Ben Elton

Ben Elton: Snobbery's killing the great British sitcom

Blackadder writer says sitcoms are a 'truly original art form' but now critics and social media pundits dismiss them before they get a chance to grow on people.

It would have been great if The Wright Way had worked. Ben Elton - instrumental in the creation of classics like The Young Ones and Blackadder - had by 2013 completed his transition from comedy hero to punchline (Get a Grip, his current affairs show featuring Alexa Chung, hadn't helped). Elton's place in the narrative of British TV history was becoming incomprehensible. But The Wright Way, sadly, was irredeemably bad.

Centring on an uptight health-and-safety worker called Gerald Wright (your cue to groan internally), we follow the man of the half-hour as he battles with his daughter, her girlfriend Victoria, and his colleagues. For its laughs, The Wright Way mines the topic of health and safety regulation, which is bad enough for the most radically right-on comedian of the 80s. But its main crime has to be the treatment of Beattie Edmondson, who plays Victoria. Jennifer Saunders' daughter was dealt one of the worst hands in sitcom history when she was cast as the cringe-a-second DJ, who recites youth jargon (and Jamaican patois) so awkward it's like she's a 54-year-old father of three channeling the spirit of a 21-year-old (oh...). Elton may have been willing to further sully his name, but he didn't have to drag the next generation down with him.

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Predictable in places, perhaps, but the ridiculous nature of some of these plot lines is arguably in the same vein as of the bards own greatest comedies.