Anyone who switched their telly to BBC1 at 10.35pm on Tuesday night could be forgiven for some momentary confusion and a queasy feeling of deja vu.
As the opening scene unfolded in Ben Elton’s new sitcom The Wright Way, it suddenly felt like a Sunday evening, just after Songs Of Praise. In 1984.
Council health and safety official Gerald Wright, played by David Haig, was in his kitchen, moaning: ‘Victoria won’t get out of the bathroom. She’s female, she’s in a bathroom, she’s never going to be finished... I thought at least when my wife left me, I’d be able to get into the bathroom occasionally.’
Lazy gender stereotypes, middle-aged self-pity and mild misogyny — this couldn’t be a new series, surely? It had to be some unseen pilot from the vaults . . . an early version of The Brittas Empire, or George And Mildred.
Or maybe this was post-modern irony and the camera was going to pull back and reveal the set, showing us that these characters were actors in a sitcom-within-a-sitcom. But it didn’t — it just slogged on, filming one hackneyed scene after the next.
We had routines about how women couldn’t load a dishwasher, how they expected presents on their birthdays at work, how women shop assistants were always more eager to talk on the phone than to serve a male customer.
It all built up to a gag where Gerald outwitted the woman at the till by phoning her on his mobile. He phoned her, you see, because it was the only way to get a bit of service. Women, eh?
The Wright Way was so old-fashioned, I said in my TV review the next morning, it should have been made in black-and-white. But that’s not going back far enough: The Wright Way should have been a pre-war, silent comedy. It still wouldn’t have been funny, but at least we would have been spared those tired old lines.
What made it worse was that these laboured situations were written by the man who led the charge against old jokes and sexist stand-up routines: all those gags about mothers-in-law, big cleavages, dim secretaries, maiden aunts, barmaids, fat ladies and nagging wives.
Ben Elton was once the motormouth of alternative comedy, the loudest, gobbiest ranter of the Eighties humour revolution. The 21-year-old wonderkid who talked at 500 words a minute and invented the most anarchic sitcom ever seen on TV — The Young Ones — a violent, expletive-spattered series about four students living in bedsit squalor.
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Picture shows The Wright Way characters Clive Beeches (played by Luke Gell), Gerald Wright (David Haig), Malika Maha (Mina Anwar), Bernard Stanning (Toby Longworth)
The show made stars of Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer and Ade Edmondson, and is still riotously funny today. The dozy hippy, the head-banging punk and the radical poet prat were cartoon versions of characters in Student Union bars in colleges and polytechnics across Eighties Britain.
Elton also had a stage act that left people slack-jawed. For the first two minutes of one of his routines, no one laughed because no one was quite sure what was happening.
He hit audiences like a sandblaster, raging at prejudices, bad jokes and comics older than 23 — and when the crowd was still rocking back on its heels, he’d punch the air and shout: ‘My name’s Ben Elton, thank you and good night.’
The WRONG way? You decide.
During the miners’ strike of 1984, he earned a reputation as a political comic with his rants against ‘Mrs Thatch’ and the Tories. ‘I can’t say the word I wanna say,’ he would bark at audiences. ‘All I can say is, they come in pairs, and Mrs Thatch has got the country by them.’
H e fed the firebrand image with appearances on Channel 4’s stand-up showcase, Saturday Live, letting off tirades about nuclear power, the Cold War, vivisection and poverty.
‘You could be Left-wing, you could be Right-wing,’ he would rage, ‘or you could be a Liberal — you’d be a bit of a prat, but you could be. Get the Liberals building the Channel Tunnel: you’d have a bridge from one side, a tunnel from the other, and when they met in the middle everyone would drown . . . but at least it would be a compromise, right?’
And to rapturous applause, he’d go off on another one: ‘If there’s a meltdown at Sellafield, we’ll all have a nuclear half-life of 10,000 years but the Press will tell us that’s all right, because at least it’s a British half-life.’
Yet for all the anarchist posturing, Elton was deeply Establishment. His father was a leading physicist, Professor Lewis Elton, and his uncle a renowned Tudor historian, Sir Geoffrey Elton. He went to Godalming Grammar School, in Surrey, before a degree in drama at Manchester University. And he admits no one else in his family has a London accent, let alone his East End Dickensian ‘mockney’.
When he and Richard Curtis wrote the cleverest sitcom of the Eighties, Blackadder, he became the most praised comedy writer of his generation. The jokes became part of the national fabric — like Baldrick’s catchphrase: ‘I have a cunning plan.’
The programme contained 'lazy gender stereotypes, middle-aged self-pity and mild misogyny', according to Christopher Stevens
Tony Robinson will always be thought of as the stoic servant, just as Rowan Atkinson will never be better than he was as his sardonic master. The great scenes are unforgettable: a deliriously squiffy Queen Elizabeth raising a tankard with Blackadder’s puritanical uncle and aunt; the posturing, superstitious actors who teach Hugh Laurie’s Prince Regent how to ‘roar’; the heart-stopping moment at the end of Blackadder Goes Forth when the soldiers finally leave the dugout and go ‘over the top’.
After the success of Blackadder, the BBC invited Elton to take over the Wogan chat show while Terry Wogan was on holiday in 1989. Elton breezed in early as Wogan’s guest, ordered ‘Tezza’ out of his seat and announced he was going to do all the interviews without a teleprompter.
‘It’s great to be a national institution for a week,’ he said. ‘I’ll be taking over from the Queen Mother when she goes on holiday.’
Insiders even talked of how he would one day be director-general of the BBC. That year, he published his first novel, Stark, an instant bestseller, and within months his debut play, Gasping, opened in the West End, starring Hugh Laurie.
The BBC gave him his own show in 1990, The Man From Auntie, but ordered him not to concentrate all his attacks on the government. He switched to a scattergun technique, blasting his targets with acid pellets. Bruce Forsyth, for instance, was ‘a giant stick insect in a wig’.Elton was still barely 30, the golden boy of the era. Fast-forward 23 years, and he’s an embarrassing old flop, churning out books and TV material to universal derision.
Ben Elton invented the most anarchic sitcom ever seen on TV - The Young Ones - a violent, expletive-spattered series about four students living in bedsit squalor
One after another his sitcoms have withered and died, even when they starred top comics such as Rowan Atkinson in 1995’s The Thin Blue Line — which ran out of steam in its second year — and Ardal O’Hanlon in Blessed, which ran for a single series in 2005.
His novels barely get reviewed, his Hollywood scriptwriting career was short-lived, and a final indignity came when his Australian sketch show Live From Planet Earth was cancelled after just three episodes in 2009, as viewing figures plummeted.
Ben Elton is the most spectacular case of middle-aged droop in British TV history, and we rightly feel a sense of terrible disappointment.
How could the manic comic genius who turned Edmund Blackadder and the turnip-chewing Baldrick into national heroes end up working with Andrew Lloyd Webber, writing a sequel to The Phantom Of The Opera — the ghastly Love Never Dies?
He turned Edmund Blackadder and the turnip-chewing Baldrick into national heroes
We’ve seen worse happen to bigger talents, of course. It’s a typical showbiz trajectory: from skyrocket to falling star. Charlie Chaplin was the king of early Hollywood, the most famous man on the planet who wrote, directed and starred in his movies. But his gifts switched off in the Forties, as if he’d been hit by an internal power cut.
O rson Welles’s first film was Citizen Kane, often acclaimed as the best movie ever made. Yet in middle age, Welles was a fat, feckless hack, wasting his talents on travel shows and voiceovers for adverts.
Like Chaplin and Welles, Ben Elton burned out young. There’s nothing left of his early brilliance. For some still fighting the political battles of the Eighties, he is a turncoat who ditched his Leftist principles and took the money.
Fellow comedians, perhaps motivated by envy, were especially scathing when he scripted the storyline for the Queen musical We Will Rock You. It has run for 11 years at the Dominion and earned Elton a considerable fortune.
But fans of Blackadder and The Young Ones wouldn’t begrudge him that. What makes millions of us sad is to see him squeezing out fourth-rate pap, along the lines of the sort of formulaic, turgid sitcom that used to make him incandescent with anger.
It’s like seeing a forgotten rock star plodding through the old hits at a seaside pavilion, or a paunchy 50-something ex-footballer puffing around the pitch in a charity match.
Nobody wants to watch Ben Elton turn into the comedy equivalent of a covers band, recycling other people’s sitcoms — but that’s exactly what The Wright Way is.
If only his younger self could be revived for just one more rant . . . and yell at himself to retire gracefully.