Ben Elton Audiobooks

From Blackadder to What Have I Done?, four decades of British comic writing

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Who is Ben Elton?

Ben Elton, born in 1959, is a British comedian and writer, and one of the central figures of the alternative comedy movement that upended British humour in the 1980s, where his stand-up ran on left-wing political satire. It is the writing CV, though, that beggars belief: co-writer of The Young Ones, Blackadder and Mr. Bean; sole writer of The Thin Blue Line and Upstart Crow; author of sixteen novels across dystopian, comic and crime territory, plus an autobiography.

Add the stage musicals – The Beautiful Game, We Will Rock You, Tonight’s the Night, Love Never Dies – and you have one of the most restlessly productive comic writers Britain has produced. Whatever you make of any single project, the range is not in dispute.

Ben Elton in audiobooks

Elton arrives in our catalogue in two distinct flavours. Blackadder: The Complete Collected Series preserves the sitcom writing on which a large part of his reputation rests – dialogue built to be performed, which makes its life in audio feel less like adaptation and more like homecoming. What Have I Done?, by contrast, shows the novelist at work, drawing on the darker, sharper seams he has mined across sixteen books.

For UK listeners the appeal is straightforward: comedy and storytelling with an unmistakably British sensibility, from one of the writers who helped define what that sensibility sounds like. Start with the Blackadder collection; resistance is largely pointless.