Skip to main content

Ben Elton's return to standup: 'I’m as scared as I get'

Back on tour for the first time in 15 years, the trailblazing comedian has some scores to settle. How can he be a sellout, he asks, if he was never radical to begin with?

They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes – but my inner 13-year-old would never forgive me if I spurned a chat with Ben Elton. The Young Ones, Blackadder and Saturday Live weren’t just a laugh for me; I constructed friendships, my sense of humour, and – let’s face it – my identity around them. Elton was the figurehead of the most exciting moment (give or take a 60s satire boom) in British comedy history, a sparkly-suited, mulleted firebrand blazing a trail for comedy’s punk generation – the so-called “alternative comedians” – to follow.

And then he wasn’t. Nowadays you can’t talk about Elton without references to selling out, and to Stewart Lee’s notorious routine comparing him with Osama bin Laden, who “at least lived his life according to a consistent set of ethical principles”. More on that later: Elton has plenty to say on the subject. But then, he’s got plenty to say on every subject. At 60 and a self-described “dad man”, the artist formerly known as Motormouth (the title of his 1987 album) is as voluble as ever in the run-up to his first standup tour in 15 years.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2mRZSHS
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more