Ben Elton's new sitcom's political correctness gone mad

Ben Elton's exhaustingly unfunny new sitcom, The Wright Way, feels like the work of a socialist Richard Littlejohn, says Michael Deacon.

Grace Dent on TV: The Wright Way (BBC1)

Ben Elton has created an admirably broad new comedy. Shame it's not admirably funny.

The Wright Way, a sitcom about a punctilious health and safety officer, should itself carry some sort of health warning. It left me with a raging headache; I left it about halfway through. Critics, like the captain on a sinking ship, should really stay to the very end, but I am a middle-aged man with a sense of his own mortality, and this was 15 minutes I would never get back.

The show is written by Ben Elton so, as you would expect, there are some good lines, neat turns of phrase and a solid narrative structure. However, it is a long way from his best work, with far too great a dependence upon the supposed hilarity inherent in brand names. Horlicks, anyone?

But even if he'd scripted a masterpiece of Blackadder proportions, it would still have been scuppered by the performances, which are uniformly terrible. It is as though the entire cast has come straight from an evening class in sitcom acting for beginners and can't wait to try out their comedy voices. Nobody, but nobody, behaves like a human being.

Worst offender is the show's star David Haig, who has chosen to give his character Gerald a hideous nasal twang all too reminiscent of Chris Barrie's in The Brittas Empire, a sitcom I also found unwatchable. Gerald is a boring person, but the show has fallen into the trap of actually making him dull company for the viewer.

It is often said that a successful sitcom is one populated by characters you want to spend some time with. Gerald, meanwhile, is a character I would like to spend some time with in a locked room, armed with a baseball bat.

The horror of the acting is compounded by a laughter track evidently laid down in a lunatic asylum. Mildly amusing lines are met with an ear-shattering explosion of guffaws, while slightly clever sight gags receive the kind of rapturous ovation that Pavarotti spent a lifetime chasing.

So, to sum up, I didn't like The Wright Way. But had the cast played the characters instead of the comedy, uninterrupted by such a hysterical soundtrack, I suspect it could have been quite watchable. We will never know.

Ben Elton has always been a middle Englander

Most of the 'alternative' comedy of the Eighties was actually middle-class agnst.

"Don't get me started," said Gerald, Baselricky town council's health and safety officer, on a couple of occasions during the first episode of Ben Elton's new sitcom The Wright Way (BBC1). If only Elton had listened to Gerald, everyone would have been a great deal happier. Lame doesn't begin to describe this car-crash of a comedy that involved actors standing around awkwardly doing their best at damage limitation. There was no point in them even trying to make the script convincing.

Several well-telegraphed knob gags; a slapstick routine involving taps that wasn't funny the first time, never mind the second; "comedy" lesbians; a litany of familiar Middle England rants about women taking too long in the bathroom, loading the dishwasher properly and how the modern world has generally gone mad; and a lead character who plans to shut down the whole of the town to reduce a speed bump by 6mm. I've had more laughs reading a Richard Littlejohn column. The Wright Way is a sitcom that would have looked and felt badly dated in the 1970s.

What's happened to Elton? If he intended to write a latter-day Reggie Perrin, someone should have told him he had missed the mark badly. I know there are a lot of people who have never liked him or found him funny - he did too often mistake shouting for humour - but his heart was in the right place and he took aim at worthwhile targets. Back in the 80s, when a great many entertainers were riding the Thatcher - sorry to bring her up again, but it's unavoidable - bandwagon of self-interest, he was in the vanguard of those with a vocal, leftist opposition.

If nothing else, Elton made you think; in The Wright Way, he does precisely the opposite. More unforgivably, he's not even funny with it. Has he mellowed, sold out or just given up? Maybe he feels that Thatcher won so there's no point in fighting old battles. Either way, he has written a sitcom that only someone like the late baroness would probably have enjoyed. And if that doesn't give him sleepless nights, it ought to. My name is John Crace, good night.

Wright Way took a very wrong turn on the comedy front

Back in the day, Ben Elton - the author of this crime against comedy - was a motor-mouthing angry young stand-up, manning the barricades against Maggie Thatcher and all things Establishment. Who knew he would end up writing a sitcom that makes Mrs Brown's Boys look like cutting-edge satire?

Last night's viewing - The Wright Way, BBC1

Like Dr Frankenstein, Ben Elton appears to have created his new sitcom, The Wright Way - his first for more than 10 years - by exhuming the body parts of different comedies and stitching them together. The result is an odd, lurching affair, sometimes funny but occasionally so groan-inducing that you want to gather a mob with torches and pitchforks.

Review: The Wright Way, BBC One

David Haig is a hugely accomplished actor, but my commiserations to him and the rest of the cast, shouting all their lines as if to drown out their awfulness. I hope they were well paid for this execrable mess.

The Wright Way, BBC One, review

When a sitcom is trying to be funny and falling miserably short, and all attempts at "edginess" are as synthetic and flaccid as a failed French boob job.

The Wright Way savaged on Twitter

Twitter really cracked knuckles and got its collective snark on last night to appraise Ben Elton's new sitcom The Wright Way.