Right now, Ben Elton is emotionally wounded. Sure, he likes to pretend he has a thick skin – don't we all, publicly? – but I wouldn't be surprised if he's back at home weeping into signed copies of his own books at this very moment. In fact, I wouldn't be too surprised if he kills himself in the next ten days or so. We should all pray for him. #BenEltonSuicideWatch – that should be any morally sound person's hashtag of choice for the next couple of days (no takers yet).

After having a gander at his new sitcom, The Wright Way, lots of ghastly beasties in the TV reviewing game have been taking vicious swipes at poor Ben. At the same time, he has found himself being buggered by a diverse range of amateur haters, people who don't get paid for expressing their negative opinions, but who like to spend their time doing it for a laugh anyway.

Fucking hell, the BBC can't even make The Wright Way look good in its advert, who the fuck decided to commission another Ben Elton show?

— Mark (@Markd88) April 27, 2013

@eclectic_blue Think that's bad? Try "The Wright Way" on BBC1. Ben Elton written, outdated shite.

— James Hodges (@Hodges777) April 29, 2013

If anyone sees Ben Elton near a typewriter, please report to the authorities. #wrightway

— Tee My Guest (@TeeMyGuest) April 27, 2013

In fact, I get the feeling everyone has been very nice to each other this past week not because of the sun, but simply because all of their excess hate-energy has been projected at 30 minutes of not-great TV.

How not-great is not-great? Well, there's a scene in which a man – Mr Wright, the lead character – accidentally wets his crotch on the sink. You know, like in that 80s Hamlet cigar ad and that 90s film with Robin Williams. And then he dries it on the hand-dryer.

Then there is a joke about erections. And there is a woman who takes too long in the bathroom. Anyone who writes this off as a light and harmless sitcom trope is missing the point, because they genuinely do take far too long in the bathroom – a huge well done to Mr Elton for being brave enough to finally point this out.

Also, apparently butter in the Marmite jar is very annoying? IDK. Regardless, Mr Wright certainly gives a fuck about it, the irascible little fellow that he is. What else? Ah, there's also a lesbian who's there to represent the essential tension between alternative lifestyles and good comedy. Oh yes, and just to emphasise the bang-up-to-dateness of it all, Mr Wright is a health and safety manager at a local council in Essex, because it is currently the late 1990s, and Richard Littlejohn's got bored of writing about Mad Cow Disease.

So far, it's not actually that bad on paper. After all, there is an episode of My Family where Pauline Quirke plays a bank robber. They literally give Pauline Quirke a gun and expect us to feel that this is dramatically plausible. Then someone in the bank's mobile phone rings and no one can figure out whose it is. British comedy has had plenty of nadirs, it's just that most of them are quiet exhalations in dimly-lit corners. Unfortunately for Ben Elton, he's Ben Elton, so his latest offering had the bad luck of being completely unavoidable.

What makes it even worse, everyone has decided, is that it is the product of a war criminal. No one can actually remember Ben Elton advocating an attack on Iraq, but it seems like the sort of smug and poisonous thing he'd do, doesn't it? Palling about with Andrew Lloyd-Webber. Sucking up to Brian May. Leeching around, scumming it up with all his crass friends in high places, betraying his Marxist principles, turning his back on the 80s. Ben Elton has sinned against who he was and no one is in any mood to forgive him for this flagrant act of personal growth. Because, truth be told, they've just been waiting several years for him to screw up so conclusively that there could be no slipping the noose.

Elton was too clever by precisely half, and he knew it. He wrote The Young Ones when he was 23. By 30, his golden years of stand-up were already behind him, so he churned out best-selling novel after best-selling novel, made £17 kajillion via his Queen musical and somehow managed to fit in a smattering of Blackadder somewhere along the way. So now we're really gonna get him.

And we've got quite a lot of time in which to do so. The show has several episodes yet to run. Every week, from now on, his death by a thousand cuts will continue. I'm sure Frankie Boyle is sat with his writing team scheduling his tweets right now. And I'm sure, by the end of it, Ben will have gone out of his mind with pain and fear. If googling your own name is opening a door to a room where people tell you you're shit, then the internet plus the swarm effect of linear old media is the ultimate, category 5 shit cyclone.

Being a middle-aged creative in the throes of mojo-loss must be one of life's least fun experiences, like losing your first tuft of hair or sensing the gradual softening of your erection. Unfortunately, there's no escaping it if you've built a life in a medium that requires you to do new work. The Rolling Stones can dick around regurgitating "Brown Sugar" at Hyde Park till the end of time. No one thinks they are any less brilliant for it. But Elton cannot stand in a public place, play the Samuel Johnson episode of Blackadder the Third and simply wait for the applause to overwhelm him. He has to go out into the world and do new things. And no matter how many millions you have in the bank, if you're of working age and you've established yourself as a big swinging dick in a particular field, you want that applause to continue forever.

An older Elton spewing out stand-up. (Image via)

If only we were all being gulled. If only he were in fact staking his claim to be one of the most innovative TV writers of all time by completely deconstructing the shitcom as a form. How we'd chortle if, having zipped through every cliché ever written in episodes one and two, by episode three there was a gently-lobbed reference to an appointment to test Mr Wright for symptoms of muscular dystrophy.

By part five, this misanthropic anti-hero should be bed-ridden, suffering from locked-in syndrome and applying for his right-to-die appeal to be heard at the Old Bailey, all while people parp on about erections and making kids wear helmets on swings in the foreground. No one should ever touch overtly on his sadness, they simply keep japing away about being lesbians and hating loyalty cards, even as Wright – his eyes now dammed with tears – silently contemplates his wasted life. It'd make the complete works of Dennis Potter look like, well, The Wright Way.

Then, in the final episode, he should knock over all the postmodern skittles. A character called Ben Elton, played by Richard Curtis, announces to our hero by video link that Wright is not allowed to die, as Elton made him and thus only Elton can kill him. Then Rowan Atkinson, playing Rik Mayall (brilliantly, of course), comes into the room and plays a time-travelling 80s Ben Elton doing a routine about the shittiness of 70s sitcoms, which, with every zinger, draws the final breaths out of Wright's wracked body. Then an entire cabinet of BAFTAs is delivered straight to the studio, not as a dramatic device, simply because the BAFTA committee will instantly recognise that continuing the awards would be pointless in the face of such a high level of genius.

Sadly, this seems unlikely. A couple of years back, Elton had a sketch show in Australia, where he now lives. It was so reviled that it was canned after just three episodes. To be yanked unceremoniously out of the schedules a second time – that really would make a man reconsider the path his life has taken, possibly via the nearest motorway bridge. The Wright Way is about to become a benchmark. Every time you want to say, "The bottom of the barrel in British comedy", you will have a clear way of saying it.

BenEltonSuicideWatch.

Follow Gavin and Marta on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes / @MartaParszeniew

Illustration by Marta Parszeniew

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