This article was published in the Daily Record on 18 October 1984.
Chatalong With Max
By MAX HOBBS
IS THERE life after Minder for George Cole? Yes! His next appearance on the box will be Blott on the Landscape.
It’s a series from the novel by Tom Sharpe, one of the funniest writers around.
Sharpe, whose latest book, Wilt on High, is in the best-seller lists, told me in Glasgow yesterday:
“Blott will be screened by the BBC from January in six one-hour instalments.
“I’m delighted to have George Cole in it. I’ve admired him for years, and not just for Minder.
“Blott is the usual anarchic, knock-about stuff… concerning upper-class country folk, whose lives are threatened by a motorway.
“One scene calls for 1200 eggs, bushels of tomatoes, three cars burned, and a Rolls Royce overturned.
“There’s also a certain amount of carnage in a wild-life park, involving camels, a zebra, and a ferocious lion.
“The lion chases George Cole up a tree. The crew had four tranquilliser darts — three for the lion and one for George.”
LAUGH
London-born Sharpe is 56, silver-haired, with twinkling eyes. He went to South Africa when he was six.
In his twenties, he wrote plays: “Most were rubbish… heavy and full of symbolism.
“Only one was staged, The South African, and it resulted in my being kicked out of the country.
“I became a humorous writer here quite by accident with my first novel, Riotous Assembly.
“I rattled it off in three weeks in 1971. Then came Indecent Exposure and Porterhouse Blue.
“I try to write a book a year, but it doesn’t always work out like that.
“Vintage Stuff ran into years and totalled 600,000 words — nine times longer than it should have been.
“I enjoy making myself and others laugh… it gives me enormous confidence.
“For most of my life, I lived in an unreal world, where I was taught opinions and told what to think.”
NOVEL
He now lives in Bridport, Dorset, with his second wife Nancy, three children, 17 typewriters and two word processors.
“I met Nancy, an American, while I was teaching in a technical college in Cambridge,” he recalls.
“Six weeks later, we were married… I wasn’t going to let her get away.
“I had £400 in the world. She had a thousand dollars — and a fridge.
“She went back to the States to sell up, and I wrote Riotous Assembly to support her.
“When she returned, I told her I’d written a novel and it was going to be a best-seller.
“You know what? She didn’t believe me!”
Photo caption: Tom Sharpe… a humorous writer by accident