Viv Hardwick reports on a new TV version of Tom Brown's Schooldays which stars ex-boarding school boy Stephen Fry.

AS a boarding school boy from the age of six, Stephen Fry was an ideal candidate to play the reforming headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold in ITV1's latest adaptation of Tom Brown's Schooldays, even if he'd been expelled for being wayward during his own younger days.

Fry describes the famous story about Rugby School as similar to today's Harry Potter where a boy arrives at a strange school and makes good solid friends and a terrible enemy. Endeavour, loyalty, good nature and bravery help Tom (played by newcomer Alex Pettyfer) to succeed.

He says: "A boarding school then was quite unlike anything we can imagine - they wore top hats and waistcoats and bow ties, they looked dead cool. They smoked pipes and drank beer for breakfast. They had gin stills, beagle packs to go hunting, and guns in their studies.

"Tom gets on the wrong side of this extraordinary figure called Flashman, a bully. It is a marvellous story of Brown having to stand up to the bully: he gets roasted against the fire, he gets beaten and fights, oh it's just a fantastic adventure."

Arnold was a real historical figure and Fry based his character on his old headmaster at Uppingham called J C Royds. He explains: "He was utterly charming, but he sort of knew it was part of his job to be terrifying - and so he was."

Fry explains that it was a family tradition to attend a boarding school and all the boys he knew went away.

"It doesn't mean that I wasn't home sick, but I never felt betrayed. I could see my mother was more upset than I was at the station seeing me off."

So was he bullied at school?

"No, there was no bullying at all when I was at school. But Tom Brown would definitely still be the model as everyone knew the story of Flashman and Tom Brown and the roasting and the tossing in the blanket - I am very glad to say it didn't happen at my school."

As for his own exploits, Fry admits that three words led him to leave boarding school. They were "you are expelled".

"I was kicked out of Uppingham and I was kicked out of another school. I was a terrible teenager, no school could mould me. I suppose I went to places where you weren't allowed to go and I shoplifted and that was the final straw. I was not a good example as a modern schoolboy," confesses the actor who adds that he was getting a beating a day at one point for being bad.

He explains: "We were always given the option of either 300 lines or three strokes of the cane - it hurts but it's gone. Three hundred lines is interminable as you had to copy out Roman poetry accurately and it just takes forever and is so boring. So I was quite happy to have the strokes."

When Fry taught at a private school in the year before he went to university he couldn't face handing out corporal punishment when a boy misbehaved. "I picked up this slipper, and I went smack on the back of my hand, and said 'Now let that be a lesson to you'."

During filming Fry did have to suffer when he filmed a scene as Arnold caning a pupil called Tadpole (Dane Carter) where he was supposed to miss the boy's hand.

"Well of course, you know, one isn't going to get through without a mistake and I really did sting him on the hand. I felt rather bad about it, and the next morning he said 'My mum took me to the doctor because of my hand. Apparently it is not a fracture, well it is a fracture but it is what they call a hair line, a green stick fracture so it's not the whole bone that's broken'.....My jaw dropped and then he went 'Ha, ha, got you!' So not much respect there."

* Tom Brown's Schooldays, ITV1, New Year's Day, 9pm.

Published: 30/12/2004