The controversial counterintuitive piece I was going to write concerned Ben Elton’s new sitcom The Wright Way (BBC1, Tuesday). You may have noticed it has been panned by all the critics, but the main focus has been on Elton’s shift from darling of the Eighties alternative comedy left to bourgeois sell-out. So what I was going to do was note that, whatever you think of Elton, he doesn’t half know how to capture the zeitgeist, and that this beautifully acted send-up of Elf n Safety gone mad starring the great David Haig is a bourgeois gem to rank with My Family and Outnumbered.
But then I made the mistake of watching it. I lasted all of five minutes. Not a cynically calculated five minutes designed to enable me to write the phrase ‘The Wright Way is so bad that I could only watch five minutes’ but a totally sincere five minutes (or possibly less) of such agonised writhing and head-burying-beneath-the-duvet that I knew with every fibre of my being that were I not to switch the iPad off that very second I would surely die.
Here is the impression I formed before that happy moment: Ben Elton has NOT changed. He may be a lot richer since the days he wore a shiny suit and made everyone laugh by saying ‘Thatch’ a lot but his adolescent politics remain entirely unaffected by reality.
You might have hoped, for example, that having done so much to create the pop cultural image of Margaret Thatcher as a hate figure beyond redemption he had since realised on mature reflection that the Blair revolution he helped foment did at least as much damage to Britain as ever the Woman Who Made Him Rich And Famous did.
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