Ben Elton - No laughing matter

By GREG DIXON

Ben Elton chooses his words. "I am not a s**t," he says, then pauses. "I know my friends don't think I'm a s**t," he continues, warming to his unprintable, conversational motif.

"And I've never lost any friends in this profession. Basically, some journalists write entirely from their own ego, and that's when they're going to use you to make their thing ... to make their mark. And if they perceive you as somebody who people like, then the most original thing they can think of doing is saying, 'Actually, he's a s**t."'

The British comedian is not joking. (Though there's just no telling if the temperature in his Auckland hotel room has dropped to frosty. The jet-lagged likely lad has, for some reason, set his suite's thermostat at broil.)

The steely stare over the top of his steel-framed specs settles all doubt. Business, his eyes say, is meant. And he can hardly be blamed.

Though the 41-year-old Elton is undoubtedly the popular writer of five of Britain's best-selling novels and some of her best-loved television comedies, including The Young Ones and Black Adder, he is undoubtedly also a popular and perennial target for some in the English press.

In particular, one recent English interview done to promote his latest novel, Inconceivable, and the film it has spawned, Maybe Baby, resulted in him being "utterly stitched up."

When he says this happens all the time, you can't help asking why that might be. The question leads to a very pregnant pause and more steely staring.

"Look, you'll quote me perfectly well, but then there'll be a piece in Britain saying, 'Ben goes to New Zealand and slags off British journalists.'

"You have some experience of the British press. I commend you to draw your own conclusions about the professional standards currently prevalent."

The media, he says later, is something he doesn't like to talk about, to the media in any case. Though once he gets started on the media during our hour together, he has trouble stopping himself. The mention of critics and criticism launches him into the sort of rant that earned him the moniker "Motormouth" during his early days as a stand-up, Tory-hating comic in the mid 80s.

"It's nice when it's nice and it's horrible when it's not," he says of criticism. "But anyone who says they're impervious to it is definitely lying — and anyone who says they don't read it is almost certainly telling the truth. You will find that very few artists read their reviews — and no journalist believes them. I don't know anybody who reads their press because you can't get through the day if you read your press.

"I know a lot of people in the public eye; everybody is sensitive, not just celebrities.

"It is a problem in Britain at the moment — and this I will say [about the media] — that in order to justify what is increasingly a cynical and negative approach to life, which is prevalent in the British media, in order to justify what is essentially a rather sort of mealy-mouthed approach to existence ... um ... it's become an established fact, a given truth, that celebrities are s**ts. That somebody who is famous is by their very nature a s**t, a selfish person, a self-seeking person ... probably a person with very few moral values.

"Clearly, this is nonsense. Some celebrities will be s**ts. I would say exactly the same number of celebrities are s**ts as bus conductors are s**ts.

"I think it is very depressing and that is why if a celebrity, in inverted commas, tells you they don't read what's written about them, the chances are they're telling the truth."

Having said all that, he's generally perceived as someone who's had very good reviews.

"And on the whole, I have," he adds brightly. "But I've had lots of stinkers as well. I got some stinkers for Maybe Baby, I got some good ones, too.

Ah yes, Maybe Baby. The film, which opens here this week, is a romantic comedy of the old school, based on a very new, very real and very personal experience for Elton. The story, about a couple desperate to have a child, echoes the struggle he and his wife, Sophie Gare, had to have children.

Diagnosed with non-specific infertility, the Eltons, who met in 1987 and married in 1994, sought IVF treatment for the problem in 1997. The result was two twin features. Twins Charlotte and Albert (Lottie and Bert) were born a year ago this month, after a third cycle of IVF. Elton had already delivered the other twins, Inconceivable and the script for Maybe Baby, a year or so before.

"The book and the film are by far the most personal piece of work I've done. Everything else I've done has been partly emotional, but mainly intellectual, more head than heart. Well, this book is clearly more heart than head."

The story isn't his only emotional attachment to the filmed version. Maybe Baby is also his film directorial debut, adding yet another job to his stuffed CV (which will next month also include co-writing a stage musical with Andrew Lloyd Webber).

Elton is proud of his cinematic baby, and both father and child seemed to be doing fine. The film has already re-couped its $10 million cost through distribution deals to every territory, including that coveted cash cow the United States. That impressed the British film industry: Elton has managed to sell a romantic comedy, that doesn't feature an American, to the Americans. It's also the second most successful British-made film in Britain this year.

Only ... You guessed it — the press have spoiled the baby shower.

"The reaction of the public? Fantastic. The Profession? Extraord-inary. And the media? Generally good, some not so good, that's as it goes. The Hollywood Reporter was a rave, the Sunday Times was a slagging."