In his 2001 novel Dead Famous, Ben Elton painted a nightmarish vision of television's future; a future where reality show producers would deliberately murder their contestants in order to boost ratings. And yet the real future of television would turn out to be so much more nightmarish than that – not because there are murders, but because Elton is still allowed to write sitcoms.

On Tuesday night, BBC1 will air the first episode of Elton's newest sitcom. It is entitled The Wright Way, because the surname of the main character is called Wright. It is set in a local council's health-and-safety department, because everyone who's ever read a Richard Littlejohn column knows what a bunch of clowns those people are. One of the characters is nominally a lesbian, solely because the word "lesbian" is apparently quite funny now. It's a shamelessly broad, deliberately lowest-common-denominator sitcom aimed squarely at the perpetually outraged heart of middle England.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Miranda and Mrs Brown's Boys are just as ostensibly mass market as The Wright Way, and people have gone crazy for those. But there are two problems with Elton's comedy. The first is that, from top to bottom, the whole thing is irredeemably dreadful. Worse than The Life of Riley. Worse than My Family. Worse than Big Top, even, and that was a sitcom about what a circus would be like if it had Amanda Holden in it.

Ben Elton in Friday Night Live, his 80s heyday. Photograph: ITV / Rex Features

The characters shout all of their lines in exactly the same way, regardless of the situation. The theme tune is the sort of half-heartedly jaunty muzak that big corporations in the 1970s would pump into lifts if they wanted their employees to kill themselves. Even the production design looks so lazy that you spend entire scenes wondering why characters are pretending to drink coffee out of obviously empty mugs. The Wright Way behaves as if the world hasn't moved on a jot since The Thin Blue Line was last on TV, and The Thin Blue Line felt as if it was 20 years older than it actually was.

The second problem is that The Wright Way was written by Elton. The same Ben Elton who exploded sitcoms so successfully with The Young Ones 30 years ago that it's still impossible to escape its influence. The same Ben Elton who made Blackadder into one of the wittiest, most original sitcoms that British television has ever produced. The same Ben Elton who all but became a figurehead for the alternative comedy boom of the 1980s. And now, here he is, responsible for this unholy mess.

The world isn't exactly crying out for any more "What happened to Ben Elton?" articles – ever since he started palling around with Andrew Lloyd-Webber at the turn of the millennium, people have been quick to criticise him for everything from selling out to turning his back on his old political ideals – but that doesn't mean the question has gone away. Elton used to be so sharp and abrasive. Just check out any of his old standup routines. Look at this clip, for example, of him railing against the lazy sitcoms of the 1970s.

That can't be the same man responsible for The Wright Way. It can't be. By rights, Elton should be at the centre of a million Paul is Dead-style conspiracy theories by now. People should be trawling through footage of The Man From Auntie looking for hidden signs that Elton died after the finale of Blackadder Goes Forth and was replaced by an imposter with a secret fondness for the Daily Mail. It's the only possible explanation.

Elton doesn't need the money. The success of We Will Rock You – the collection of Queen songs that he assembled into an almost-narrative a decade ago – is so impossibly successful that the man probably spends his days splashing around inside a Scrooge McDuck-style cash vault. The only feasible reason for him to write The Wright Way is to prove that he's still got it. And judging by the results – it's been shoved to the margins of the schedules, has been barely promoted at all and is unilaterally unfunny in every sense – will finally teach him that he hasn't.