When Ben Elton told his publisher that he was considering committing his life story to print, he was told: “The first thing you’re going to need to address is why so many people hate you.”

It’s a question he returns to time and again in the breathlessly frank and wonderfully entertaining memoir that resulted. How did this decent, thoughtful and very funny man, who wrote sitcoms that have lived for decades in the public’s affection, novels that topped bestseller lists all over the world, and plays and musicals that have put millions of bums on seats, cop so much opprobrium from the press and some of his peers?

Elton recounts many instances between the covers of the appropriately titled What Have I Done? He is the only human being to have been put into Room 101 twice. John Osborne, the original angry young man, famed for bringing kitchen-sink realism to theatre, wrote a piece for the Daily Mail headlined, “Why I hate Ben Elton”. And there was once a discussion on Newsnight “about why I was so completely and utterly sh*t”.

“I have always believed in the value of popular art,” he says, trying to explain the media’s aversion to him. “But the general presumption of the British arts-media establishment is that if something is much loved then it must be of less value. Look at the contempt that was heaped on Paul McCartney for his effortless ability to increase the sum of human happiness with almost every breath he took.”

Reviews of Elton’s work, in whatever form, tend to play the man rather than the ball, often bubbling with furious irritation, the subtext of which is, in his own words, “for God’s sake, can Ben Elton please just f**k off?”

Much of it, he knows, had to do with his stand-up persona. The loud, opinionated, Thatcher-bashing motormouth from his days on Saturday Live (and briefly, later, Friday Night Live) was accused of breaking character by hanging out in Claridge’s, enjoying the company of cel