Lunchtime With Stephen Fry and Edwin Moses

Acclaimed actor, presenter, writer, and national treasure Stephen Fry speaks to two time Olympic gold medalist Edwin Moses.

Who is Edwin Moses?

Edwin Moses, an Olympic Champion, sports administrator, diplomat and businessman, is one of the most respected and recognised athletes of our time. His experience as a distinguished Olympic champion and world record holder has earned him the esteem of the inter-national sports community. Moses, a physicist from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, is known for utilising the applied sciences to perfect the technical aspects of his athletic performance in his event, the 400 meter hurdles. This knowledge also enabled him to create, implement and administer the world's most stringent random and out-of-competition testing systems for performance enhancing drugs in sports.

Moses won the trials for the 1976 in the 400 meter hurdles with an American record of 48.30 seconds, making his first Olympic team. At the summer Olympic Games in Montreal, Canada, he became the Olympic Champion, bettering the Olympic and World Records with a time of 47.63 seconds. For the next decade he dominated the hurdles accumulating the most amazing string of consecutive victories ever amassed by an individual athlete. Over a period of nine years, nine months and nine days, from August 1977 until May 1987, Moses collected 122 straight victories, 107 of these were finals; this winning streak has remained unbeaten and stands in the Guinness Book of Records to this date.

Who is Stephen Fry?

Stephen Fry was born in 1957 and educated at an unfeasibly large number of educational establishments, most of which rapidly tired of him. At Cambridge University, he met and worked with, amongst others, Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie, a life long friend and comedy partner.

There followed Alfresco, a comedy series for Granada (along with Laurie, Thompson, Ben Elton and Robbie Coltrane) three series of Blackadder, four series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie with Hugh Laurie (both for BBC) and four series of Jeeves and Wooster for Granada.

Stephen Fry continues to host the BBC quiz show QI, now in its 10th series, and has also presented the documentaries Stephen Fry's 100 Greatest Gadgets, Planet Word, Stephen Fry on Wagner, Last Chance To See, Fry In America, Manic Depression, HIV And Me and The Machine That Made Us all for the BBC.

Since making his film debut in The Good Father in 1985, Fry has continued to make regular film appearances, winning awards for performances throughout his career. He starred in Kenneth Branagh�s Peter's Friends and achieved much critical acclaim for his role as Oscar Wilde in Wilde. As a stage actor he has performed in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On, Michael Frayn's Look, Look, Simon Gray's The Common Pursuit and Cell Mates.
Fry is also a celebrated author. His work includes best-selling novels, an autobiography, as well as a book on poetry form, The Ode Less Travelled. He is well known amongst a younger generation as the reader of the audio book versions J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels.