Dead Famous
Ben Elton Bantam Press, 339pp, £16.99
ISBN 0593048040
Ben Elton's high concept for his latest social satire is promising, if not terribly original. It is about the way reality TV, fuelled by the solipsism and daftness of the youth of today, undermines culture, society, humanity and everything else about us that quells the beast within. Throughout, you can hear the souped-up, theatrical disdain of the Thinking Brigade at whatever dinner party Elton was at when the idea came to him. But that's not the problem. Or at least, that's not the main problem.
On the level of straightforward whodunnits, Dead Famous is a fairly accomplished piece of work - much thought has gone into creating canny structure, wily plot-twists, pace and denouement. Ten proles (very much like the contestants of Big Brother) are locked in a house. A couple of them are booted out; one is murdered; the rest have to remain in situ until the murder is solved, leaving the rest of the nation breathless with excitement at the untold quarries of human interaction that reality TV could provide (I mean, head-stabbing, for God's sake - you don't see that on Pet Rescue). Difficulties arrive only with the dialogue, the characters, the world-view and one Terrible Sentence, of which more in a minute.
Elton's ear for youth parlance is showing signs of decrepitude. Sure, they say "wicked" a lot, they automatically italicise "so" (as in "that is so cool") and they might say "he da man" as a joke. But "Big up to yez" is jarringly wrong. So is "amped up" (only Buffy the Vampire Slayer - a fictional, American character - has ever said it). Here's a sample sentence (it isn't, by the way, the Terrible One): "It's brilliant, wicked, outrageous. I feel just totally bigged up and out there." This is just not good enough. Picking up some dated keywords that get on your nerves and repeating them to fade gives you a lampoon of extremely poor quality. You need to bring something to the table. In these post-Ali G days, surely everyone knows that. There are very mild differences between the characters, but on the whole they stick to this lazy, dad-impersonation of mall-speak. Dads be warned - you can't satirise the dumb by being even dumber than they are.
If the "dumb" characters merge as a result of the homogeneity of their speech patterns, so, too, do the "clever" ones. Elton splits his "thinking" voice between a number of chaps, mainly a policeman and a TV editor. "It's the hugging I hate most, you know, and the stroking. And above all, the endless wittering on": this is a typical complaint, along with whingeing about therapy culture, homosexuality (the "in your face" kind), the egocentricity of the young, their failure ever to fight a war, etc, etc. The "thinkers" have their own petty vanities and prejudices. They may seem upright and firm, but hey, folks, they're human. They're frail. Here's the rub - when Elton throws his weight entirely behind a character, when he gives it the full force of his agitprop sincerity (as he did in Gridlock, say), he is fantastic. But when he tries to play mediator between one outlook and another, he is absolutely woeful - far from shedding his didactic bent, he veils it with ill-executed perspective shifts and a hackneyed approximation of fatherly fairness.
There are two amusing sentences in the book, and one convincing line of dumb dialogue (so uncharacteristically convincing, in fact, that I ran it through a search engine and found that real-life Helen, from Big Brother 2, actually bloody said it). The Terrible Line is this: "Now his hand was brushing at Kelly's most intimate self." Most intimate self! Who could ever have predicted that the creator of Blackadder would one day be referring to the female pudenda as a most intimate self? What happened to his fabled dash, and wit, and boldness? Where have his balls gone (or should that be "most intimate orbs")?
My constant yen to use the word "dad" (or synonyms thereof) while discussing this book makes me think that fatherhood is not agreeing with Ben Elton. He is turning pompous. He spent too much time worrying about mortality and furry tubes (see Inconceivable), and took too little care of his humility.
Zoe Williams is a columnist on the London Evening Standard
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