Blackadder's Ben Elton reveals how Stephen Fry responded to his "few-holds-barred" portrayal in new memoir

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Ben Elton, it’s obvious, is slightly floored by the question – but it’s actually pretty straightforward: “Why does everybody hate you?”

Maybe it’s because the query comes not from me, interviewing him over Zoom from Australia where he now lives. (In fact I find him the very opposite of hateable: frank, funny, thoughtful, self-aware and generous.) No, the question in question comes from the publisher of Elton’s new autobiography – and good friend – Larry.

“When I took him the idea, it was his first comment,” says Elton. “Not ‘Oh great, I can’t wait to hear you on the subject of Blackadder’, but ‘You’ll have to address the question: Why does everybody hate you?’”

The answer – like everything else in Elton’s book/life – is tackled with head-on humour. “Everybody doesn’t hate me. That’s why I’ve written 16 novels,” he says (modestly neglecting to mention the smash-hit musicals, seminal stand-up routines and million-dollar movies he’s written, nor even national-fabric sitcoms such as The Young Ones, Blackadder and Upstart Crow).

“But clearly I irritate some people. My gaucheness, my enthusiasm, my Mickey Rooney tendencies – ‘Let’s do the show! It’s going to be brilliant!’ – I can see how that would irritate people, especially in Britain, which has a default approval of false humility. If my dear friend Stephen is doing an interview about his book, he’ll say [excellent impression of Mr Fry], ‘Oh, it’s awful, pure nonsense. Don’t read it, let’s talk about something else!’ – and people love that.

“But I’ll say, ‘It’s the best thing I’ve done, I’m so pleased with it, please read it!’ – and that doesn’t seem to wash. In the book, I deal with a few people who’ve been mean about me [they really have, and he really does], but I think I’ve done it in a nice way and paid respect. I think I’ve got it just right – but there I go again!”

So why write a memoir and not, say, novel number 17? “I started to think about an autobiography after Rik died [Mayall, Elton’s friend since university, suffered a fatal heart attack in 2014]. There were all these eulogies, which was bittersweet because he’d had some lean years and he could have done with a bit of that love while he was still alive. So I was in reflective mood, but not a particularly happy one.”

Now, he says, he’s in a “good reflective mood”. At 66, he’s “got through most of my life – a decent slab of it, anyway. And realistically I’m unlikely to have many more significant pieces of work. Now my mum’s dead I’m the next generation to the grave: my friends and siblings and I are next. Rik’s gone, Robbie’s gone…” (Coltrane was another old pal.)

Writing the book “wasn’t easy”, he admits. “My fractious relationship with Rik; his problems with alcohol; when Alexei [Sayle] turned on me out of the blue; IVF; my psoriasis – that was all painful to remember and to talk about. But I’ve never been in therapy so it’s been good to reflect.”

Certainly the book’s honesty is a refreshing antidote to many celeb memoirs – but how do his famous friends (and enemies) feel about their few-holds-barred depictions? “I talk about Stephen a lot in the book, and it’s not uncritical. I didn’t want to ask his permission to say the things I said, because I felt I had every right; but I love Stephen and would never wish to hurt him. And I talk about Hugh [Laurie] quite a lot too, and although it’s laudatory in many ways, I also talk about his darkness. So I asked Hugh’s wife, Jo, to read it and see what she thought.

“In the end, Stephen wrote me a very beautiful letter saying, ‘You may wonder what I think about ‘my’ bits, so to speak. And I 100 per cent applaud you for telling the story as you’ve done. It’s the right thing to do.’”

There’s plenty of self-criticism too, but always the entertaining sort. One fantastic anecdote about blowing his chance of working with Elton John climaxes at a party with Janet Street-Porter (“fun”), Sean Connery (“dour”), Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys (“dryly witty”) and film actress Salma Hayek (“uninvited… and with two bodyguards for her necklace”).

Yes, he’s shameless with namedropping (“Of course I am. I owe it to my publisher”), but it’s all part of that unconcealed enthusiasm. And really, if you can’t relish the fact that you once spent a day at Paul and Linda McCartney’s watching them bicker over the correct consistency of veggie burgers, then what’s the point? (They met through George Harrison, who “came over to me at a gig and said, ‘Thanks for keeping us amused in the 1980s’. I’ll never forget that.”)

So does he, to borrow the phrase infamously used 14 times in Alan Partridge’s memoir, think ‘Needless to say, I had the last laugh’? “I’m always being invited to say, ‘Well, we won’ – especially about [his derided but hugely successful Queen musical] We Will Rock You. And no, I don’t feel I’ve had the last laugh. But I do feel I’ve had an awful lot of laughs.”

The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here.

To order What Have I Done? My Autobiography by Ben Elton (Pan Macmillan, £25) for £22.50 including p&p, visit radiotimes.com/shop50.

For all the latest RT Book Club news, interviews, Q&As with the authors, reviews of previous books and more, visit The Radio Times Book Club sponsored by Dr. Oetker Ristorante.