Time to Walk with Stephen Fry
“A morning walk seems to set me up for the day. It’s a terrible cliché but a truthful one. Like so many terrible clichés.” Stephen Fry is a hugely celebrated actor, comedian and writer. He’s known for everything from voicing the entire Harry Potter on audiobook (in the U.K.), diverse performances from Blackadder to Doctor Who to The Hobbit and for his public acknowledgement of having bipolar disorder.
And today, you can go for a walk with him. Apple Fitness+ is the subscription service designed around Apple Watch so that whether you’re watching on an iPhone, iPad or Apple TV, your heart rate metrics are up there on the screen.
But there’s one Fitness+ workout which is designed to work on Apple Watch alone: Time to Walk. Set out for a walk and you’ll be accompanied by the voice of the guest who—and here’s why this is such an intimate experience—is also out for a walk at the very same time.
On the walk, you’ll see photographs pop up on the Watch screen as required by the story the guest. Fry begins with talking about his childhood and how he was different from everyone else around him. Fry is a talented raconteur and his first story, about his childhood discovery of Oscar Wilde, first his plays and then the story of Wilde’s punishment for being gay. As Fry puts it, “And this is what changed me forever really, for a crime that I knew inside was something very deeply connected to me, that Wilde’s nature was my nature, what we’d now call sexuality, we shared.” Fry is amazingly eloquent about the nature of discovering your sexuality isn’t socially the most conventional. But he’s even more engaging, moving even, as he describes visiting where Wilde is buried in Paris.
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Fry is walking around Regent’s Park in London, my favorite park for walking my dog, as it happens and indeed I’ve seen him there several times. Fry talks about how important walking is to him and the walk that led him meet and team up with Hugh Laurie, his comedy partner and great friend.
His third walk deals with his mood swings and recounts how he walked out of a play he was performing in, in London’s West End when he felt his life was a failure. Cue an image on the Apple Watch showing a newspaper front page headline reading “Fears As Fry Goes Missing”. His analysis of mental health is intellectually rigorous, as you’d expect, but also inspiring.
Regent’s Park, as I can confirm, overlooks London Zoo, and walkers can peep from various points at the tigers, penguins, giraffes and Amy and Genghis, the pair of camels who are easily seen from your walk. You’ll see a photo of Fry and one of the camels.
This being Time to Walk, there’s music as well, beginning with Lou Reed’s Perfect Day—a wonderful accompaniment to any walk. Then there’s a tune I’ve heard Fry recommend before, Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass. “If ever there were a tune to make one skip, literally skip along. Cheerfulness spreads… sometimes complexity is just nothing to cheerfulness.”
And finally, there’s Unbelievable by EMF. “It makes you want to pogo, just listening to it. It’s a bit like a chilli sauce, it just spices up anything.”
Fry ends with a wonderful riddle about what the walk has meant to him, “How can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?” I’ll let you hear his answer for yourself.
This is a fabulously accessible listen, funny, touching and uplifting. Enough to keep you thinking. As you walk.
