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Dead Famous
Ben Elton
Bantam Press, 2001, 339 pp, £16.99
Review first published on fish.co.uk. in Septemer 2001.
You have to admit, Ben Elton has hit upon the perfect
setting for a whodunnit. Seven suspects perfectly sealed
from the outside world, no-one entering or leaving. The Big
Brother house is a location Agatha Christie would have
killed for.
Dead Famous - the latest in Elton's relentless torrent of novels, plays, films, TV series et al. - is the story of a murder on a show called Peeping Tom. Any similarity to reality TV shows living or dead is entirely obvious.
Elton writes novels about things - the environment, politics, social issues. It was a slight surprise then that this one is such a trad whodunnit. Plenty of red herrings, a murderous motive for every suspect, and a detective who neglects his marriage and gathers all the suspects together at the end for his dramatic revelations.
However if you want a proper Eltonesque critique of reality TV, you won't be disappointed. It is an excellent portrayal of the futile self-promotion of the contestants, their cynical manipulation by the programme makers, and the voyeurism of the viewers. Above all, it shows the degradation of a culture that has abandonned all values other than the pursuit of fame or money.
What exactly Elton thinks about it all though is hard to say, because he has taken the precaution of making the only person in the story who doesn't love Big - sorry - Peeping Tom, a conservative Christian policeman. And as Inspector Coleridge also disapproves of such things as swearing and explicit sexual talk (two utterly un-Eltonesque taboos) it's impossible to tell where Coleridge stops and Elton begins.
It's as if Elton is camoflaging the squareness of his concerns about TV culture. Maybe not though: he has never stuck to fashionable causes, and has assaulted cooler targets than Big Brother, such as Tarantino and Trainspotting.
In fact this camoflage works very well in making you weigh up for yourself what you think of the issues without being able to take a lead from the esteemed novelist.
Dickens, of course, it ain't. Neither is it Christie, and the denouement is predictable and unconvincing enough to let the the book down. Personally though I never saw the point of whodunnits, and I didn't much care who did it in this case. It was still a great read and a welcome comment on what TV is doing to us. Long may he keep them coming.
the Big Brother house is a location Agatha Christie would have killed for