This article by Alun Rees and Bob McGowan was published in the Daily Express on 14 October 1999.
BEST-SELLING writer Tom Sharpe, who had a TV hit with Blott on the Landscape, has now got a block on his literary outlook.
Tom, one of the most successful novelists in the English language, is stuck for ideas — and he blames computers.
His incisive wit and sense of the ridiculous abandons him at the keyboard.
So fans waiting for the fourth in his acclaimed Wilt series are going to have to be patient. He’s binned it.
Crowds of his admirers heard his “writer’s block” confession at a literary festival where Sharpe, 71, revealed he had spent four years on a follow-up, writing half a million words.
His efforts had not met the high standards he sets himself. They also failed the ultimate test when the manuscript didn’t raise a smile from wife Nancy.
At the Everyman Theatre, during the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, he confessed that the comic inspiration which supplied the hilarious twists and turns in his books had eluded him.
He said ruefully: “The trouble is there are six chapters in the middle which I know are really good but if I can’t make my wife Nancy laugh after 165 pages, out of the window it goes.”
Part of the reason his inspiration had deserted him, he insisted, was the computer. “You can edit so easily on them,” he explained. “You find yourself going back over things, again and again. I am easily distracted by the immense capacity of computers to do other things.
“With a typewriter all you can do is type. Then that’s it — it’s on paper.”
Tom said: “Unless a book makes me laugh I won’t give it to a publisher. I am reasonably well-off and don’t need to. Sometimes it all goes right — I wrote Wilt in two weeks.”
Sharpe has delighted millions of readers all over the world since making his debut with Riotous Assembly in 1971. It was followed by Indecent Exposure and Porterhouse Blue which was filmed starring David Jason.
Wilt was published in 1976 followed by The Wilt Alternative and Wilt on High. His last book, The Midden, came out four years ago. Since then, his output has, well, wilted.
Tom, who lives in Cambridge with Nancy, has now started work on another novel.
His literary agent Vivien Green said: “Hopefully it will be a new Wilt — but if he can’t make Nancy laugh, it won’t be.”
Photograph caption: DOGGED: Tom has started a new novel, hoping to beat his writer’s block.