This article was published in The Sunday Times on 8 July 1984.
INTERVIEW
Elisabeth Dunn on a remarkable partnership
TOM SHARPE was playing his well-known role of retired colonel from the Shires. What was it, I asked, that had made him choose Blott on the Landscape as his first televised work? Would not Wilt, the book which established his reputation, have been a more obvious candidate? Sharpe straightened his back and announced: “Money, madam. Money. People have bought options for peanuts and not made the movie. I’m holding on to Wilt.”
The filming of Blott — currently on location in Shropshire — is the result of a remarkable collaboration between two giants of popular contemporary literature, Sharpe and Malcolm Bradbury. Bradbury has taken Sharpe’s rampaging, anarchic novel, published nine years ago, and turned it into a six-part television series to be shown by the BBC around Christmas.
At first sight, it would seem an ill-matched partnership between a weighty observer of social absurdities (Bradbury) and a roaring exponent of high farce (Sharpe), yet both find the marriage delightful.
“People have tried to adapt my work before,” said Sharpe. “And they’ve produced scripts which have been absolutely abysmal. Absolutely over the top. Then this one turned up. Best thing I’ve ever seen, and who should it come from but Professor Bradbury, last heard of lecturing on structuralism in Brazil or something or other in Budapest. It was like finding F. R. Leavis doing a balancing act with a seal. It’s serendipity, isn’t it Malcolm? You use long words.”
“It started partly because we share the same publisher,” said Bradbury. “And various people had said there was a kinship between our kinds of writing. I’m a comic writer of a certain kind — a rather serious comic writer — but I love writing farce and this seemed a wonderful opportunity to do something rather more playful than I might otherwise have done. And I love re-writing — myself and other people. I never let a book go.
“Writing for television is filled with people. It’s not a work of literature in that controlled, tight, almost anal sense that a novel is. You have to think of the actors and the director. When you’re writing a novel, you sit in the same position from 9.30 until 6.00, drink too much coffee, smoke too much, and I’m dull to my family and bad to my wife. It can get very depressing.”
Living with a Sharpe novel, on the other hand, is not a depressing experience. Certain changes have been made in the transition to television. Blott (played by George Cole) [sic] is no longer a prisoner of war because such a background would have made him too old for the updated version. Bradbury has explored the characters more fully than Sharpe’s fast-moving original had time for. But in essence, the series remains faithful to the tale of squirearchical folk, their lives threatened by a motorway and their efforts to ruin each other.
Sharpe explains: “I said: ‘Throw the book out of the window,’ because a book and a movie are two different things. I don’t have any qualms about literary sensibilities. He’s put a lot of sex in it and I suppose I’ll get the blame for that, but I’d have difficulty in saying which was Malcolm’s joke and which was mine. You’ve got Morecambe and Wise here.”
It’s a persuasive comparison. Bradbury, analytical and thoughtful, Sharpe, bluff and loaded with one-liners. Yet you can hardly see the join.
“There is a particular pleasure about Tom’s work for me,” Bradbury says. “Though I don’t know whether he’d be happy to hear me say this. An awful lot of British television drama is nostalgia. But in Tom’s work there is something very nasty about nostalgia. It’s anarchic nostalgia. I don’t want people to think: ‘Ah, the lovely old British countryside. How sweet it is.’ And what Tom seems to be writing about is something more atavistic, more animalistic.”
Sharpe: “I don’t live in Dorset for nothing.”
Bradbury: “The thing about television drama now is that the technical standards have risen enormously — the quality of directing and acting is very high. Though this can be dangerous because of the enormous temptation to spend far too much money on a big prestige series. Blott turns out to be much, much more expensive than I would have imagined.”
Sharpe: “You’re telling me. I went up to Ludlow when they were shooting the riot scene. I’m standing there thinking about the Third World and wondering what they’re doing with 1,200 eggs, bushels of tomatoes, three cars burned and a Rolls-Royce overturned.”
The dénouement calls for a certain amount of carnage in a wild-life park. The instructions for the day’s shooting read: “08.30”. (“It’s very military, you see,” said Sharpe.) “Animals and animal handlers: 1 puma; 1 camel; 1 zebra; 1 tiger; 1 ferocious lion still to be found.” “The lion chases George Cole up a tree,” said Sharpe. “They’ve got four tranquilliser darts — three for the lion and one for George Cole.”
The secret of Blott’s success is Bradbury’s cool, restraining influence on Sharpe’s mayhem, a seriousness of approach which is reinforced by the casting. Geraldine James, for instance, plays the heroine, if that’s the right word for the appalling Lady Maud. In any event, it is a collaboration which is to be repeated, since Bradbury is preparing to script another Sharpe novel, Porterhouse Blue, but not until he has finished the adaptation of his own Booker Prize contender, Rates of Exchange.
Sharpe for his part is basking for the moment in his success in the States — a salient reason for holding on to the film rights of Wilt — where four of his books have just been published. “Had the best review I’ve ever had in the Washington Post. And the Christian Science Monitor. What will all those dear old ladies who read the Christian Science Monitor think when they get to the bit about oral sex? Eh?”
Photo caption: Malcolm Bradbury and Tom Sharpe: “Throw the book out of the window . . .”