‘Blackadder’ wordsmith grapples with ecological threats

Press, 28 June 1989, Page 17

‘Blackadder’ wordsmith grapples with ecological threats

BEN ELTON, the wordsmith behind ‘‘Blackadder,” is a professional jester, but he is nobody’s fool. If he talks at top speed (earning himself the sobriquet “Motormouth”), his tongue is only trying to keep up with his restless mind.

It is a mind which nof only produces the outrageous oneliners and hilariously absurd situations of “Blackadder,” "The Young Ones,” and his sell-out stage shows, but also sustained a radical weekly column in Britain’s mass-circulation “Daily Mirror.” Now he wrestles with the ecological dangers facing the whole planet in a best-selling first book, a thriller called “Stark.” Aptly enough, it is described as “an earth-shattering novel.” Its subject is a despicable conspiracy by the world’s richest industrialists to save their own skins from the mess they have made of the world.

Their opposition is a rag-tag group of Green freaks — a mad Australian veteran of the Vietnam war, an ageing drug addict, a New York journalist and an Aboriginal housewife. Elton wrote “Stark” while visiting his girlfriend in Fremantle a year ago, and set it in West Australia.

It went straight into the bestseller lists in Britain, and Sphere Books have now paid him £lOO,OOO for the rights to his next novel. What it will be about he is not yet sure. “I’d really like to write a good light comedy,” he says. “A combination of guts and wit.” At present he is not concerning himself so much with the detail as with the form. "The shape of projects is as important as the contents.”

In Britain, Ben Elton is well known as a top stand-up comedian, and for his television show “Friday Night Live,” but in New Zealand it is his television comedies “Blackadder,” and “The Young Ones” he co-wrote with Richard Curtis; that captured big audiences. Their technique is to write in separate rooms, then swap scripts for appraisal. Scripts for a fourth “Blackadder” series are now complete. The odious Black-

adder reappears in another time and place — the trenches of World War I, as an army captain. Baldrick is his batman.

“Hugh Laurie, who played the Prince Regent in a previous series, will be a chinless wonder of a lieutenant who gets hampers of food and drink from Fortnum and Masons while Blackadder is boiling Baldrick’s socks for their nutritional value.”

By

GARRY ARTHUR

The dangers of writing a comedy about the carnage and waste of life of World War I do not alarm Ben Elton. “I know my history very well,” he says. “Both my grandfathers fought in World War I, one on each side, and I hope my hands would wither over my wordprocessor before I laughed at the sacrifices made.” A long-time member of Greenpeace, Ben Elton hopes

that everyone concerned about the state of the planet is heartened by the success of the Green party in the recent European Community elections in Britain. He says he is not partypolitical, but he uses things that concern him to make comedy. “If it’s good, it’s because I use things like that.” He sees his writing as pure entertainment, even so, saying that entertainment does not have to be a nebulous or shallow thing — “It can be powerful and strong too. Most light entertainment is crap; it fills the gaps and whiles away the hours, but it doesn’t entertain.

“I wrote ‘Start’ to really entertain — to engage the mind and delight the spirit, and to be really worth wading through. If it was light entertainment nobody would read it; if it was a book as bad as the worst TV, you wouldn’t get through the first few pages.” “Stark” is a success, he believes, because it takes a difficult subject — the poisoning of the planet — and finds the intrinsic humour in it. Not foolish humoqr, he emphasises, but what he calls “humour with guts.”

He likens himself to the fool in Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” a play which he sees as an incredible parallel to the situation with the eco-system in modern times. “Lear thought he could break the chains between God, the King and animals. His power made him arrogant, and he thought he could abdicate from the chains of being. But his fool said, ‘You’re a fool.’

“Today our kings — the industrialists — think they can do the same. There was a feeling in less sophisticated ages that the human race had a part to play, and that powerful forces would be unleashed if it did not. It’s fascinating that that has come to

pass. By seeing ourselves as running the world, we’ve released Armageddon. Animals are developing facial skin tumours because we thought we could interfere with the Sun.” It is not as if the knowledge has not been around for a while. Ben Elton quotes a 3000-year-old Indian legend which tells of the people praying to the god Ganges to send a river because the plains were so dry. “The god replied: ‘I am too powerful — I would destroy you. I will flow if you will bind me with forests and chain me with trees. I won’t then engulf you.’ “Can you believe that? Three thousand years ago they knew that forests were needed to prevent floods. Last year Bangladesh was completely flooded because of deforestation. Somewhere we forgot that; we’ve cut them all down.” •

On the future of the planet Earth, he says he is neither a pessimist nor an optimist. What has been done cannot be cured, he feels, but mankind can stop the poisoning. “We must stop murdering the world. We can’t detoxify the food chains, but we can stop putting poisons in, and let the world try to launder itself. I know we’ve got to try, because if we don’t we’ll die.” He sees the idea of “saving the world from destruction” as a form of arrogance.. "If we see our role as manipulative, either as good or as bad, then we’re dead.”

Neither does he believe that people can only wait for the industrialists to take action. Consumers could stop them poisoning the atmosphere tomorrow, he believes, by world-wide boycotts of products. “Certainly, the producers are at the sharp end of culpability, but if we all said ‘Stop!’ ...” For his part, Ben Elton is 100 per cent committed, and promises to use "all of my verbosity and celebrity” in the environmental cause.