Ben Elton

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.

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.

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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.

Ben Elton has always been a middle Englander

Most of the 'alternative' comedy of the Eighties was actually middle-class agnst.