Ben Elton on falling in love with Scotland and why he's still touring at 65

Ben Elton Picture: Ken McKay/ITV/Shutterstock

“An obviously talented young man” is what The Scotsman had to say about Ben Elton when he appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe back in 1979 and he’s been proving us right ever since with a 45 years’ worth of stand up comedy, hit TV shows, novels, plays and a musical.

“Review wise It was all downhill from there!” wisecracks the creator of Blackadder, The Young Ones, The Thin Blue Line and Upstart Crow, who won a BAFTA last year for Channel 4's one-off return of Friday Night Live [1986-8] and Saturday Live (1985-8), the live comedy cabaret show that made him famous.

He’s had success with hit West End musicals (The Beautiful Game (2000), We Will Rock You (2002) the Queen biopic he wrote with members of the band, and in which he also took to the stage, Tonight's the Night (2003), and Love Never Dies [2010] , and has written three plays including the multi-award-winning Popcorn, and a jukebox musical about his friend Twiggy which played in London last year. His 16 novels include the bestselling Stark, Inconceivable, Dead Famous and High Society and he won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award for Popcorn.

He might be 65 now and the cropped hair grey, but he fitted into the same suit he wore to the BAFTAS IN 1989, and his energy appears undimmed as he goes back to his stand up comedy roots on the road once more with a 60-date tour, heading to Scotland in September, and he is still very much the motormouth.

Elton joins me on Zoom from Fremantle, Western Australia at the home he shares with his wife Sophie and their three children, when they’re not at their UK home in East Sussex. Surprisingly, in one of the hottest spots on the planet, it’s gloomy, unlike the irrepressibly upbeat Elton.

It’s only because it’s dark, and we’re entering winter, thank god, because the rain came two months late and if it hadn’t come the whole continent would have burst into flames. I’m fearful that one day it actually will. Climate change is brutally real and terrifying and still, such is the nature of democracy that because people have three, four and five year terms, nobody ever actually feels they’ve got to deal with it. Anyway let’s not talk about that,” he says.

He says this a lot, then does anyway. He’s trying to keep to the point - we’re here to talk about his Authentic Stupidity show - but he can’t help a quick aside, whether it’s politics or climate change, subjects he’s tackled with humour in his stand up and novels.

Ben Elton at the BAFTA Television Awards, where he won a BAFTA last year for Channel 4's one-off return of Friday Night Live [1986-8] and Saturday Live (1985-8), the live comedy cabaret show that made him famous. Pic: WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

So Authentic Stupidity is heading here in time for a UK autumn, shame he’ll miss the summer (now I’m doing it).

“I love a Scottish summer in as much as I love a cold, drizzly rainy day and for me it’s my favourite weather. Funnily enough I married a girl from Western Australia which is the hottest most beachificated of the states. Really she should have been from Tasmania because that’s a bit like Scotland. It’s mountainous and has beautiful lakes and rivers and the weather is much colder and wetter which I love. If it’s raining all the time and I’m out there I enjoy it.”

But back to the point. What is Authentic Stupidity about?

“When I was deciding to go on the road again everybody was suddenly talking about artificial intelligence. And Sunak had a summit in which Musk said oh yes, it could put humanity out of work, yes it is an existential threat. I mean, we don’t know, but it might actually be the end of humanity. For f***’s sake, in that case shoot them all, send in MI5!

Ben Elton, whose  Authentic Stupidity UK and Ireland Tour will be at Edinburgh, Queen’s Hall, 3 September, Pavilion Theatre Glasgow 4 September, Aberdeen, Music Hall, 5 September. Pic: Contributed

“If a terrorist organization said we’ve invented a machine that will probably put you all out of work, which will enable anyone in their front room to imitate anyone in a deep fake manner, whether it’s constructing poor Taylor Swift as a porn star or pretending to be a politician and making them say something they didn’t, and we’re going to flood the internet with it, we’d do something about it, but because it’s a bunch of tech bros in California we’re going ‘oh well apparently they’re going to be able to make a new Beatles song, isn’t that great’. F*** ‘em! This thing needs controlling immediately.

“So that interested me but the greater threat to humanity is authentic stupidity. Ours. Because we’ve let these unelected, unaccountable billionaires come up with something which will do no good for anything. Oh, it might cure cancer, yeah, but if democracy’s dead and we’re all out of work I don’t f***ing wanna live anyway, so the fact that we allow this to happen is a good example of humanity’s authentic stupidity. We’re not capable of dealing with the technology we invent.

“Humankind is cunning. We invent the car but then we’re too stupid to invest in public transport so then the car ends up as a traffic jam choking our communities. We invent the internet but we’re too stupid to be able to tell verifiable facts from a*** porridge and so democracy dies in front of us. But I’m not going to spend the whole night talking about that.”

OK, so what is Authentic Stupidity about?

Ade Edmondson and Ben Elton pose after the We Will Rock You Gala Performance at The Coliseum theatre in London last year. Pic: Dave Hogan/Hogan Media

“The title is just a good hook on which to hang what I always do, which is exploring our inherent smallness, our foibles, be they large scale in the way we treat our planet, the way we treat each other, the way we treat our society, our politics, or small, the way we treat ourselves, the way we fall in love, fall out of love, we’re scared of wine waiters. The stuff that I always do, which is celebrating comedically the endearing smallness of being human. I think most comedy in the long run boils down to that.”

Ben Elton’s previous interview with Janet Christie, 2019

If Elton’s humour focuses on us and our behaviours, macro and micro, would he describe himself as a people watcher?

“It’s not conscious but I think I must be because I think I am relatively astute about people, which is why I’ve written 16 novels, I’ve written an awful lot of characters and people who have read the novels seem to enjoy them so there must be some awareness of what it is to be various types of being human. But I don’t consciously observe it.

“Early on when I very first became a stand up I started carrying a notebook around and I very soon realised it stops conversation dead and you have no fun. Good material wasn’t worth ruining my life for. I don’t want to sit in a cafe thinking ‘oh he’s got a wart on the end of his nose, he’s in my next novel’. I can’t think of anything more boring than conducting my life like that.

“I can only imagine that all the observations and conversations I have are absorbed and some of it regurgitates when I sit at my desk. But I really only create either in conversation or at my computer. Very occasionally an idea will drop into my head but normally I’m working away at it. Clearly I have a certain talent, I mean it would be stupid to pretend I can’t do what I do but beyond that, art, particularly comic art is indefinable. Woody Allen put it for all comic writers when he said ‘when I write a joke I’m hearing it for the first time’. You don’t know the point at which the observation or the collection of words suddenly mesh themselves into something funnier than the ordinary.

Ben Elton joined the cast in his musical We Will Rock You when it returned to the West End in 2023, 21 years after the show first premiered in London. Elton directed and wrote the original script featuring 24 of Queen's greatest songs.

“It’s so difficult to understand why sometimes something lands and sometimes it doesn’t, why some timing is different to others. My wife is a bass player [they met in 1986 when her all-girl band supported him on tour in Australia] - she plays mainly electric but started on double bass and one of the phrases that bass players use is ‘being in the pocket’. You can look at a lot of comedians and Eric Morecambe was always in the pocket, his timing was beyond perfect, although you couldn’t define it. So I don’t know where the muse comes from but all I know is to make any use of it you have to do some work. You have to sit down and write and tease it out, or get on stage and do it. I prefer to go on stage with my material very prepared, because it’s complex, I’ve put a lot of thought into it and I don’t think anybody wants to pay somebody to experiment in front of them. I deliver my very best shot. I’ll have done a lot of warm ups and then I’ll come to Scotland and I will be match ready.

Speaking about Scotland, it holds a special place in Elton’s heart, and groin as it turns out, his career trajectory having started from Edinburgh Fringe performances when he was a drama student in Manchester, along with Young Ones co-stars Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson.

“I’ve got a lot of connections professionally, in that my first ever reviews really as a writer were in Scotland when I came here as a young student playwright and it was just beyond excitement, the best days of my young life. We had such fun and I put on four comic plays at the Fringe in 1979 and 1980, and got amazing reviews; Radio 4, The Scotsman…

“We used to perform and live in a place in Leith. Rik was there, him and Ade were doing their own show, Death on the Toilet, so Scotland was big for me then. But I knew it anyway because my then girlfriend was from Glasgow so I went there a lot in my late teens and early twenties and made a lot of Scottish friends whom I still have. Our first walking holiday on the Isle of Rum with her friends was just fantastic misty, whisky laden walks. And Emma Thompson is half Scottish and has a beautiful place with Greg, which we’ve visited a number of times, and of course Robbie [Coltrane] was a dear, dear friend.

“Funnily enough I had my hernia done in Scotland. When I was writing Filthy Rich and Catflap Rick was driving me so mad my groin popped. Thatcher’s attacks on the NHS were being mitigated and she was saying some hospitals haven’t got queues, why don’t you go there? Obviously a single mum in Dalston is not in a position to go to Devon and there was no internet then, but I could travel and a surgeon at Fort William hospital was a friend of mine. It’s the best train journey in the world, the sleeper to Fort William, the romance is great. I’ve done it three times and every time I’ve had a bottle of whisky and a copy of John Buchan’s The 39 steps (watch out for the anti-semitism, you have to excuse him, it was a different time). That is a book to read half drunk thundering up to Fort William and then you get out and you’re in heaven. Anyway, on that occasion I went up for my hernia and the doctors and nurses of NHS Scotland back in 1986 did a fantastic job because it’s given me no trouble since.”

Back in the 1980s Elton and Mayall always kicked off their UK tours in Scotland.

“We’d always start in Dundee, at a club called Fat Sam’s. I opened three tours there and went back in 1986 on my own to record my very first album, Motormouth. If people want to know what I was like when I first became famous on Saturday Live, it’s all on Motormouth, recorded at Fat Sam’s in one take. So all those grunting interjections, you can blame your fellow countrymen and women for that. Very occasionally when I’m in Scotland people say I was at Fat Sam’s that night. And that’s a lovely thing.“

Relieved that the election will be over when he performs, after his 2019 tour coincided with a general election - “It was the Johnson election. It was horrendous and I had to do some shit on it” he’s happy to swerve Sunak and Starmer, Trump and Brexit.

“I’ve got plenty I want to deal with which is great fun for the audience. I’m a comedian and I’m meant to entertain people who want to have a great laugh and get out of themselves. I mean there will be some politics, but it will be what I normally do. I’m the principal target of my humour. There’s stuff about growing older - I’ve got grown up kids now. Next time my wife and I walk in Scotland we’ll be using the ski poles for saddos. I used say ‘oh look at those old gray hairs with their poles, stacking them outside the pub when they stagger in’, and that’s us now. We’ve got the ski poles for our walks - essential for avoiding swollen hands and sausage fingers. So I mention the ageing process and I’m sure some of the audience will understand. Although I get a lot of young people in the house - their parents bring ‘em, and that’s nice. I do a pretty effective riff on the whole Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z and I think they might enjoy it. I’m the butt of the joke. There are no villains. I point no fingers!” he says.

Apart from the occasional sausage ones.

Ben Elton’s  Authentic Stupidity UK and Ireland Tour will be at Edinburgh, Queen’s Hall, 3 September, Pavilion Theatre Glasgow 4 September, Aberdeen, Music Hall, 5 September.