SHHHHH..THEY DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THEY WERE LAUGHING AT THE ACCENT:

Elton's new BBC One sitcom, The Wright Way, has suffered some of the worst reviews of any television comedy in decades. It has been called "dated", "desperate", "laboured" and "groan-inducing". The social media reaction has been even harsher, and from within the chastened Beeb-hive comes the familiar buzz - when things go wrong - that many of the Corporation's creative types didn't really want the show anyway.

It was too old-fashioned, too middle-Englandy, too predictable, and its premise of exposing the follies of a local council's health and safety department, run by a clipboard-carrying despot called Mr Wright (David Haig), played too readily to the prejudices of curtain-twitching suburbanites.

In all of this, one theme was unmissable: whatever happened to Ben Elton, the Tory-bashing, mockney-spouting, stand-up radical who helped transform British comedy in the Eighties? Most of the people who today run, and for that matter, write about, television grew up thinking of Ben as a prime adornment of the anti-Thatch resistance, and believed that his routines would have the masses laughing their way out of their chains.

When it turned out that Elton wasn't quite as seditious as the comrades had hoped, and, by his own admission, was slightly bewildered to find himself being cast as any kind of political figurehead, his reputation in right-on circles began to wither. The process was accelerated by the discovery that he came from a well-to-do family, the son of a prominent physicist, had been educated at a top Surrey grammar school, and that his street punk London accent had been adopted in the hope that comedy circuit audiences would find it funnier.

Many in the artsy-liberal crowd wondered if they hadn't been conned. The accusations of outright treachery would come later. "Politically," shrugged Elton, "I'm kind of a pub bore going on about what's wrong with the world. It's just that I have a bigger pub." How could the man who created The Young Ones, the most anarchic, insubordinate show on television do this to his fans?

As it happened, he only became truly funny when he ditched all the tribune-of-the-people schtick and turned his mind to comedy that might appeal to a wider audience.

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