Ben Elton Live is an hour and a half of blisteringly incisive comedy

While Ben Elton’s body of work as a writer and director is second to none, it’s easy to forget that it was his work as a stand-up comic that originally turned him into a star.

Elton’s 1987 and 1988 shows Motormouth and Motorvation, appearances as host of Channel 4 alternative comedy showcase Saturday Live and Friday Night Live, and solo series Ben Elton: The Man from Auntie and The Ben Elton Show secured his status as one of the country’s most outspoken and best live comics.

However, following the 2005 tour of his poorly received ITV show Get a Grip, Elton decided to take a break from stand-up, concentrating on writing and other projects.

He returned in 2019 with a new stand-up tour, and although it was interrupted by a certain international health crisis, it went down a treat.

Elton, 64, explains why he stopped toured for so long.

“I never gave up stand-up comedy,” he told Chortle. “Telly gave up me, which is fine.

“The world doesn’t owe me a living. Morecambe and Wise were only at the very top for about eight years. I’ve never had the remotest feeling of ‘Oh, why didn’t they give me another gig?’

“I had an amazing time in the 1980s and 1990s. I had my own show. And then time came when new faces came along, and that was totally cool. And that coincided with me having kids and I just stopped touring,

“I was able to be at home and be part of my children’s growing up. I did one tour in 2005. And I missed six months of my children when they were five, six years old. I didn’t have to do that.

“So I got out of the habit, but always it was on my mind and my wife – she likes my stand-up – she always said, ‘you know, you must do it again.’

“Maybe she just wants to get me out of the house. But eventually the kids grew up, they left and she said ‘you might as well p*ss off as well’. So I went back on tour.

“Stand-up comedy for me is a great art form. It’s a means of communicating ideas in a way you can’t do with a script. You can’t do it with a play or a sitcom. It’s the only truly subjective part of my comic art.”

Recorded in 2022 at Southend’s Palace Theatre, Ben Elton Live sees the comic deliver an hour and a half of blisteringly incisive comedy, in which he tries to make sense of a world which appears to have gone stark raving mad.

He says: “Ben Elton Live crams 15 years of accumulated outrage and bewilderment into two hours of sweat soaked, gag filled, taboo busting, tonsil rattling, sacred cow slaughtering, w*nker exposing, d*ckhead destroying, mind expanding, a*se ripping, profane, incisive, uplifting, motor mouthed hilarity and it’s f*cking brilliant.”

The man behind sitcoms Blackadder, The Young Ones and Upstart Crow, films Maybe Baby, Three Summers and All is True, novels Popcorn, Dead Famous and Identity Crisis, and musicals We Will Rock You, Tonight’s the Night and Love Never Dies will always be, in his words, “the sparkly-suited Thatcher-bashing comedian”.

However, in everyone else’s mind, Ben Elton is the Godfather of modern stand up, and it’s great to see him back.