Ben Elton admits he has a habit of rubbing people up the wrong way. In 1975, three weeks after his arrival at the Stratford technical college where he did his A-levels, he put up a notice in the drama department looking for recruits for an acting group he was founding called The Studio Players. The notice explained how their first performance would be a three-act play, written by him, which he would also be directing. But the students didn’t take kindly to Elton’s “grandiose overreach”, refusing to join his acting group and freezing him out. “I had no idea then and still have very little idea of how to play it cool,” he notes.
He’s not wrong. What Have I Done? is an exhaustive account of the 66-year-old’s career as a writer and comic, detailing every play, standup show, comedy series, movie and book he’s ever worked on, including multiple projects that never saw the light of day. A 470-page doorstopper, it takes us from his early days at Manchester University where he met Rik Mayall, with whom he would collaborate on the smash hit The Young Ones, to the writing partnership with Richard Curtis that yielded Blackadder and on to Comic Relief and Saturday Live, delivering standup that included the fevered skit “double seat”, which people still quote back at him 40 years later. After that, he digs into the novels, all 15 of them, and the jukebox musicals including the Queen-themed We Will Rock You, which got a critical drubbing but nonetheless ran in the West End for 12 years. Though the focus is mainly on his work, there are diversions into his personal life too, including his marriage to Australian musician Sophie Gare, with whom he has three children.
