It is really quite exciting trying to interview Ben Elton. It is like attempting to interview a ranting hedgehog, should a hedgehog be capable of ranting. Hedgehogs are somehow endearing – they have sweet little faces – although also, obviously, they are prickly as hell.
He claims to have the hide of a rhinoceros, but does he, really? We’ll see. He is quite famous. “Oh, I used to be a lot more famous in the old days. I mean, if you were on the telly, everybody knew who you were. So I went from being literally completely unknown to everybody looking in the street overnight.”
Now, he says he is “what they call a heritage act. I don’t think I’ve yet been called a national treasure. I think I’m a bit too abrasive for that.”
What I think is that he gets a great deal of amusement out of being abrasive. Also, he can’t help himself. He is really quite successful. He co-wrote The Young Ones with Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer, and Blackadder with Richard Curtis. He writes novels.
He collaborated on a musical with Andrew Lloyd Webber and wrote compilation shows featuring songs from the catalogues of pop stars, including Queen and Rod Stewart. For those musical successes he was lambasted as a sellout. He says he became “the whipping boy for the British media for years”.
He is bringing his one-man show, Authentic Stupidity, to New Zealand in April. Its theme is that humans are so stupid we invented artificial intelligence “which is actually going to replace us”. Also “we need signs to tell us to step off escalators”. These facts are proof that we are “homo halfwit”. He has ever been the optimist.
Here is something he can be optimistic about. His show has had great reviews. I mentioned this early on in order to suck up a bit. I had decided that sucking up a bit might at least delay the inevitability of getting prickled. His reputation for hedgehogginess precedes him.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m beginning to wonder if I’m doing something wrong. Because, you know, I’ve had some pretty successful tours and I’ve never had reviews like this.
“They’ve been nothing less than four stars. And I don’t think they’ll ever give me five stars because, you know, I am and will always remain a slight red rag to the critical bull. But they have given me some praise.
“It’s like with awards. Awards and reviews are pointless and silly when they’re bad or you don’t win. And when you win they’re very thoughtful and I admire the writer very much.”
That is both almost ruthlessly honest, and very funny. He hasn’t, by the way, read reviews for years. He says he has been told that the show has had great reviews. “And I’m very pleased, and that’s lovely.”
Prophetic imaginings
He imagined the world he now finds himself living in years ago. “I’ve done that quite a lot in my life. I’ve looked ahead to what I imagined might be a sort of exaggerated version of human folly only to discover the following year that it has come true.” He imagined a world where all music “was controlled by Central Computer Entertainment … you didn’t buy it any more. Instruments were banned and nobody played guitar. That was four years before the iPhone. I sound like I’m showing off now.”
He is a prophet. “I’m not going to say that. If you’re kind enough to say so … I mean, it’s up to you. I did start showing off about some of the things I’ve spotted. But, yeah, I think hard about things. You asked me if I was an optimist and that led me to think about sometimes when I’m being comically pessimistic, and then, of course, comedy becomes ever darker when it comes true. Well.”
Even when he’s being funny he’s in a rage about things. “Funny is about taking … what we do and exaggerating it. And sometimes I’m talking about awful things and exaggerating them. Like billionaires fucking up the planet and escaping to space.”
He’s earned a bit of showing off, doesn’t he think? “Well, if you say so. I’m 65. Let them knight Stephen Fry. I’ll just do a bit of showing off.”
He doesn’t think he’s in line for a knighthood? “I don’t think so. All my friends are getting knighted. Lenny Henry got knighted. Emma Thompson got a damehood. And they even knighted Baldrick – even Tony Robinson’s got a knighthood. I don’t think I’m at the front of the queue.” He might mind just a teeny bit, you think. Those “evens”.
He has always felt like something of an outsider. “That’s the thing. You’ve got to keep your outsider status. You’ve got to keep your mystery. In a way, I’m quite glad I’ve not been offered anything.”
He once said there was “a cultural cringe in Britain about conspicuous ambition and energy. And I’m just naturally overeager. I don’t know how to shut up, you know.”
“Is that what I said?” Yes. “Is that from something I’ve said?” Yes. And, yes, I do know that he can’t shut up.
“Right. Well, that sounds about right.”
Being over-eager and not shutting up is frowned upon in Britain. You are meant to be ever so ‘umble.
“My dear friend Stephen [Fry] goes on TV to sell a book and he’ll say, ‘Oh it’s awful. Don’t buy it.’ And I’ll go, ‘It’s great. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I’m so proud of it.’ You’re not supposed to say that. I think it’s the same in Australia and New Zealand.”
I probably got a bit cocky and full of myself and effing and blinding.
People go on about him being half-Jewish. It’s a trope, he says, and one of his many bugbears. His father [psysics professor Lewis Elton] was “born Jewish but he was a refugee and an atheist. I’m actually an atheist. I don’t identify as Jewish because I’m an atheist and it’s a religion and I don’t believe in racial definitions of anyone.”
His mother was a teacher. The only comment she ever made about his early stand-up was that “the F word is all very well as an exclamation mark, but it’s not much use as a comma.” That’s very funny.
“Yeah, I think that’s a brilliant critique and I’ve really thought about it. I do still swear a lot, but I swear less. You can get into lazy habits. In the early days, and because we’re talking about, you know, my fame, I was playing these huge arenas, 3500 seats, which in those days were the biggest you could play. And I probably got a bit cocky and full of myself and effing and blinding.”
There he goes, showing off again. I could, but I won’t, give you the details of all the starry places he’s played and how many people were in the audience. He remembers these things and rolls them out. But why? There is something a bit sad about this and also something quite endearing. It is as though he has to reassure himself that he has indeed been successful.
There is something almost plaintive, which he certainly wouldn’t acknowledge or recognise, about his insistence that he wouldn’t want to be offered a gong. He’d have to then think about whether to accept it, he says.
I wondered if he felt he had to underline his successes to himself. “No. I do in interviews. It’s a funny thing, I’ve spent a lifetime being told I’m very defensive. Somebody will say, ‘Apparently you’re a hypocrite. What have you got to say?’ And when I answer they say, ‘Ooh, you’re very defensive aren’t you?’ It’s a bit of a Catch-22. My wife always says, ‘Just refuse to answer. Whenever somebody brings up a different bad review just say, I don’t want to talk about somebody else’s opinion.’ But I always do. I always get drawn into it, as is happening now.”
Why? Does he know? “Well, because I’m doing a fucking interview.”
The past revisited
You’d be mad to think you could actually interview a hedgehog. You’d be equally mad to think you could actually interview Ben Elton. On the odd occasion that you get to slip in a question, you get a long soliloquy. Fair enough. Long soliloquies are what he does, really. Whatever you do, do not ask him anything about what he may or may not have said in past interviews. How is he supposed to remember what he has and hasn’t said?
Especially do not raise a particular interview from 1990 by Lynn Barber – “that silly cow” – for The Observer. I didn’t. Which doesn’t mean I wasn’t going to.
He got a bit huffy with me. But the really funny thing is that he raised that interview. He raised all of the things she had written about him. Such as: “Why do people dislike Ben Elton? Why does he get everyone’s backs up?” Elton says now, “And I think that was for her to answer. I’ve been answering it for the last 35 years now. I wish I could stop.”
Here’s a thought: he could just stop.
I must be happy. I can honestly say the only things that have made me unhappy have been bad reviews.
He used to be pretty OCD. He says he’s better now than he was. “One of the early routines I did was called Captain Paranoia. About checking lights three times before I left the house and then, you know, going back and checking the cooker. I’m much better at that. I seem to have just got more relaxed.”
Hmm. “I mean, I’m still very concerned about my work. I mean, when I’m on stage, it is one long effort of concentration to make myself understood.
“And I can do it. If I wasn’t able to do it, then you wouldn’t be doing an interview with me. I’m less, kind of neurotic than I was when I was young.”
I asked if he was happy – it’s a bit hard to tell. This elicited another of his long soliloquies about how he doesn’t suffer from depression but he worries about the state of the world, and so on. But he thinks, on balance, he’s a happy person.
“I must be happy. I can honestly say the only things that have made me unhappy have been bad reviews. So, I’ve had pretty fucking good luck.”
When he was younger, he and his father, who died in 2018 aged 95, did one of those pieces in which, by turn, father and son observe each other. It ran in The Times in 1990. His father said, among other things, that Elton was manic. “I don’t know if he said ‘manic’.” Oh, all right, what he actually said was “absolutely manic”.
Anyway, we can all relax (he never does, he’s always on the go, which is not at all manic) because, he says, he is definitely not manic. He sounded perplexed. He often does. “Because manic sounds like there’s a problem. I always use the example of alcoholism. I drink far more than the government says is healthy. Well, fuck it, if you sniff a sherry bottle you’re over the unit level. I love a drink … and I’m never going to give it up.” But he is not an alcoholic, either. He has a happy and functional family life and “I’ve never been in a fight in my life”.
All of which is a circular way of saying he is not manic. Golly, he is exhausting. You’d think he’d exhaust himself. “Words like manic and driven and workaholic are often sort of offered to me. And I deny them because I think they suggest a sort of emotional dysfunction. Oh well, maybe I’m kidding myself. But I don’t believe I am emotionally dysfunctional.”
When he’s not being touchy he can be very sweet. He offered me a pair of tickets to his show, free.
He also very kindly offered me entirely unsolicited advice on how to do writing. Here is the short version: “You must write. Write lots of words. You’ve got my advice for what it’s worth.” Thank you, Ben. I’ve only been doing it for more than 30 years.
Yes, he’s shouty and he can spot a slight in an empty room – while picking a fight with himself. But what’s a spot of huffing and puffing? He’s all right, is Ben Elton. I’ve always had a soft spot for hedgehogs.
Authentic Stupidity, Clarence St Theatre, Hamilton, April 19; Sir Howard Morrison Centre, Rotorua, April 22; Baycourt Addison Centre, Tauranga, April 23; Michael Fowler Theatre, Wellington, April 26; Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Auckland, April 28; Municipal Theatre, Napier, April 30; Town Hall, Dunedn, May 1; Christchurch Town Hall, May 2.