others and one of the bains of being British as we know, is a sort of self consciousness of feeling that if I do this what will people think I am trying to do? How will they interpret what I am doing? How will I interpret what they interpret I 'm doing. We drive ourselves in an appalling self-sodomitic kind of revolution. Like the dog running around in circles so fast that it injures itself twice. Ken is not like that. I don't know how he manages to avoid that. Perhaps because he wasn't born on the mainland. But simple and obvious as it sounds, he is not paralyzed by self-consciousness and that allows him to be free as an artist and it gives him a terrible and splendid clarity about what he does and that is a remarkable and wonderfully valuable thing.