Being Ben Elton

Ben Elton's an enthusiastic chap. He's like a please-pet-me panting puppy. At the moment he is tearing round the Dominion Theatre where his play We Will Rock You, a story about Queen which "isn't at all about Queen," he says, has been running for the past year. "We're the number one hit in London!" Elton says, scurrying down one set of backstage stairs to the next. "Did you know that? The critics hated us when we opened. I mean they hated it. But people love it!"

By this time we've got onto the stage. It is a magnificent sight looking out at the rows and rows of empty seats. Elton is patently excited. "I could talk about this forever," he says. He shows me all the new-fangled stage props. "This," he says, waving his hand towards what looks like a large video screen, "is on a truck and you can drive it around across the stage! And this," he points to the floor, "comes up and then swings across the audience when we're doing Killer Queen." He stops for a minute and sighs. "Gets to you, doesn't it?" he says.

He then tells me he remembers playing here in the early Nineties when he was "the git in the shiny suit". "I never called myself that," says Elton, "but the term stuck." He didn't have a backing band, a chorus line and hundreds of thousands of pounds of props behind him. It was just him, a microphone and his quicktalking, motormouth wit.

It must have been hard, I suggest, to have seen all those people in front of you waiting to be shocked, amused, entertained and him just standing there in the spotlight. "But you've got it there in one!" he says. "I am an entertainer. I've loved drama all my life. I studied it at Manchester University. For ages I thought I was going to go into theatre as an actor but I ended up writing, and that's what changed things for me." It certainly did. He met Rik Mayall at university and by the time he was 21 he was writing The Young Ones and then Blackadder.

At the same time, he decided to do a bit of stand-up comedy at the Comedy Store and within a year he was on television. I remember him very clearly. He used to wear pretty much what he is wearing today - tightish jeans, shirt (burgundy), bog-standard, train conductor's shoes, nothing fashionable, nothing that stood out. Mostly he was famous for routinely denigrating Margaret Thatcher. "Yeah, well, I hated her," he says. "If you feel passionate about the world you live in then that passion will invade your act."

I tell him I used to cheer at the television when he did his anti-Thatcher tirades. "I think you awoke my social conscience," I say.

"Oh," he says, looking taken aback. "It was supposed to be comedy. I wasn't about social conscience. I used to do routines about failing to get laid as a student." He is, at the moment, thinking of going back on tour as a comic again. Would the content of his show change?

"Well, of course I'd have to talk about politics. But I wouldn't go back to stand-up because I was feeling annoyed about the world. Frankly, I've got a life. Also, Blair is not like Thatcher. There's enough that's amusing about Blair's government but it's not shifting the fabric of our society. I'm a Labour Party member but I'm not necessarily a supporter of New Labour. Even so, I wouldn't go back on the road to lambast the Government. God no. I just fancy a change." That's the funny thing about him. He doesn't really like being controversial at all.

He was born in Guildford. He's a middle-class boy. He was never, the Arthur Scargill of the stand-up circuit, he says. A few years ago he quite happily joined forces with arch Conservative Andrew Lloyd Webber to do The Beautiful Game, a musical about the Troubles.

"Look at it this way, I have always loved Andrew's music so it was a great opportunity," he says. "I know people found it odd, as if I was joining forces with the enemy or something."

Then there was all the furore when some of the songs from the play were used at George Dubya's inauguration ceremony. "Why should I have stopped that from happening? I don't own the rights to the songs and it would have been very churlish to have kicked up about it." He was also criticised for compering the Queen's Jubilee concert with Lenny Henry.

"I loved it!" he says. "It was great. There were all these people - Paul McCartney, well I know him a bit, and Eric Clapton. He came up and hugged me.

"I've never said I'm against the monarchy. I think they're a harmless, rather odd little family. What would we put in their place? Anyway, there are all these people moaning on about me while they're drinking their Starbucks coffee and wearing their Gap jeans. It's the marketing men who rule the world now, folks. I've got time for a proper communist but not those hypocrites."

Well, he can still certainly dole it out when he wants to. He's obviously bright, clever and quick and likes to sound off occasionally. But what he really loves - and I think this is the essence of him - is a jolly good gag. That's really what he is, a very good, very funny, very apposite writer. He just loves to make people laugh.

This is why he never stops working. At present he is directing We Will Rock You in Melbourne and careering back and forth on aeroplanes.

"Yeah, I'm commuting to and from Australia but I love it. I've got three children under five and I tell you there's nothing more relaxing than hearing the quiet hum of a hotel mini-bar." He's written and is now preparing for Tonight's The Night, a play about Rod Stewart that is opening in October. "It's based on the lure, the essence of Rod," he says. "Anyway, he's seen the script and he seems to like it." And his new paperback, High Society, is number one in the best-seller list.

All this activity must be hard on his wife, Sophie, an Australian musician whom he married nine years ago after a seven-year courtship. They do, after all, have these three little children to look after. "I spend my life in a sea of snot," he says. "Sophie is at home with them because that's what she wanted. But I do nights and mornings and weekends." It was a tremendous trial for the couple to have children in the first place. "We did three failed IVFs and I cannot tell you how dreadful and painful they were. More for my wife than for me."

Sophie then became pregnant with twins - Lottie and Bert - who were born nine weeks early. "I was filming Maybe Baby at the time," says Elton - the film was based on his book Inconceivable about a couple who cannot have children - "and I was on set and I'd tried to get it all organised but then Sophie went into labour. I can tell you, Prem units are desperate places to be. We'd been told that our two had a pretty good chance of surviving but standing no more than a foot away from you is a mother who is losing her tiny child. It was heartbreaking. But I don't want to talk about that."

He says that at night, when the twins and Freddy, their youngest son, who was conceived naturally, go to bed, he and his wife love to have a couple of bottles of wine together. "It reminds me of what we did before the kids," he says. But he doesn't want to reflect on his own childhood as the grandson of a German Jewish couple who fled from Germany in 1939. Doesn't Elton find his family history fascinating? "I don't delve into it that much," he says.

But now various technicians have arrived on stage and we have to leave. Elton looks relieved when the interview is over. "I'm sorry but I hate doing these things," he says. He has three days and then he's back to Melbourne. "Back to theatre," he says, happily staring at the stage. "Now did I tell you about those back lights? Well they're on a trolley and they zoom forwards when ..." And he's off again, bless him.

High Society by Ben Elton is out now (£6.99, Black Swan).