Ben Elton

I don't know who it is who makes up the studio audiences for sitcoms or what they're injected with before the recording begins, but, as Ben Elton's The Wright Way demonstrated last week, there is virtually nothing that they won't laugh at. Like laboratory animals trained to respond to some arbitrary stimulus, they react to anything that is even vaguely punch-line shaped. This turns out to be quite handy in Vicious, which is full of lines that have the cadence of comedy but often prove to be devoid of wit when examined more closely.

Or to employ a wit so dubious that an appalled silence might be a more reasonable response. An example: "You let a complete stranger use your loo?" says Frances de la Tour's character when she discovers that Freddie and Stuart's lavatory is occupied. "What if he comes out and rapes me?" Gales... no... tornadoes of laughter.

The basic schtick in Vicious is high-camp bitchiness, a form that reached an apogee in the American sitcom Will & Grace (on which Gary Janetti also worked). This is a sadly depleted version, though, and it's delivered by McKellen and Jacobi as if they're playing in Wembley Stadium and only the upper tiers are occupied, with a heavily semaphored effeminacy that seems to belong to an entirely different era.

That is partly the point, of course - they're supposed to be social fossils - but unfortunately nothing else in Vicious provides a believable backdrop for their self-dramatisations, from the inexplicable eagerness of the young straight neighbour to insert himself into their lives, to the jerky clockwork of the plot. Only Marcia Warren comes out of it with her dignity intact, as an absent-minded friend. Seems almost blasphemous to say it but McKellen and Jacobi should watch her and take some notes on comic acting.

Once upon a time, Ben Elton wrote sharp, funny comedy that aimed for a mass audience yet didn't seem to care too much if it was too close to the knuckle for the great British public. But that was a while back. Now, sadly, the health-and-safety-culture-spoofing The Wright Way, which this week finds Gerald trying to prove that playing conkers is dangerous, merely seems rather dated. Quite remarkably, it also proves that, yes, you can try to squeeze too many cock and humping jokes into 30 minutes.

Ben Elton: ex-darling of the Left who can do no right

Artsy liberals are determined not to laugh at their old hero Ben Elton's new sitcom The Wright Way.

I don't know what I was doing in 1995, apart from watching a lot less telly than I do now. Ben Elton at that time was sending himself up. One sketch parodying his oh so right-on image had him chasing Page 3 models round a park to reprimand them and tricking heterosexual couples into becoming gay. And did that stem the sneers? Not really, and then he gave his critics more ammo by selling out to the West End and its Tory-supporting high priests. Thus, The Wright Way is his first sitcom in 11 years.

A soft target Elton may be, but some things have simply got to be done: this is dire. Jokes from the 70s. Jokes suggesting The Wright Way might therefore be ironic (it's not; just dire). Slapstick involving hand-dryers. Knob jokes. Jokes about speed-bumps (the "hero" is a health and safety officer). Jokes about how long women spend in the bathroom. Jokes about the M25. Jokes which end: "...the same excuse the Nazis tried". Unbelievably, the studio audience laugh. That free wine must have been very good.

New BBC comedy by Ben Elton is the worst sitcom ever

Everything is diabolical. From so-called jokes about women taking forever in the bathroom, to the word "erection".

Do comedians lose their edge as they get older?

Ben Elton's new BBC sitcom The Wright Way has received a critical mauling. At 53, is he too old now to cut it as a comedian?

Somewhere out there in this mad world, where Uruguayans bite Serbians and we are all travelling to hell in a handcart, there are presumably many people who find sitcoms like The Wright Way funny. It's hard to believe, but we have little choice, because the alternative explanation for the existence of Ben Elton's ranty new show is that the BBC knew it was a mirthless dog and still commissioned it on the strength of Elton's name. Either way, you have to laugh, or else you'd cry.

The saying goes that if you've got nothing good to say, say nothing at all. So when it comes to Ben Elton's new BBC sitcom The Wright Way, my review is as follows.

That is all.

Grace Dent on TV: The Wright Way (BBC1)

Ben Elton has created an admirably broad new comedy. Shame it's not admirably funny.

The Wright Way, a sitcom about a punctilious health and safety officer, should itself carry some sort of health warning. It left me with a raging headache; I left it about halfway through. Critics, like the captain on a sinking ship, should really stay to the very end, but I am a middle-aged man with a sense of his own mortality, and this was 15 minutes I would never get back.

The show is written by Ben Elton so, as you would expect, there are some good lines, neat turns of phrase and a solid narrative structure. However, it is a long way from his best work, with far too great a dependence upon the supposed hilarity inherent in brand names. Horlicks, anyone?

But even if he'd scripted a masterpiece of Blackadder proportions, it would still have been scuppered by the performances, which are uniformly terrible. It is as though the entire cast has come straight from an evening class in sitcom acting for beginners and can't wait to try out their comedy voices. Nobody, but nobody, behaves like a human being.

Worst offender is the show's star David Haig, who has chosen to give his character Gerald a hideous nasal twang all too reminiscent of Chris Barrie's in The Brittas Empire, a sitcom I also found unwatchable. Gerald is a boring person, but the show has fallen into the trap of actually making him dull company for the viewer.

It is often said that a successful sitcom is one populated by characters you want to spend some time with. Gerald, meanwhile, is a character I would like to spend some time with in a locked room, armed with a baseball bat.

The horror of the acting is compounded by a laughter track evidently laid down in a lunatic asylum. Mildly amusing lines are met with an ear-shattering explosion of guffaws, while slightly clever sight gags receive the kind of rapturous ovation that Pavarotti spent a lifetime chasing.

So, to sum up, I didn't like The Wright Way. But had the cast played the characters instead of the comedy, uninterrupted by such a hysterical soundtrack, I suspect it could have been quite watchable. We will never know.