Ben Elton

10 sitcoms even worse than The Wright Way

Ben Elton's sitcom The Wright Way has been universally panned by critics - but it's not the only sitcom which singularly failed to raise a snigger...

Ben Elton has always been a middle Englander

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

"Don't get me started," said Gerald, Baselricky town council's health and safety officer, on a couple of occasions during the first episode of Ben Elton's new sitcom The Wright Way (BBC1). If only Elton had listened to Gerald, everyone would have been a great deal happier. Lame doesn't begin to describe this car-crash of a comedy that involved actors standing around awkwardly doing their best at damage limitation. There was no point in them even trying to make the script convincing.

Several well-telegraphed knob gags; a slapstick routine involving taps that wasn't funny the first time, never mind the second; "comedy" lesbians; a litany of familiar Middle England rants about women taking too long in the bathroom, loading the dishwasher properly and how the modern world has generally gone mad; and a lead character who plans to shut down the whole of the town to reduce a speed bump by 6mm. I've had more laughs reading a Richard Littlejohn column. The Wright Way is a sitcom that would have looked and felt badly dated in the 1970s.

What's happened to Elton? If he intended to write a latter-day Reggie Perrin, someone should have told him he had missed the mark badly. I know there are a lot of people who have never liked him or found him funny - he did too often mistake shouting for humour - but his heart was in the right place and he took aim at worthwhile targets. Back in the 80s, when a great many entertainers were riding the Thatcher - sorry to bring her up again, but it's unavoidable - bandwagon of self-interest, he was in the vanguard of those with a vocal, leftist opposition.

If nothing else, Elton made you think; in The Wright Way, he does precisely the opposite. More unforgivably, he's not even funny with it. Has he mellowed, sold out or just given up? Maybe he feels that Thatcher won so there's no point in fighting old battles. Either way, he has written a sitcom that only someone like the late baroness would probably have enjoyed. And if that doesn't give him sleepless nights, it ought to. My name is John Crace, good night.

Wright Way took a very wrong turn on the comedy front

Back in the day, Ben Elton - the author of this crime against comedy - was a motor-mouthing angry young stand-up, manning the barricades against Maggie Thatcher and all things Establishment. Who knew he would end up writing a sitcom that makes Mrs Brown's Boys look like cutting-edge satire?

Last night's viewing - The Wright Way, BBC1

Like Dr Frankenstein, Ben Elton appears to have created his new sitcom, The Wright Way - his first for more than 10 years - by exhuming the body parts of different comedies and stitching them together. The result is an odd, lurching affair, sometimes funny but occasionally so groan-inducing that you want to gather a mob with torches and pitchforks.

The Wright Way savaged on Twitter

Twitter really cracked knuckles and got its collective snark on last night to appraise Ben Elton's new sitcom The Wright Way.

Ben Elton mauled by critics after Wright Way goes wrong

Critics accused Elton of producing precisely the kind of dated sitcom that the "alternative comedy" uprising he once spearheaded, with its zero tolerance for sexist attitudes, set out to destroy.

Ben Elton's first sitcom in over a decade feels old and new at the same time. The first joke is about how long women spend in the bathroom, and you groan inwardly. Then it turns out the man making the joke - our uptight antihero, played by David Haig - shares a house with his daughter and her girlfriend. "What is the point of being a lesbian if you continue to act like a normal woman?" he demands.

The tone is old-school. Haig, whose character, Gerald Wright, rants about everything, does exasperation well (and a lot). Oddly his character is the thing middle-aged curmudgeons hate most - a health and safety officer.

Ben Elton's The Wright Way - What went wrong?

It is easy to knock Ben Elton because of his involvement in We Will Rock You, but that does not explain quite how bad The Wright Way is.

I wonder if Ben Elton saw a Channel 4 Comedy Showcase pilot called Fun Police a couple of years ago about an ­overzealous health and safety department at a local council. I only ask because his new sitcom stars David Haig as overzealous health and safety officer Gerald Wright.

Gerald's gripes about modern life sound suspiciously like one of Ben Elton's old stand-up routines, only done in a comedy voice.

And almost everyone in this has a comedy voice, except for Beattie Edmondson, who has two. She plays Gerald's daughter's lesbian girlfriend - a modern flourish in a show as old-fashioned as one of Elton's spangly suits.

You can feel the heavy hand of ex-My Family director Dewi Humphreys all over this, while the laughter track suggests an ­audience rupturing their spleens over gags that are smirk-worthy at best. But Mina Anwar who plays Malika is rather good - perhaps because she's the only one speaking normally.