Stephen Fry felt ''guilt and shame'' after trying to take his own life.

The 62-year-old comic has been open about his struggles with bipolar disorder and has attempted suicide three times, most recently in 2012, and reflected how everything in his life had lost ''flavour or savour'' and felt ''hopeless'' when he reached his lowest points.

Speaking on the 'Art of Change: Nothing Concrete' podcast, he said: ''Inside you, you just do not see the point of anything. Nothing has flavour or savour. Nothing has any meaning. Everything is just hopeless.

''There's no future. There's no sense of anything ahead of you. And you have to hope something will stop you. In my case it was just failed attempts and waking up in a hospital.

''In your recovery, in the fact you realise people are kind enough to forgive you, because you feel such a fool and you feel you've done it to them - all the guilt and shame that comes from an attempt on one's life that's gone wrong - and it's in the recovery, it's when you suddenly find that flavour, and life has colour again.''

The former 'Blackadder' star - who married Elliot Spencer in 2015 - admitted listening to Beethoven was one of the things that helped his recovery.

He said: ''There is a healing quality to listening to it that helps. When combined with not drinking too much and walking and eating properly and all the other things that supposedly help one's mental health.

''One of the ways I cope with it is to bathe myself in music like Beethoven's and to think of people who have gone before me who have been lit by the flame of mania and doused by the icy water of depression and lived those lives of flaring up and going down and being close to the edge and how they have managed to do things and to achieve things and to retain their love and hope, and one clings to that.''