Ben Elton

Ben Elton was one of the loudest voices in the British alternative comedy movement of the 1980s, a stand-up whose act was fast, left-wing and openly political at a point when most television comics were still doing mothers-in-law. The delivery, all sequins and gabble, made him easy to caricature and just as easy to underrate.

The writing is the durable part. He wrote for The Young Ones, then co-wrote three series of Blackadder with Richard Curtis, and that show remains the strangest achievement on his record: the jokes are engineered like clockwork, the insults are baroque, and the whole thing grows sadder each series until the final one is playing something close to tragedy. The Thin Blue Line, later, ran on the opposite instinct, a deliberately gentle studio sitcom aimed squarely at the audience Blackadder had left behind.

Since then he has written in almost every available form: novels including Stark, Popcorn and Blind Faith, plays, film (he directed Maybe Baby), and musicals with Andrew Lloyd Webber and with Queen. He acts occasionally too, mostly in comedy, though Kenneth Branagh cast him as Verges in Much Ado About Nothing.

The critical line on him has been unkind for years, largely because the musicals and later novels are broad where the early work was precise. The output is uneven. The range is not really arguable, and very few British writers have had a hand in two sitcoms as good as The Young Ones and Blackadder.