Stephen Fry was ‘minutes away from suffering permanent brain damage’ and even death after ‘whacking cocaine up his nose’ at a party with comedian Ben Elton
20:35, 25 Oct 2025
Stephen Fry’s friend reveals his near-death experience(Image: Alan Chapman/Dave Benett/Getty I)
Celebrity Traitors star Sir Stephen Fry was minutes from death after a booze and cocaine binge, Ben Elton has revealed.
The comedian tells how he rushed his friend to hospital in a cab. He says doctors told him the genius former QI host had been “minutes away from permanent brain damage – and not many more minutes away from death”. Ben, 66, jokes: “I saved the most celebrated brain in showbiz.
“The throbbing, cerebral epicentre of national treasure-dom has throbbed on these last three decades ’cos of me.”
The revelation comes after Sir Stephen, 68, became one of the latest to leave BBC1’s Celebrity Traitors. Ben – co-writer of legendary 1980s sitcom Blackadder in which Stephen played bumptious toff Melchett – tells the story in his new autobiography What Have I Done?
READ MORE: ‘I raced rock stars to see who could snort longest line of coke before my crash’1990: From left to right, British comedy legends – Stephen Fry, Ben Elton, Robbie Coltrane, Griff Rhys-Jones, Mel Smith and Rowan Atkinson(Image: Getty Images)
They had been out for dinner in London in 1992 before going to an after-party together at the Islington home of late author Douglas Adams. Stephen, who he affectionately nicknames Bing, was house-sitting for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy creator at the time.
Ben describes how he and Stephen were smoking and drinking beer late into the night. Stephen, who didn’t normally drink beer, was tucking into “some weird organic Belgian stuff ” and snorting cocaine too, he claims. Ben says he was about to call it a night when his pal started to wheeze and then collapse in his chair with his head rolling.
Stephen Fry with his husband Elliott Spencer at the premiere of Rocketman in 2019(Image: NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Ben called a taxi which got them to hospital at around 2am, dragged him up the stairs to the main entrance and put him in a wheelchair. He says Stephen was slumped like a sack, almost falling out of the chair, and his breath sounded like a death rattle.
Worse for drink himself, Ben struggled to manoeuvre the wheelchair and ended up dragging it backwards. But as he tried to turn it in a corridor, Stephen lolled sideways and bashed his head against a wall. When they eventually arrived at reception, Ben realised he had to alert the doctor to his friend’s coke habit for medical reasons.
Stephen Fry was banished by his fellow faithful on The Traitors(Image: CREDIT LINE:BBC/Studio Lambert/Euan Cherry)
He said he felt like he was grassing an old mate up to an authority figure – and if word got out it could have led to Stephen’s arrest and the end of his career. While celebrity drug confessions are now commonplace, it would have been huge news in 1992 when drugs were much more taboo and laws were stricter. Ben recalls: “A doctor told me Stephen was in the emergency room.
‘Has he had much alcohol?’ the doctor asked. ‘Yes, a lot,’ I said, ‘and many cigarettes.’ “I took a deep breath. ‘Also, I need to tell you that I think it’s possible – quite probable, in fact certain – that he has had cocaine.’ Have you any idea how hard that was?”
When he was shown into the emergency room, Ben thought his friend looked like a corpse, with grey skin, almost lifeless eyes and numerous tubes and wires attached. It was then that Ben decided he had to confess that he had told the doctor Stephen had been doing coke.
“He squeezed my hand and whispered that it was fine,” Ben recalls. “‘Don’t worry,’ he added between mercifully longer breaths. ‘I’ll be writing an entire book about it in 20 years’.” Ben says in the book that he has never been into hard drugs but Stephen has written about his 15-year addiction to cocaine in his own 2014 memoir More Fool Me.
In it he claims he inhaled the powder in Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, at Clarence House, and Sandringham – and even snorted it off a urinal in the House of Commons. The Jeeves and Wooster star wrote: “I am confessing to having broken the law and consumed, in public places, Class A sanctioned drugs.
Stephen joins the cast of the first Celebrity Traitors UK – who have so far failed to catch any of their enemies(Image: CREDIT LINE:BBC/Studio Lambert/Cody Burridge/Artwork – BBC Creative)
“ I have bought gorgeous palaces, noble properties and elegant honest establishments into squalid disrepute.” Claiming that he had wasted “tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as many hours,” on the drug, Stephen said that, by the end of the 1980s, “I would no more consider going out in the evening without three or four grams of cocaine in my pocket than I would consider going out without my legs”. He since realised he had used drink and drugs to self medicate and declared:
“I wouldn’t recommend cocaine to my worst enemy.” In the last three weeks Stephen, who was knighted in March, has been one of the top stars of Celebrity Traitors but exited on Thursday night.
He said afterwards: “It’s a word that’s overused as people give them as Christmas presents, but it really was a remarkable experience. That was just wonderful to get to know some extraordinary people I would probably otherwise never have met.” Sir Stephen’s representatives were approached for comment.
* What Have I Done? By Ben Elton is out now published by Macmillan
