Ben Elton

He occupies a strange space in British comedy. As a founder of the 1980s alternative scene, he helped write the sitcoms that reshaped television, including The Young Ones and Blackadder. He then spent decades writing West End musicals and bestselling novels, angering purists who felt he had defected to the establishment. In his later theater tours, he plays an older man trying to navigate a changing world, but the underlying frantic delivery remains intact.

He builds his sets around escalation. He takes a tiny domestic complaint and inflates it until it sounds like a profound societal failure. When he targets a self-checkout machine, he applies the same blunt hammer he once used to bash the government. He rarely shifts gears. Subtlety is absent, and a punchline usually lands at the exact same volume as the premise. He does not coax a crowd into agreeing with him. He talks until they surrender.

He met Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson while studying at the University of Manchester, an encounter that provided the blueprint for his early television work.