Ben Elton talks comedy, chaos and keeping up with the times as a ‘a bemused middle-aged man’

Ben Elton’s got to go. He’s got his pants to wring out in a hotel sink, he’s got to pack, get out and get on to the next hotel ahead of the next performance of his latest one-man show, Authentic Stupidity. “A lot of things accumulate when you are doing one-night stands around the country, let me tell you,” he says. “I manage every minute.” Elton’s accustomed to running — it’s a pastime he loves — but this tour of Britain is a multitude of marathons that pauses briefly to catch its breath before springing back to life in Perth at the Astor Theatre this month. In sporting parlance he’s taking it one day at a time but no doubt he abhors a cliche, much preferring the wisdom of Kenny Rogers: “You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table, there’s time enough for counting,” he says, quoting The Gambler. Music is another abiding love. What’s not up for debate is that he’s having a hell of a time. After a 15-year absence from stand-up comedy, he returned in 2019 for a series of Ben Elton Live performances that straddled the confines of COVID restrictions — reaching Australia in 2021 — and fell hard in love with the stage, never his favourite habitat. “I didn’t know how I would feel about it, it was a big leap in the dark,” he recalls. “You know, I’d had a very nice life writing novels and living in Fremantle primarily. I was still very busy, I was all over the world directing We Will Rock You and things like that, but I was never away for more than a month. “I didn’t know whether the passion would still burn, whether there would be an audience, whether I’d still have enough to talk about. Well, all those things turned out to be wonderfully in the positive. “I loved my 2019 tour. I loved the perspective that age had suddenly brought to me. I’m still passionate and while I’m still loud and fast and quick, I have a much happier relationship with the stage.” Spend 50 minutes chatting to him and it’s hard to imagine Elton, who is 65, would ever doubt he would have enough to talk about. He is, among other things, aghast about the effects of social media on children, scathing of politicians who allow big tech to get away with everything and adamant that Australians must have a deeper discussion about how they celebrate their national day. “I haven’t looked into the details of what the Aussie government is doing (about restricting children’s access to social media) but I think they are 100 per cent right,” he says. “Adults have got to start to act to retrieve childhood from the clutches of big tech. And I fully applaud the fact that Aussies are leading the world. “A six-year-old can watch a rape — it’s insane. Look, everyone knows the problems. It’s not an easy job. The thing has become so ubiquitous that just beginning to sort of break the habit . . . it isn’t easy but we have to do something. We just can’t roll over and let big tech continually foist societal-changing mechanisms on us without any thought to the consequences. “My daughter says, look we can all see how awful it is but stop going on about it because we have no choice, we’re all online and it is what it is. “I don’t want to dwell on it because I’d rather be more upbeat . . . but if we ever do manage to retrieve childhood maybe we can start trying to retrieve adulthood.” He is not, he says, an old curmudgeon on stage, more a bemused middle-aged man trying to navigate a new generation. Young and old alike feel the sting of his barbs. “The perspective of age is a wonderful thing for a stand-up, or at least it is for me,” he says. “Suddenly I came back and I’ve become old. “Not old in the decrepit sense but I’m processing a whole different generation’s change and having to catch up and having to work it out and having to work my way through it. “People my age are having to really come up to speed on some radical new thinking that we didn’t see coming in terms of gender and sexuality and changing attitudes. “I talk a lot about how we are all formed in our youth and how I used to be considered a rude comedian. I was boundary pushing — routines about bodily functions and all sorts — but now with the pornification of the world I’m as aghast as what’s going on as my mum was at my act. “I love my tunes, I keep an eye on it (music). Although the lyrics are so rude,” he says, going on to discuss the explicit inner workings of Charli XCX and Billie Eilish’s hit song Guess. He reckons we are in a golden age of pop music, led by young artists such as Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX, but, in his middle-aged bewilderment, he drowns in the volume of choices. “Unfortunately because we don’t have Countdown or Top of the Pops, it’s hard to focus,” he says. Authentic Stupidity (named because Elton says it’s that human trait, not artificial intelligence, that will be our downfall) has been warmly received by critics, a profession Elton’s often had an uneasy relationship with. His left-leaning politics, his brashness, his string of famous acquaintances — most notably his musical collaborations with Conservative Party stalwart Andrew Lloyd Webber — have all come under attack. “I’m very happy that I seem to have arrived at a point in my career where they are reviewing the work more than their impression of that young fellow that irritated them so much in his sparkly suit 40 years ago,” he says. “I can’t deny it hurts when you get horrible reviews, particularly because they can be quite personal with me. It hurts when you get bad ones and it’s bloody lovely when you get good ones. I wouldn’t say it is as lovely. I wouldn’t say the elation you get from a good review is as much as the pain you get from getting a real slagging.” He’s also buoyed because his old mates have come out to support his performances — Brian May and Roger Taylor from the rock band Queen and comedians and actors Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson. “It sounds like name-dropping but it isn’t,” he says. “These are people I knew when I was 21, 22. I knew them all before they were famous — apart from Brian and Roger.” Elton recalls being a lonely, 16-year-old student “living in nasty digs” when Queen’s chart-topping Bohemian Rhapsody played endlessly on radio stations in the autumn of 1975. Twenty-five years on, the band would come calling to ask him to work on the musical We Will Rock You. It was, he says, an astonishing privilege and one of the great moments of his life. “We remain a bit of a brotherhood. You don’t get to make a show that successful if it is as stupid as some people tried to say it was when it first opened.” His storied career began alongside those of a glorious generation of British comics. He was a drama student at the University of Manchester when he met Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall and then in what he describes as a stroke of good fortune, he was paired with “the Oxbridge lot” — Fry, Laurie and Thompson - in an early sketch show. “We were very lucky, it was a vibrant time,” he says. By the age of 23, he had a massive hit on his hands as co-writer and occasional actor with The Young Ones, a television series that charted the anarchic adventures of four students in Margaret Thatcher’s divided Britain, starring Mayall and Edmondson. Two years later, Curtis — who will for ever be known as the writer of Love, Actually — would come calling, asking Elton to work with him on Blackadder. Together they would write three series, creating a worldwide hit and establishing a partnership with another rising star, Rowan Atkinson. Elton would work with Atkinson again a decade later as writer and producer of the much-loved sitcom The Thin Blue Line. “We all were very fortunate,” he says. “Of course we had something to offer and everybody worked hard but there’s no doubt about it, privilege plays an enormous part of success. “We were all middle-class white kids who’d been to university. Bloody hell, there’s a start to say the least. I’ve done far too many auditions to be unaware of just how much talent is out there. And a tiny part of people who could have made it big, a big splash, actually do make a big splash. “Privilege and opportunity play an enormous part of that, which is why I find it so disgusting that Donald Trump is weaponising the idea that positive discrimination is itself somehow stopping good people getting where they need to. “We all know that if you want to get the best out of a generation that have not had the opportunity that you have, you’re going to have to make some f...ing effort. You can’t say that is a level playing field because it obviously isn’t.” Amid all his successes, it is his friendships he holds closest, revealing he never looks back and hasn’t seen an entire episode of The Young Ones or Blackadder in the past 30 years. “Occasionally they come up on someone else’s screen on the back of an airplane seat. I haven’t revisited my movies. I loved making Three Summers and Maybe Baby with a passion but if I were to look back I’d only think about the edits that I never got right. “I’ve never really asked Roger and Brian if they go back and listen to the old albums. I think they do because they are always doing things like remastering them. Obviously nobody is asking me to remaster Three Summers.” He is toying with the idea of writing his biography. “Revisiting the genesis of those friendships and everything will be a lot of fun ... the work itself, as they say I’ve had some hits and I’ve had some misses and I’ve had lots of stuff that never saw the light of day. “All of it meant exactly the same amount to me when I was doing it — which was everything, everything. I put everything I have into a piece of work and try my best to do my best.” Away from the stage, Elton says he lives a well-balanced life. “I drink a lot, far more than is healthy, according to the government. “Like me, if you drink probably three times the allowable amount of units a week, but you can get up, do your work, pay your taxes and don’t go out and get in a fight then I don’t think you’ve got a problem. “So there’s one thing, I love a drink. I look forward to when I can get gently pissed over a big lunch and mellow into the evening. “I cook a lot. I’m not a gourmet in any sense, I do family cooking. I love to walk. I love to go for a long run. I don’t have other hobbies. I don’t make model aircraft, though occasionally I think I’d quite like to. I love to read, I love to read history, and go to the cinema and the theatre.” He will turn 66 on the last night of the tour — in Christchurch, New Zealand — and his wife Sophie will join him. “She’s my WAG, as she likes to call it,” he says. But that’s a few months away and right now he has today to worry about. “When you are doing one-night stands, you never manage to get your laundry done no matter how successful you are,” he says. “I’m literally having to wring my pants out in hotel sinks. I’m sure Chappell Roan’s doing it as well.” Ben Elton’s Authentic Stupidity tour will show at the Astor Theatre on Thursday and Friday, March 13 and 14, and on Monday and Tuesday, April 7 and 8. Tickets through Ticketek.

Ben Elton talks comedy, chaos and keeping up with the times as a ‘a bemused middle-aged man’

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