markreed.cjb.net - Bring Me The Head Of Ben Elton

BRING ME THE HEAD OF BEN ELTON!

OK, just a quick one today, but one that’s been secretly burning away at my previously happy-go-lucky nice, tolerant, persona.

I hate Ben Elton. Absolutely can’t stand him. He was never very good to start with, but these days I loathe him with a fear. A fear I can’t place, a fear of being just like him : bland, dull, and of performing a complete betrayal of his every ideal for a bit of profit.

He started off being a vaguely promising, opinionated, left wing tosser. Sure, I didn’t like him, but I admired his political stance. Even if he did get on my nerves all the time.

He wrote some pretty good things in his time : The Young Ones, and the excellent Blackadder. Even though the first season of Blackadder was fairly ropey. But since then?

And then he bought a Porsche.

And his work is nothing but absolute tosh. He’s turned into everything anyone with a conscience can despise. His works, previously biting and semi-political, incisive and almost good, have become bland rubbish. Stark, his first novel, was an almost interesting excursion into the world of Eco-terrorism. Gasping was a similar take upon a world where oxygen became a retail commodity. Not bad ideas for a precious, arrogant twenty something into novels.

But it then started to go horribly wrong. Ben Elton forgot what it was that made him good in the first place, the thing that made him work, and started working out of habit. Just churning out any old rubbish because he can, sans rhyme, reason, or arithmetic. He mistook saying something with having something to say.

He began writing novels with such dull titles as Inconcievable, about a couple trying for a baby. And this from what once could’ve been the sharpest political commentator in the country.

Hugh Laurie was in the film. The film was probably directed by Richard Curtis – a typically British, bland, affable comedy about love and stuff. And thoroughly dull and boring. Whenever I go abroad people think the British are a race of dull, affable, useless stuffwits who talk out of their arse, sit on their elbow, wouldn’t recognise true love if it had its name up in lights, and are oh so reserved and British. Oh rather, I say, old chap?

Not content with that, Ben Elton also further collaborated with enemies of good taste everywhere, by writing the script for the dreadfully humourless Thin Blue Line, a cop comedy (if ever there was an oxymoron, there it is), being a rentaquote gabbing head for chat shows across the country, and lastly, but not leastly, his collaboration with the devil in excelsis, Andrew Lloyd Webber, for a no-doubt high budget, low-concept cinematic abortion of The Phantom Of The Opera, as well as reinforcing the highest level of conceptual tosh with We Will Rock You (a dreadful rock opera about … well, nothing important) and even worse, staging a rock opera based on Rod Stewart – I mean, come on, Ben, where’s your quality control? Where’s your pride? Do you have anything left to say, anything left to do? Or are you just some old fart whose sold out, or ‘bought in’, takes money from anyone, lords it up with royalty, and is the token weirdo at the otherwise bland and boring Queens Jubilee Variety Performances?

Ben, your time is up. You’ve been rumbled. You’ve nothing to say, and you’re saying it very very loudly. Shut up, grow up, go away. Come back when you’ve got something worth listening to, instead of dull rock operas about Galileo who discovers the power of The Bohemian Rhapsody to dull the corporisation of the world at the hands of Globalsoft, you dull, boring, Porsche driving wanker.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws