Everybody loathes Elton

Ben Elton is often mentioned by British comedians as the most-hated man in the business. It's a bit hard to see why, exactly, it's just that he is rich, successful and mainstream, and makes musicals with Andrew Lloyd Webber (which is at least three strikes in most people's eyes, I suppose). His career has been odd, though: starting as a political firebrand and anarchist Young Ones writer, then moving to the high wit of Blackadder, before blanding out in his Man for Auntie sketch show and The Thin Blue Line anaemic police comedy, underusing Rowan Atkinson as almost a straight-main. From here it's easy to see his early radical days as a careerist stunt: that was where the buzz was at the time. I'm not sure that's right, though- his novels continue to reflect his passionate intensity, and even the Thin Blue Line was quite advanced in its philosophy considering its positioning: there were a lot of jokes about sex (that's not quite true: of the jokes there were, a lot were about sex), but the characters' sexual orientation and colour was never exploited, as it would have been in most comparable sitcoms. Given the widespread wish for Elton to fail, it's surprising how little anyone has had to say about his latest masterpiece, the couple-with-young children sitcom Blessed. Now, this may come as a revelation, but young children cry, and need feeding, and make a mess. Sometimes the parents get tetchy as a result. With hilarious consequences. Or not. Actually it's not entirely laugh-free. But what amuses is the plotting and the frustrated rants of the lead character, rather than verbal agility. One problem is the inaccuracy of the cultural references. The record producer hero has to deal with a manufactured Spice Girls grrl group, with the moral issues that raises about whether he should insist on his rights to his creative work or let them steal it in return for lots of money. The trouble with this is that he is starting from the view that groups should be talented and creative, not manufactured. It's hard to believe this when for a start, he works as a jobbing music producer churning out advertising jingles and backing tracks, and is hardly therefore at the 'art for art's sake' end of the business, but more importantly, his views are anachronistic: after all the Idols and X Factors, nobody seems to mind that stars and groups are designed by marketing consultants, publicised by publicists, and sold to the media in bite-size chunks from 'wow I won' to 'ex-singer in drug shame' to 'who?'. After Darius lost out to much laughter in the first Pop Idol, or whatever, and dismissed as a talentless poser, I thought I'd heard the last of him; I hardly expected him to crop up in 2005 as a credible and successful artist with fans and No. 1s and everything. So Elton here is being misled by what he thinks and feels, which is not believable as what his character thinks. The characterisation has another major flaw: the ageing rocker guitarist. With his wrinkled, twitching face and leathers, he models himself on Keith Richard. But Elton tries to have it both ways: sometimes, he is clearly a delusional loser whose pose is just that, masking an empty and tragically wasted life; but sometimes he really is a star, able to charm groupies and acquaintances. In general, I would think that the series owes its origins to Elton's life experiences, and would have been better if it had accepted the fact rather than mask it by, say, changing the father's job from comedian novelist living in London with his young family, to something totally different, like, record producer living...

What I don't understand, after all this, is the eerie silence. Shouldn't the airwaves be jammed with pundits queueing up to say it's terrible and Elton is finished? I can only suppose they have realised it's more cutting, in the long run, tosay nothing, just walk away.

Pranks and japes

The latest reality TV series, Space Cadets, has exposed what has lain mainly hidden in its predecessors like Game for a Laugh, Beadle's About, and Candid Camera: that its humour is derived from cruelty, or at the very least from exploitation of dramatic irony (the audience knowing something the protagonist does not). Hence it is an act of collusion by the viewers at the expense of the participants.

This is a strong but largely unexamined part of traditional humour. The attraction of the 'surprise party' is surely for the other attendees, who can smirk to themselves as they lead the dupe to believe that everyone has forgotten. And a similar pattern can be seen in the initiation of apprentices, who were sent off in search of tartan paint or for a long weight (wait): a rite of passage intended to remind the new workers that, however cocky they may be, in the workplace they are at the mercy of their bosses and colleagues. The humour is anaemic verging on albinoism: but humour is not the point.

TV programmers may not realise the danger they face. Newspapers these days very rarely present April Fool's stories; I think this is because they have realised that they rely on their readers gullibility, which offends them, or undermines the paper's credibility. If your newspaper tells you that Elvis is alive and well and living on the moon in a WW2 bomber, you are hardly likely to pay much attention when they tell you which political party to support. We do not expect, when being bombarded with information, to have to distinguish not just between hard fact and soft fact and opinion, but between fiction masquerading as fact and simple fact.

The irony is that the hapless and charmless space cadets, whose desire to be famous exceeds any talent that might justify such a desire, have proved to have some strength of character. Everyone else is smirking, but they have trusted in the
reliability and safety of Russian aeronautics, and have demonstrated that the Right Stuff can be found in all sorts of containers.