The most difficult five days of a difficult year are upon me now and much of this Thursday was spent trying to get started on the final Objective script, though I had to pop into town to do one of the interviews for the show, which slightly derailed the work. This one is about Dolly the Sheep and it's not a subject I have thought about much before and I only have two or three days in total to knock this one into shape. I am aware that I have taken on too much and it's not going to be a pleasant weekend.
At this stage of proceedings it is very hard to stay focused and I allow myself to flit attention away to video games and the internet and in doing so I came across
this promotional clip for an upcoming "one night stand" stand up set from Ben Elton for Dave. Ben Elton was, long ago admittedly, one of my comedy heroes. He wrote the Young Ones, which shaped my comedy tastes more than any other programme apart from Monty Python. He did what then seemed edgy and political stand up on Saturday Night Live. I didn't like him in the way that I loved Rik Mayall, but I knew he had been at the heart of this new wave of comedy that excited me and would change my life. I met him in Montreal in 1997 or 8 and though Stew and me had already said rude things about him in the paper (for which I apologised) he was very kind in allowing me to play the Young Ones and Alfresco fanboy, even performing his Sharp lager advert for me in the bar of the hotel.
Of course some of his subsequent choices and his seeming fair-weather attitude towards his left wing principles have put me off him further, but as I get older I find it hard to build up the anger and antipathy I might once have felt for such things. I am aware that some of the fans of my early work feel equally strongly about the direction my career has taken. I know that it is very hard to live up to the expectations of a 14 year old for whom comedy is everything and who is bound not to like what you do later in your career.
But I still can't believe how poor this clip is - Elton looks awkward on stage, he is floundering a bit trying to find the right words for a routine that is at best half-written, he seems to be getting heckled at one point though he ploughs on, and it's all building up to an awful joke about Catford and then a joke that barely makes sense about "crap river". Perhaps the gig is in Catford which would be a partial excuse, but even so it is embarrassingly weak. In fact weaker than most of the open spots performing on the circuit. And what is remarkable is that this is the clip they have chosen to promote the show. Maybe the rest of the stuff is brilliant. Maybe an idiot chose this clip. Or maybe someone very clever, knowing it would make people wonder if Elton had entirely lost it and be hungry to see the rest of the set. My favourite bit is where he is trying to list the attributes of English towns, but can't even find the words and says "noble...." and then just makes an odd sound approximating a word.
Believe me, I have had gigs like this, though not televised specials and I don't think I have attempted a joke as bad as that even at a new material night, but I found this fascinating and frightening in equal measure. Is he just rusty and been away too long? I witnessed a similar phenomenon (though not as bad) when I saw one of Frank Skinner's early comeback shows in 2007, and he soon bounced back to his old form. Has Elton just got fat and lazy (comedically speaking) due to his success and money? Was he never actually funny at all but coasting along on other's talents? Does having a career where everything you write is published or made make you unable to believe that anything you have come up with is shit? Does Ben Elton just not even care that someone (in this case a 5 year old child) has probably spotted that Catford is made up of two smaller words (indeed the name apparently is a shortening of Cattle Ford which means this is scarcely even a pun)? Or more worryingly for me, do you just get past 45 and lose all judgement and ability to filter out what is and isn't funny?
I watched the clip loads of times, and only partly out of a sense of schadenfreude. It was like looking at a traffic accident, but being faintly worried that the injured person had your face and this was your soul now floating away from it. I feel bad criticising another comedian and one of my childhood heroes, but I feel worse fearing that I might one day (or already) have fallen in the same way, but be unaware of it. I think I am still doing pretty good stuff and possibly my best ever stuff, because I had the good fortune not to be massively successful when I was young and unbelievably rich now (and I think both of those things are good fortune), but it is as well to be afeared of this.
And maybe part of the issue is that the main problem here is a lack of preparation and maybe some over confidence in his own abilities to be funny without much of a script - and look what I have got coming up on Sunday and Monday. Complacency is the enemy.
But there are, I am sure, some comedians who have managed to stay interesting and productive into their fifties. I can't think of any right now.... I can think of a couple actually, but not many. Mainly because not many stand ups stick with it that long.
I see it as a warning anyway. Hopefully I care enough to make sure I don't fall into the same trap. But maybe I will hit 45 and think that taking apart the word Catford (or to be honest, even thinking that Catford is worth taking the piss out of at all) is enough.
Go on
watch it again, shudder and weep for him, your youth and the dreams of us all.
