When Ben Elton told his publisher that he was considering committing his life story to print, he was told: “The first thing you’re going to need to address is why so many people hate you.”
It’s a question he returns to time and again in the breathlessly frank and wonderfully entertaining memoir that resulted. How did this decent, thoughtful and very funny man, who wrote sitcoms that have lived for decades in the public’s affection, novels that topped bestseller lists all over the world, and plays and musicals that have put millions of bums on seats, cop so much opprobrium from the press and some of his peers?
Elton recounts many instances between the covers of the appropriately titled What Have I Done? He is the only human being to have been put into Room 101 twice. John Osborne, the original angry young man, famed for bringing kitchen-sink realism to theatre, wrote a piece for the Daily Mail headlined, “Why I hate Ben Elton”. And there was once a discussion on Newsnight “about why I was so completely and utterly sh*t”.
“I have always believed in the value of popular art,” he says, trying to explain the media’s aversion to him. “But the general presumption of the British arts-media establishment is that if something is much loved then it must be of less value. Look at the contempt that was heaped on Paul McCartney for his effortless ability to increase the sum of human happiness with almost every breath he took.”
RM Block
Reviews of Elton’s work, in whatever form, tend to play the man rather than the ball, often bubbling with furious irritation, the subtext of which is, in his own words, “for God’s sake, can Ben Elton please just f**k off?”
Much of it, he knows, had to do with his stand-up persona. The loud, opinionated, Thatcher-bashing motormouth from his days on Saturday Live (and briefly, later, Friday Night Live) was accused of breaking character by hanging out in Claridge’s, enjoying the company of celebrities and, worst of all, “writing a West End musical with a Tory”. The Tory was Andrew Lloyd Webber. The musical – his Dylan-goes-electric moment – was The Beautiful Game, about teenagers growing up during the Northern Ireland Troubles.
“I’m not a communist,” Elton says of the decades-old charge of not practising what he preached. “I never said I didn’t want to do well. I just want a more equitable society. My point was always, I’d rather pay more tax and not have to dodge homeless people in the street.”
Looking back, his decision to try his hand at stand-up comedy shaped his life more than anything he ever did as a writer. It defined him in the eye of the public, and everything he said and did subsequently was viewed through the prism of who he was on stage in the 1980s.
He only did it because he needed the money while the BBC was considering whether to commission The Young Ones, the first of three sitcoms he wrote, or co-wrote, that regularly feature in the top 10 of those Britain’s-most-loved lists, the others being Blackadder and The Thin Blue Line.
So does he ever wish he’d kept his big mouth shut?
“Would I have been better off not going on the telly?” he asks. “No. And I’ll tell you why. Because I love stand-up comedy. It’s a great art form and it’s a great medium for ideas. And I know that might sound a bit pretentious from someone who’s cracked as many nob gags as I have.”
A lower-middle-class childhood chatterbox from Catford, in south London, Elton has been financially secure since he was 21, “an unimaginable privilege” he owes to the success of The Young Ones, the anarchic, fourth-wall-obliterating anti-sitcom that introduced a whole range of words and phrases into the lexicon.
And not just in school playgrounds. When Boris Johnson referred to David Cameron, his predecessor as UK prime minister, as a “girlie swot” in a leaked cabinet note, he was, consciously or not, channelling the character Rik Mayall played almost 40 years earlier.
Elton’s meeting with Mayall at Manchester University, which he describes as “love at first sight”, altered the current of both their lives. He wrote the first episode of The Young Ones in one night, later typing it up while sitting on the toilet, with the singular purpose of trying to make Mayall laugh.
After writing 16 novels, eight TV series, three feature films, three West End plays and four musicals, he struggles to name a favourite piece of work. “I don’t dwell on it,” he says. “I tend to just move on to the next project.”
Many consider Blackadder Goes Forth, the last of three Blackadder series that Elton wrote with Richard Curtis, to be his crowning glory. It was a lot more enjoyable to watch than it was to write, he says. The wonder is that he and Curtis managed to remain such firm friends with John Lloyd, its producer, and with Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, its stars, after the torturous table reads.
“When the scripts were read on the Monday morning,” he says, “there was definitely the feeling of a Cambridge or Oxford tutorial, where they saw me and Richard as two nervous first years who were offering our essay to the group to criticise it.
“It was overly analytical, overly serious and, I think, at times destructive. I think there were episodes that could have been better. I particularly think of Blackadder III and Blackadder’s Christmas Carol. The scripts that Richard and I presented were better than what emerged after a lot of cigarette-smoking and cheek-sucking and frowning.”
Set in the trenches of the first World War, the fourth Blackadder is the most faithful to history. Elton used his own family’s war-strafed past as a muse in Two Brothers, his most personal novel. His father, a physics professor, was born into the German-Jewish middle class – Elton’s great-grandfather went to school with Kaiser Wilhelm II – and fled the country to escape the Nazis, later changing his name to Elton from Ehrenberg.
“He had a cousin who was adopted,” Elton says, “so his parents were Jewish, but he was not. Which didn’t mean anything in the 1920s. My father and uncle loved him, and he loved them. But then, in the 1930s, it meant everything, because my father and uncle were under prospective sentence of death, and their cousin suddenly had no family, because they were deemed subhuman.”
The great sadness is that it’s the only one of his novels that his father didn’t get to read, because of his Alzheimer’s.
“But his cousin,” Elton says, “who only just died a couple of weeks ago, age 106, had the story described to him, and he was thrilled. He said this book should be in German schools.”
Elton’s writing process has remained largely unchanged for more than four decades, notwithstanding the advice of a college tutor who told him, quite presciently, that he might make a decent playwright one day “if you can only forsake your ruthless pursuit of the one-line gag”.
“I’ve come to realise that there was something in that,” he says.
When Elton comes up with an idea he sets to work immediately, “throwing words at it”. Sometimes they stick, sometimes they don’t. His abandoned or rejected projects he refers to as “broken crockery”.
The demise of the three-set, live-audience studio sitcom, a mainstay of British comedy since the invention of television, is something he regrets deeply. Sitcoms such as The Office, as well as Ricky Gervais’s savage send-up of the medium with When the Whistle Blows, Extras’ show within a show, have made the old way of presenting comedy look tired and outdated, much as rock’n’roll did with skiffle.
“It’s a beautiful way of making television,” Elton says, “and, I would suggest, one of the true television art forms, the half-hour, recorded-over-three-hours, live-audience comedy playlet. I hate the snobbery that has led a whole generation of critics and opinion-formers to think that just because The Office seems cooler, that means it’s better.
“I love The Office, but why we have to venerate one form of comedy at the expense of another is beyond me. Dad’s Army is, by any measure, as great a sitcom as The Office, but why should the form of one be lauded while the other is not?”
The other factor that hastened the death of the traditional sitcom, Elton says, is that “all of the studios in London have been sold to build investment properties for foreign investors”, a legacy of Margaret Thatcher “privatising everything she could”.
A little bit of politics, as his old catchphrase had it. The name of the former British prime minister is seldom far from the conversation. Elton says he never loathed Thatcher – not in the way he came to loathe Boris Johnson. He regrets passing up an opportunity to have dinner with her out of fear that he would like her.
“I never despised Thatcher,” he says. “I disagreed with pretty much everything she said or did, and I think she was a deeply destructive force, but she was a respecter of parliamentary democracy and she was also, for what it’s worth, a politician of principle. I hated her principles, but she pursued them because she believed in them.
“The problem for me with Johnson is that he actively, and willingly, and with full knowledge, indulged in the destruction of those invisible constraints which society requires for people to behave properly.”
How can comedy respond to figures such as Johnson and Donald Trump?
“I think it’s very hard when somebody clearly, literally, does not give a f*ck about anything except themselves,” he says. “So making a relevant or useful joke about them, or satirising them, is pretty much impossible if somebody has discarded all constraints, all conventions, all common decency.”
At the same time, there is a new threat to expression that didn’t exist when Elton started writing: cancellation.
I know that I have personally made a small contribution to modern English through Blackadder, The Young Ones and other stuff
Comedy was once policed by the political right, he observes; now it’s policed by the left, by so-called progressives more interested in hating each other for not being pure enough than in taking on the real enemy.
So does the man who once railed against the saucy, seaside-postcard humour of Benny Hill believe that wokeism is killing comedy?
“I tend to say no,” he says. “We had woke when I was young. It was called political correctness, and I was blamed for it. I was the godfather of political correctness. People said I killed Benny Hill. Most things that people call political correctness gone mad is just stuff that, 50 years from now, we will be accepting as a given.
“But I would also say that the emergence of the internet, which is an engine for disinformation, and is almost exclusively destructive in my view, has made it possible for something that somebody says to be taken out of context, or misquoted, or misrepresented, and it changes who they are overnight.
“I think we do live in slightly dangerous times, and I’m afraid the right wing is weaponising it, using this perception that people are minding their Ps and Qs to an unnecessary degree to claim that freedom of speech is under assault, therefore they should be allowed to incite racial hatred under the guise of freedom of speech.”
In the past decade Elton’s career fortunes have undergone a late-life upturn, which his wife, Sophie Gare, refers to as his Benaissance. There was Upstart Crow, his acclaimed Shakespeare sitcom; All Is True, his feature film, also about Shakespeare, which was directed by Kenneth Branagh; a one-off revival of Friday Night Live, in 2022, which earned him a first Bafta since 1989; and a hugely successful return to stand-up comedy.
Now, with an autobiography charting his extraordinarily productive life of hits and misses, is Ben Elton, at 66, finally about to become that most curious of British things: a national treasure?
He laughs at the suggestion.
“I’ve had a great life,” he says. “I’m someone who discovered very early that he loved words, starting with PG Wodehouse and Noël Coward, and Morecambe and Wise, and the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney.
“I’ve made my living from doing something I love. And I know that I have personally made a small contribution to modern English through Blackadder, The Young Ones and other stuff, phrases and comic rhythms that I’ve either written or been part of writing, which now live on in English. And that, certainly, is treasure enough for me.”
What Have I Done? is published by Macmillan
