Life
What Have I Done? review: A highly entertaining autobiography by the oft-maligned ‘Blackadder’ writer
Jewish comedian and writer Ben Elton settles old scores in this frank account of his life in showbiz
November 20, 2025 14:53
Jewish comedian and writer Ben Elton settles old scores in this frank account of his life in showbiz
November 20, 2025 14:53In 2012, Ben Elton was asked by the BBC to pitch an idea for a sitcom. Having been in what he calls “telly wilderness” for years, he leapt at the opportunity to write a comedy for his long-time friend and collaborator Rik Mayall. The show was called The Wright Way, with the plan to feature Mayall as a “pedantic health and safety officer”. But things didn’t work out. While the BBC liked the show, they apparently thought Rik “too much” for a family audience.
“The knock-back was a hammer blow for Rik,” writes Elton. “We’d both pinned so many hopes on it.”
Elton’s highly entertaining autobiography is full of candid little showbiz anecdotes such as this. It details Elton’s emergence from the 1980s alt-comedy stand-up scene into a versatile comic all-rounder: scriptwriter, novelist, playwright. His name became synonymous with hugely successful British comedies such as Blackadder and The Young Ones, and more recently the Shakespeare spoof Upstart Crow. He also wrote the stage musicals The Beautiful Game, We Will Rock You and Love Never Dies.
Yet Elton would be the first to admit that he is not to everyone’s taste. He is admirably frank about some of the “fair” adverse reactions to his work. Of the reaction to The Wright Way, which was eventually made starring David Haig, he writes: “The media consensus… was that it was so bad as to be beyond and beneath contempt. They even had a discussion on Newsnight about why I was so utterly shit… In my case, they kind of review me via the actual piece. My [13-year-old] son said, ‘Dad, if I ever read anything like that about me, I don’t think I’d bother trying ever again.’”
What Have I Done? certainly contains some clear settling of old scores. With TV honcho Michael Grade over a decision to cancel Blackadder (Grade claimed he didn’t, but Elton has kept the cancellation letter); with presenter Jonathan Ross, over a decade of sniping at Elton, culminating in a row over “Wossy’s” bid for tickets to see We Will Rock You, only to throw his tickets away live on air after telling his national TV audience that “he wouldn’t dream of attending such a god-awful horror as a Queen jukebox musical by Ben Elton and so was offering them to anyone who wanted them”; and with comedian Alexei Sayle who eventually apologised after 20 years of dissing Elton in interviews.
We don’t get much of Elton’s private life, though. Briefly, he tells us that he was born in London in 1959, the youngest of four children. Almost as swiftly, he relates how his Jewish father and uncle, Lewis and Geoffrey Elton, arrived in Britain in 1939 from Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Like many comedians of his era, with the exception of David Baddiel, Elton didn’t trade on his Jewish identity professionally. But then he does not identify as Jewish despite his father’s background. “As far as I’m concerned, Judaism is a religion, like Christianity or Islam. It’s not a race. How can something be a race if you can convert to it?” Although in the next paragraph he admits: “To Hitler I would be a Jew.”
But he also wonders why almost the very mention of his name raises the hackles of so many in showbiz. One possible explanation is provided by Elton’s friend, Harry Enfield, who says “it’s a Jew thing”, and, using a Colonel Blimp voice, adds: “We don’t like uppity Jews, y’know.”
Elton protests that Stephen Fry doesn’t get the same level of antagonism. Enfield tells him it’s “because Stephen doesn’t look and act ‘Jewish’. He’s urbane and self-deprecating in patrician English style, whereas I’m too eager to please and too anxious to succeed.”
I think Enfield might be on to something, and I also think Elton might agree, for he goes into a detailed defence of his late uncle Geoffrey Elton, a brilliant academic. He was once described as spending his life “wanting to be English” and using language “effectively but never beguilingly”. Elton concludes: “The writer just wants to say ‘Jew. Jew! DIRTY JEW!’ but of course he’s far too English for that.”
Has that been his own problem, Elton wonders?
He decides not. “I really don’t think any of the long list of people who have found me unbearable over the last 45 years are being antisemitic – some of them are Jews themselves”.
He himself describes himself as a people-pleaser. Yet his publisher’s immediate response to the idea of an autobiography was “Well, the first thing you’re going to have to address is why so many people hate you.”
Maybe it’s because it’s too easy to categorise him as a middle-class lightweight, play-acting at being a hard-left member of the working class. Actually, the ferociously hard-working Elton is anything but a lightweight, forever coming up with pitches and ideas for films, TV and the stage.
For me, Elton’s staggering achievements outweigh the point-scoring and the chippiness. I’d like to meet him, after reading this.
What Have I Done?
By Ben Elton
Macmillan
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.