Where's the new Ben Elton?

Christian Talbot wants a new comedy hero your parents will hate

Given that Alexei Sayle is making a return to stand-up and Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson have been in the spotlight over their cancelled Hooligan's Island project, I got to thinking about what it was that first excited me about comedy. Early comedy influences were things like Monty Python, Kenny Everett, Billy Connolly and later on the new wave of comedy in the form of The Comic Strip Presents, The Young Ones, Saturday Night Live and Sayle himself.

Even when I was a pre-teenager in Dublin, I was acutely aware of the changes happening in comedy in the early Eighties. I remember vividly watching the first Comic Strip Presents... show on the opening night of Channel 4. It had an extraordinary effect on me. The same thing happened when the Young Ones was shown for the first time on BBC Two a week later.

In that one week, the whole world seemed to change. There were now comedy programmes that seemed to speak directly to the young impressionable me and my friends. These shows were rude, crude, and anarchic while also requiring a degree of intelligence to ‘get’ them. They were often violent and nihilistic unlike the other ‘family’ sitcoms around at the time, which made them essential viewing for my classmates and I.

What was also apparent from shows like the Young Ones and in particular Saturday Night Live, with its stand-up sets from the likes of Ben Elton, Jo Brand and Julian Clary, is that the comedy had a political and social message.

Elton's anti-Thatcher diatribes, Brand's stand against sexism and Clary's confrontational assault on homophobia all seem quite tame in 2013, but at the time were quite revolutionary for mainstream television. These shows, although never garnering the ratings that Terry and June or the Good Life may have achieved, were instead highly influential to a whole generation of teenagers and young adults.

I would go as far to say that this group of comedians and performers, had at the time, the greatest influence on molding the political and social ideals of a whole generation. My own left-leaning, liberal political views are directly attributable to that group of people.

But probably the most important thing about that new wave of crude, anarchistic and political comedy was that my parents hated it. And so did the parents of all my friends. Not only did they not ‘get’ it, they were vehemently opposed to it, just like they were to punk. This just made it all the more appealing.

The UK is now again going through a recession to rival that of the early Eighties. There are huge numbers of young people unemployed, a Tory government is in power (in practice if not in name) and gender equality, gay rights and racism are still important, emotive issues but yet don't seem to be tackled in the same way as there were 30 years ago.

There's two possibilities here. The first is that young comedians of today aren't tackling these issues because they're not passionate about them or they're afraid that sort of material might not be mainstream enough to reach a wider audience or a television appearance.

The second is that there are young comedians out there doing this kind of material but are not being given a wider platform on TV and radio because commissioners prefer to play it safe. The overriding ethos these days seems to be to make shows which a huge amount of people think are ‘all right’ instead of making ones which become the ‘new favourite thing’ for a smaller audience. Either way it's a shame.

I've tried to think of which TV comedians would be influencing and exciting today's teenagers in the same way but I can't think of any. Maybe it was a once only deal or perhaps there's a new wave of comedians just waiting for their opportunity to break through.

I met Ben Elton, by chance, at a show last year in London. Instead of telling him how much I liked Blackadder or the Young Ones, I told him that his work (and that of his peers) in the Eighties helped to inform the political ideals I still hold strongly today (you can argue among yourselves as to whether he still does).

He seemed genuinely pleased by this. Regardless of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, I still owe him for that.