Ben Elton's Nemesis

Ben Elton.

Sit back for a while if you will and cast your mind back to when Ben
Elton was relevent.
The spangly ironic suits, the poo-pooing of the hoi poloi and how he
all thought that if one person would never sell out it would be
him.
Not until Thatchers bloddy corpse was fed to the sealions at London Zoo
would Ben Elton have stopped.

We didn't mind the fact that his cockernee voice was put on, nor that
his father was a staunch left-wing lecturerer at a upper class
university. And neither did we care that through his novels of
staggeringly bland airport fodder did he manage to lose every hope we
had of him as an intellegent author.

No, the reason that Ben Elton managed to turn our collective hatrid
away from the easier targets of Jamie Oliver and the cast of Atomic
Kitten was that he decided to work with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Andrew sodding Lloyd Webber.
If one man should have been on his "no" list than Mr Webber and his
single handed distruction of London theatre from one of intellegence
and thought into one of dull hoop-la and tepid spectacle should have
been singled out in a green highlighter from the word go.

"How can we get more working class people into the theatre Ben?"
"Make a musical about football Andrew, they seem to like that."
And so the patronising guff that was coughed up out their collective
gob turned out to be his downfall, Ben simply couldn't be bothered to
pretend to be anything more than what he was all along, another
Cambridge graduate who fell out of college and into the lap of the
broadcasting elite.
Poor show Mr Elton.

Eagle eyed readers will note that at the inorgaration of King Thicky in
America the other day Ben's lyrics were performed in front of
exactually the kind of people he used to rally against.
Shortly after this performance he left the show with the Starbucks
mernaid on his arm before checking into a hotel to be sodomised in a
huge pile of cash by Tony the Frosties tiger.

Hmmm, so what of his acheivements? What Blackadder? and the now
legendary scene in which all the characters died to show like...y'know
how like, bad war is and stuff? and poppies fell about?
Well if my time in the Bedford Youth Theatre as Muchkin #6 is anything
to go by this was stolen if not heisted from "Oh What A Lovely War" one
of the plays in fact he would have studied whilst doing theatre at
Cambridge.
Oh and what about The Young Ones in which Rik Mayall used to fall about
and say nob and then Alison Moyet would sing for a bit.
Well watch a repeat on UK Gold and you will be left as cold and as
stony faced as Andrew Llyod Webber would be if everyone were to find
out all his best tunes are nicked from both Bizet, Mozart and
Bach.

Oh dear Ben, youve been found out to be as dull and predictable as the
people you used to hate, and that makes you the same as them if not
worse.

Yes Indeedy, indeed.
And as if the thought of this musical filled you with terror, try
contemplating whats gong to be done with the classic "The Secret
Garden" when it lifts its petticoat and parks its contempory ass down
in a few weeks time.
First the Grinch and now it seems another fond childhood memory is
trained to jump through hoops whilst every last penny is squeezed out
of it so that eventually nothing will be left except books and
imagination become as redundant and dull as television seems to aspire
to be.
Prepare for battle royale if they ever get their hands on Fingerbobs,
mind.