Ben Elton

Drama at Manchester put Ben Elton alongside Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, and British alternative comedy carried him on from there. He co-wrote The Young Ones with Mayall and Lise Mayer, joined Richard Curtis on Blackadder from the second series onward, wrote Filthy Rich & Catflap alone, and later made The Thin Blue Line and Upstart Crow. A Londoner, born in 1959, he also worked in stand-up, wrote the book for We Will Rock You, the Queen musical that opened in the West End in 2002, and collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on The Beautiful Game and Love Never Dies. He married the Australian musician Sophie Gare in 1994, took Australian citizenship in 2004, and was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2023. Dead Famous, his seventh novel, came out in 2001 and is built around reality television: a housemate on a programme called House Arrest is killed on camera, and three police officers work through the recordings to work out who did it while the surviving contestants keep filming.