Ben Elton’s return to stand up brings comic icon to Adelaide
Forty years ago Ben Elton was a young firebrand comic. Now, the writer of The Young Ones and Blackadder is back with his first stand-up tour in 15 years, and he still has plenty to say
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Ben Elton has just come off stage in Llandudno in Wales. He’s tired from the effort but still exhilarated, feeding off the buzz of another packed house. He’s enjoying being back on stage again for the first full-scale tour since 2005. Enjoying a return to his stand-up roots where he first made his name in the early 1980s.
It was, he concedes, a “big decision” to return to the stage.
“But I’m very glad I did,” he says. “I’m happier as a stand up. I’m happier on stage than I’ve ever been. Perhaps when you get older, I’m 60, I just feel more at ease with myself as a stand up.”
Not that he’s been idle in the meantime. Elton was a co-writer of iconic 1980s TV shows, The Young Ones and Blackadder II, III and IV, but he’s also written novels, musicals with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Rod Stewart and Queen. He has also returned to the small screen, writing Upstart Crow, a sitcom about William Shakespeare, starring David Mitchell.
When Elton first arrived he was tagged as an angry, young political comedian. He was part of a new wave of alternative comics that included Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.
It was the era of Margaret Thatcher, radical Right wing politics was refashioning a struggling Britain, and Elton was one of those reacting against the prime minister. More about Thatcher later.
But Elton shrugs off attempts to pigeonhole him in a political sense.
“I have always been a bit less Left wing than the Right would call me, nor remotely as Right wing as some of the Left wing call me,” he says.
And if he still has plenty to say, and he does, it’s not the only reason he has now returned to the stage. When he last toured Britain and Australia in 2005, he was away from his Fremantle home, wife Sophie Gare and their three children for more than four months.
“That is quite a lot when they are that age,” he says. “It’s bloody hard work when you are there, but you miss it when you are not. So I just sort of stopped.”
But it was never a retirement. So, now the kids are grown up and his wife, he jokes, “maybe she just wanted to get me out the house”.
Elton is bemused by the turn politics has taken in recent years. Through Boris Johnson and Brexit, to Donald Trump and Scott Morrison, he says the world is “in a state of extraordinary flux”.
“The internet has ushered in a new dark age. Truth and facts are only of equal – if not lesser – value than superstition, hearsay and opinion. These are fascinating times to go out and do live stand up.”
Elton says it’s not that he has a message to deliver, it’s more he just has something to say about the times we live in and his place in them as an ageing bloke.
“I do what I always do and that is go on stage to express myself and try to make myself understood. Certainly the theme of this tour is one of confusion. Society is changing so quickly,” he says.
And that includes in areas where it was thought there was no further debate to be had. “No one would ever thought when I was growing up, and was a teenager, that there would be a whole generation of politicians who would literally choose whatever science they wanted to believe,” he says. “Not just be ignorant of science but would actively denigrate science. These are extraordinary times. We are potentially sacrificing 500 years of the enlightenment.”
Which concurrently makes the job of a comedian both easier and harder. Leaders like Trump and Johnson are beyond “conventional satire”.
“To say, for instance, Boris Johnson is motivated, self-evidently, by a grotesque level of self-interest and entitlement is hardly new,” he says. “Clearly a satirist trying to take on Johnson will have to go beyond the obvious, and I hope I do.”
He’s no fan of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison either. And, as an Australian citizen and long-time resident, he feels he is qualified to speak about Australia as much as Britain.
“Morrison is probably easier to satirise because he has such specific things like this weird, evangelical side to him,” Elton says. “This extraordinary thing he has of the need to be liked. The huggy side to him.
“He does naked ambition with an impressive zeal (yet) somehow wants us all to feel he is a huggy person.”
Which brings us back to his old nemesis, Thatcher. It’s not that he now agrees with what Thatcher was doing back in the ’80s, or even that he likes her now. It’s just that given the current crop of world leaders, there is something about Thatcher at least having a set of principles and sticking to them that he admires.
“Mrs Thatcher was a politician of immense integrity,” he concedes. “She never wavered. She announced what she wanted for Britain. I hated it. She didn’t lie, she wasn’t contradicted by how she acted when she was in power. I hated her with a passion but I did respect her for it.”
Not that the show is all about politics.
He will talk about “the age I find myself at, my position as a parent, as part of my community”.
“Often they (the themes) are universal. The nature of ourselves as individuals as family people, sexual beings.”
He will also adapt the show a little for Australian audiences. There are a couple of ideas he already has up his sleeve to tweak local noses.
“The idea that the only people in the world who know what mateship is or larrikinism is are Australians,” he says. “And particularly the idea that Australians are larrikins. I’ve never known a (country) more bolted down by authority.
“You try having a drink outside designated hours or outside designated areas anywhere in Perth. There ain’t no larrikin culture,” he says.
It may be late in Wales but the man who released a comedy album in the 1980s called Motormouth is still revving up.
It’s not only the self-identification of Australians as larrikins that has him going.
“This never-ending obsession with mateship,” he says. “Nobody has friends except for Australians?”
Ben Elton is playing Thebarton Theatre on April 23. Tickets at Ticketmaster.com.au