I have one piece of advice...

DON'T GET YOUR HEART FIXED IN YOUR MID-80s

- By Matt Nixson

BEN ELTON has a routine about public health warnings that claim even moderate drinking can cost two years of your life. “Oh, how terrible, two whole years,” riffs the iconic comedy writer.

“They don’t say which two years but I'll tell you, it’s the f***ing last two and frankly I'd be very happy to be done with those — so give me a drink!” It’s familiar territory for the 66-year-old Young Ones creator, instinctively funny, justly angry and carrying a social message — the sort of material he’s been killing audiences with since finding fame as the motormouth in the shiny suit in the 1980s.

But it’s not just a routine; Ben’s take on our longer lifespans, the flip-side of which so often is dementia, was informed by his own parents. And it’s been on his mind while writing his brilliant new memoir, What Have I Done?, having first been inspired by the death of close friend Rik Mayall in 2014, then by the passing of his mother, Mary.

“When you're young you think you're going to live forever - you get to 66 and you know damn well you're not,” he grimaces. “Like anyone my age, you're getting more and more conscious of your own mortality, particularly if you’re burying parents who in any other era would have died at 70 and are now staggering on until 95 in misery.

“My father Lewis suffered from complete Alzheimer’s so if I have one piece of advice, it’s don’t get your heart fixed in your mid-80s like my dad. The old pig’s valve kept his heart going long after his brain had gone and that’s medical science today — it’s prolonging physical longevity without any thought for our ability to appreciate or understand we're alive.”

This, he believes, is a “moral and philosophical madness” and has made him a passionate “100% believer in properly regulated voluntary assisted dying”, for which the Express has been campaigning alongside Dame Ester Rantzen with the Give Us Our Last Rights crusade.