Ben Elton’s new memoir is called What Have I Done? And the short answer to that question is: a lot. The long answer is he has written 16 novels, eight television sitcoms – including the generation-defining The Young Ones and three series of Blackadder, often rightfully cited as the greatest British sitcom of all time – five stage plays and four stage musicals, including the monster Queen-inspired We Will Rock You. Oh, and he’s been a hugely successful stand-up comedian for more than four decades.
Reading his book, I was struck by how quickly Elton found success. He was brought up in Catford in south-east London, before moving with his family to Guildford in 1968. “I was certain that I wanted to be a comic writer by the time I was 14,” he tells me. “I started writing PG Wodehouse-style short stories. I was writing stories about people in gentlemen’s smoking clubs in the 20s and I was a 14-year-old boy living in Guildford.”
Elton left to study drama at Manchester University, where he met fellow students Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson. When he was just 21, he was commissioned by the BBC to write a pilot episode of The Young Ones, which starred Mayall, Edmondson and Nigel Planer. He wrote the pilot episode in one night. How do you do that, I ask, and can it be taught? “You can’t learn it,” he says. “There is such a thing as talent. Everyone’s brains are different. Some people can write tunes. I can write comedy.”
