There’s a sure clairvoyance required of an excellent satirist, an virtually supernatural knack for holding up a mirror to society and forcing us to see the grotesque reflection that lurks behind our shiny veneers.
While all the time being a centrist politically, I’ve beloved the ascorbic, often left, typically far-left that British stand-up comedy brings and have been an enormous fan of Ben Elton’s from his first outing in his shiny go well with on Friday Night time Dwell. Elton, the sardonic jester of British comedy and a proud Labour man of the Mrs Thatch period, delivered this in spades with Gasping, his debut play from 1990.
On the time, Gasping appeared like a intelligent, absurdist send-up of Eighties company greed, Thatcherite free-market frenzy, and the rise of shiny advertising and marketing machineries. However as we sit right here in 2025, with the air round us tinged with each air pollution and forms, one has to marvel—was Elton’s play much less satire and extra prophecy?
For these unfamiliar, Gasping tells the story of a slick advert government who, in pursuit of the following massive factor, helps his firm invent and monetise “Perrier for the nostrils”—oxygen in a bottle. What begins as a hilariously absurd idea spirals into chaos, because the commodification of unpolluted air results in shortages, international inequality, and an all-too-real survival-of-the-richest situation. Humorous? Completely. Ridiculously prescient? Much more so.
Taxing the air we breathe? Certainly not
Quick-forward to at present, and Elton’s dystopian imaginative and prescient doesn’t really feel as far-fetched because it as soon as did. Certain, we don’t but queue at Tesco for bottled oxygen, but it surely’s not completely past the realm of risk. Air high quality has turn out to be a premium commodity in city centres, with wealthier neighbourhoods typically having fun with cleaner skies whereas poorer areas choke on the detritus of heavy business. Purifiers, filtration methods, and even air-purifying vegetation have turn out to be middle-class staples—primarily a DIY tax on the air we breathe.
However the place Elton actually will get spookily near house is in his critique of huge enterprise and governmental overreach. In Gasping, the company world exploits one thing that ought to be a common proper—clear air—and turns it right into a money cow. It’s arduous not to attract parallels with our present predicament, the place all the things from water to parking to the miles we drive is metred, measured, and taxed. And with a authorities as hungry for income as at present’s Labour Celebration, it’s not completely inconceivable that oxygen may very well be subsequent on the listing. In any case, we’ve already received carbon taxes—how far off is an “air utilisation levy”?
The irony, after all, lies in Elton’s Labour allegiances. Again within the day, he was the poster boy for Thatcher-bashing, a flag-waving advocate for socialist beliefs and the redistribution of wealth. The concept that his beloved Labour Celebration may in the future be accused of taxing all the things below the solar—effectively, it could have made the youthful Elton choke on his organically sourced lentil soup. But right here we’re, with a number of the most creative revenue-raising schemes coming from the crimson nook.
A brand new divide: oxygen as a standing image
The world Elton imagined in Gasping is one the place the “haves” breathe straightforward whereas the “have-nots” gasp for survival—a painfully acquainted dynamic in at present’s world. Clear air is now not a given; it’s a privilege. In cities like Delhi and Beijing, air air pollution is so extreme that oxygen bars and private air-purifying gadgets are booming industries. And whereas these improvements are marketed as life-style merchandise for the prosperous, they spotlight a stark reality: the hole between those that can afford to guard themselves and people who can not is rising ever wider.
The Third World, as Elton dubbed it in his play, continues to be being plundered, not for oxygen however for assets that preserve the wheels of capitalism spinning. In the meantime, local weather change—arguably the last word indictment of our collective greed—has made clear air an more and more scarce commodity. Forests, the lungs of the Earth, are cleared at an alarming price, typically within the title of revenue. Elton’s satire wasn’t nearly air; it was concerning the commodification of something and all the things, irrespective of the results.
So, was Ben Elton a satirical Nostradamus? Maybe. Or maybe his genius lies in his capacity to distil common truths into biting comedy. The themes he explored in Gasping—greed, inequality, environmental degradation—are as related at present as they have been in 1990. The distinction is that we now dwell on this planet he as soon as exaggerated for comedic impact. The joke, it appears, is on us.
And what of Elton’s beloved Labour Celebration? May he have foreseen its evolution from the scrappy underdog of the Eighties to the tax-happy institution of at present? One suspects he may need, although he’d have skewered them simply as mercilessly as he did the Conservatives. As a result of, at his core, Elton is a satirist in the beginning, and satire spares nobody—not even its personal creators.
In the long run, Gasping is each a warning and a time capsule, a reminder of the place we’ve been and a cautionary story of the place we may be headed. Because the world grapples with local weather change, useful resource shortage, and the ever-present shadow of company greed, Elton’s play feels much less like a relic of the previous and extra like a roadmap to an unsettling future. So, if you end up reaching in your Dyson air air purifier or paying additional for a seat in a “clean air zone,” spare a thought for Ben Elton. He noticed it coming, and he made us chuckle earlier than we began gasping.
