Ben Elton

It's becoming harder and harder to remember the days when Ben Elton was funny - his latest comedic misfire was thankfully axed after a single series, with the BBC's controller of comedy commissioning Shane Allen blaming Twitter for "crucifying" the show. What Shane forgot is that Twitter is full of people - it was people that hated The Wright Way. All of the people.

David Baddiel - portrait of the artist

The comic talks about the mundanity of fame, the difficulty of doing alternative comedy when you went to Cambridge, and how Andrew Lloyd Webber keeps mistaking him for Ben Elton.

It appeared as if the BBC had little confidence in Father Figure from the get-go as it was broadcast in the post 10 O'Clock News death slot. Sitcoms previously scheduled in this slot include the horrid Citizen Khan and Ben Elton's recently atrocity The Wright Way.

To be fair to Father Figure, it was slightly better than both of those shows as it did have an innate likeability to it which was mainly due to the cast. At the same time though it had plenty of problems including one-note characters, a predictable script and gags you could see coming a mile-off.

The story of the first episode saw Tom Whyte (Jason Byrne) cooking a dinner for his neighbours to apologise for covering them in baked beans while they were trying to sunbathe. Then followed a well-worn script where the juvenile central character attempted to cook while fending off the interference from his family members. His mother (Pauline McLynn) tried to take over with the cooking while his friend Roddy (Michael Smiley) steals a giant cake from a hotel lobby. Meanwhile Tom's children are incredibly annoying and his wife Elaine (Karen Taylor) is presented as a serious alcoholic.

The episode climaxed with a scene which saw the neighbours being hit by the cake and covered in chocolate mousse while Tom's mother punched him in the face with a roast chicken. If any of these situations are putting a smile on your face then you probably would've enjoyed Father Figure more than I did.

The show was yet another addition to the list of poor sitcoms that have been produced in 2013 and to me Father Figure feels incredibly dated. As I said, the majority of the cast are incredibly likeable, particularly Pauline McLynn whose gift for physical comedy is put to good use here. But ultimately Father Figure feels doomed to fail and after watching the show I felt like Tom's neighbours - incredibly embarrassed and ever so slightly dirty.

Phoneshop creator Phil Bowker on the art of TV sitcoms

The creator of E4's hit sitcom PhoneShop, Phil Bowker, has spoken to Digital Spy about the secret of his show's success, his contempt for Twitter critics and why he feels sorry for Ben Elton.

If awkwardness were an Olympic event, Arthur Strong would be a gold medallist. The music-hall aficionado staggers around as if glued to an ironing board, and has to forcibly eject words as if passing a kidney stone. Like that other fully realised comic character John Shuttleworth, he polarises opinion, but to his loyal fans the Count is cryingly funny.

There are shades of Hancock this week as our delusional artiste lands a part in a radio play (the way he deflates the pseuds' corner of a read-through is delicious). As in previous weeks, the plot is small but neat. And the modern practice of injecting dramatic heft into sitcom (Tom Hollander in Rev, Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi in Vicious and now Rory Kinnear as Arthur's unfortunate new best friend) is paying rich rewards. The series has been recomissioned after just one episode - take note, Ben Elton. Long live Count Arthur!

I used to enjoy, very much, listening to Count Arthur Strong. But that was when it was on the radio, and I was in the bath. Six-thirty of a pm, the purple glower of dusk, risotto glooping away gently on the stove, and life doesn't get much better than that. I fully appreciate that expectations can vary hugely according to, for instance, personal childcare needs, personal mental health, local proliferation of guns, wholly imagined threat of incipient alien attack, etc. But the programme used to make me smile. Now, instead, it's on my television, and that is, I think, a mistake, and not just because of the cricked neck and spilt Radox as, bath-bound, I crane my head towards the living room.

It wasn't bad. It was co-written by Graham Linehan, of Father Ted fame, which you would expect to have accorded it some comedy chops, and original creator Steve Delaney, who played the titular count, a pompous, bumbling malaprop-trap from Doncaster. The problem was this: it wasn't at all funny. There's recent history here, in the form of executives merely thinking a "name" is enough - in this case, Linehan; a couple of months ago, and in a far, far worse case of unfunny, Ben Elton - to create, as they probably say, albeit with knowing cynicism, comedy gold. In the end, it was just a something about a pompous bumbling man from Donny. Quite why it ever worked on radio I'm now struggling to understand.

Here's a thought. All generalisations are dangerous, even this one, but: few programmes migrate well from radio. There's Have I Got News For You, a spin-off from the (still extant, and wickeder than ever) News Quiz; and Tony Hancock's finest half-hours were actually on the screen. But executive shoes corridor-crunch on the ossified bodies of "hit" shows that died on the transition to screen. Just a Minute became just a dirge. Famously, Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's... was a roiling trough of rhino poop. Not even that lovely Martin Freeman, in the marginally better movie, could pull it off, and the original TV series was a travesty. The phrase "Zaphod Beeblebrox had two heads" works fine-ish as a line in a book, or spoken on the radio (actually it wasn't that funny, ever) - when we can imagine it, in the bath, in the wonder of the mind's eye. On TV, some poor actor was actually given a kind of "ball of saggy painted calico, with eyes" to waggle on his shoulders as a second head. It's the difference between having to show it, and trusting the listener/reader to, basically, "insert image here": and, incidentally, the reason why Lucky Jim, the funniest book of the 20th century, has never been filmed, other than execrably. Surreality, wordplay and extended interior monologues would seem particularly vulnerable to becoming lost in transition: but I don't know quite why I'm banging on about things that don't work on TV, when there were so many last week that did. It's just that I... well, I quite liked lying in the bath. Imagining.

Wright Way goes wrong: how social media is changing TV

As Ben Elton and Peter Kay feel the heat of Twitter's critics and communal viewing makes a comeback, Mark Lawson asks if broadcasters are running scared.

It seems aeons ago now, but Ben Elton's Young Ones once featured its own spoof ITV sitcom-within-a-sitcom called Oh Crikey, a typical "Oops, where's me trousers" farce. So it's while gazing slack-jawed at The Wright Way that you appreciate just what a journey its creator has been on, from there to here. In tonight's final episode (fingers crossed), Gerald writes F.A.N.N.I.E.S on a whiteboard, Ade Edmondson's daughter spouts more stunningly unfunny patois, and a nation roars in unison: "Your name's Ben Elton - goodnight!"

Beeb is ready to chop Ben Elton's sitcom flop

After being slated as TV's worst-ever sitcom, I hear Ben Elton's disastrous comedy The Wright Way is set to be quietly forgotten.