All about dying to be famous

Comedian, TV scriptwriter and film director Ben Elton talks to books editor MARGIE THOMSON about his novel Dead Famous.

There's no trouble recognising the setting. "One house. Ten contestants. Thirty cameras. Forty microphones." Oh no - it's reality television. But wait, there's a twist. Millions of eyes watch as the perfect murder takes place, yet nobody knows whodunnit.

It's Agatha Christie meets Big Brother: two winning formulas rolled up into one hot-selling paperback, lurching out of the fertile imagination of Ben Elton - famous, successful Ben Elton, who wrote the brilliant scripts for The Young Ones, the Blackadder series, and numerous other books and films, including the recent Maybe Baby.

And now this, his latest: Dead Famous (Bantam Press, $34.95), a murder mystery set in TV land, populated by good-looking twentysomethings who simply, desperately want to be famous.

They're an unpleasant, shallow lot who speak in code ("Wicked!", "Check it out!" "Bigged up and out there", "I love these guys!") and talk shamelessly and graphically about sex all the time. Is the now-middle-aged one turning on today's young ones?

Elton sighs. He's accustomed to people thinking the worst. We in New Zealand are used to worrying about our tall-poppy syndrome, but it seems we're no worse than the British. It's the Andrew Lloyd Webber syndrome: the experience of incredible popular success, tempered by utter derision at the hands of the would-be intelligentsia.

"Why does everyone hate you?" the celebrated English interviewer Lynn Barber asked Elton. He was ready with a blistering personal defence.

"I said, 'Oh Lynn, my darling, do you think it could be just you and your friends at your Hampstead dinner table who hate me? Because if you go to the theatre tonight there'll be 1000 people who have bought tickets, and I don't think it's them that hate me. Who are these people who hate me? I think it's you! And could it by any chance be because you would like to be playing to 1000 people tonight? I have to say I think there is an element of that."'

But back to those twentysomethings. Even the early Greeks, Elton reminds us, complained about the falling standards of education among the young. "Every generation bemoans the dumbing down of the younger generation ... I'm not going to buy into the idea that 'it were better in our day'. Every age has its challenges."

And he certainly doesn't feel he's having a go at the younger generation. "Having a go schmo. I mean, I was having a go when I was writing The Young Ones. My God, if ever there was a critical piece about young people's vanities it's the character of Rick, the ultimate student leftie who's going to be a bank manager in five years' time. I don't think you could ever accuse me in my earlier work of exalting youth culture only to grow up a generation and shit on the next lot coming up. I don't think that would be fair at all. I think I've always taken a wry and critical stance, but been well aware of my own inadequacies."

What does set those twentysomethings apart from fortysomethings such as himself, he says, "is that they've grown up in a world saturated by media, which has led to an unhealthy obsession with celebrities and a lack of analysis as to why someone should be in the public eye.

"We're living in a world where fame itself is considered a career. What do you want to be? I want to be famous! Famous for what? I don't care!"

At one point after the murder, the remaining participants in Elton's fictional reality TV programme, House Arrest, must decide whether to pull out of the competition or resume the show.

"Those people decide to go back in the house even though one of them is a murderer, and the reason they do it is because they know that it will make them more famous," Elton says.

"I think they would choose to go back in. I think that anyone who would choose to go into that bloody house in the first place would go back in."

Just as those who have been simultaneously mauled and adored by their audience will go back for more. For the ultimate in this love-hate dallying with the public, Elton teamed up with well-known Tory Andrew Lloyd Webber to write the musical The Beautiful Game, about the forces which turn an ordinary man into an IRA bomber, and which played for a respectable if not blockbusting 12 months in Britain last year. That certainly got tongues wagging.

"How could you reconcile your political beliefs with writing a musical with this man?" was the tenor of questioning in an online interview hosted by the Guardian; not to mention the vicious rumour that he'd played at President George W. Bush's inauguration ("As if under any circumstances ... It's because Andrew Lloyd Webber was asked and he played one of our songs. Nothing to do with me. But I was very pleased, actually, because it was a song about peace and reconciliation").

But at least he's famous for actually doing something. And, more than that, he's worked his way right to the heart of our culture. How many people do you know who can recite screeds of Blackadder, or who can't see a Porsche without saying, "I've got a Porsche" in a very silly Oxbridge giggle?

Dead Famous, then, is a great idea. It's not exactly slagging off at reality TV, but it's certainly an insight into a cultural obsession. Lights, camera, action, murder.