This article appeared in The Guardian on 18 October 1984.
Malcolm Bradbury is adapting some of Tom Sharpe’s comic novels for television. John Cunningham reports
[Ed: I was much riled by Mr Cunningham’s tone in this article. It is snobbish, sneering, condescending, and dismissive of Sharpe’s work to the point of insult. A disciple of Dr Sydney Louth, no doubt.]
FEW academics see thesis fodder in Tom Sharpe’s novels. One who did fastened on to the notion that Sharpe’s view of cocked-up Britain was a “contra pastoral idyll.” Sharpe is more perplexed than flattered by that and, just as he was resigned to settle for the laurels of the pop reviewers, (“Chuckling good fun,” Daily Express. “Often very rude indeed,” Daily Mirror) along came the ideal professor: Malcolm Bradbury, who seized on the novels as ideal serial fodder.
Tele serial stuff, at that, Bradbury, has adapted Blott On The Landscape, which is now being filmed for the BBC, and is working on a treatment of that book’s immediate predecessor, Porterhouse Blue, in which Channel Four is showing an interest. Bradbury is just the sort of academic Sharpe deserves. A comic novelist himself and a television playwright.
Sharpe (Lancing, Cambridge and South Africa, from which he was deported in 1961) was not, of course, hatched on any literary farm. But when he emerged in 1971 as a full-time writer, after 16 years as a teacher and a period as a commercial photographer, there were those who reckoned that his was the best comic talent to have come out for years.
Starting with Riotous Assembly, he has managed a book almost every year, with his best-known hero, Wilt, a technical college lecturer making another appearance this autumn, in Wilt On High.
Opinions are polarised. Many think the books are trivial, lewd, full of clichés and over-wrought, puerile jokes, which they are, and that to lie, endlessly reprinted on station bookstalls, is a fate far to good for them. It is.
Be that as it may, television has decided to home in on the quintessential Trad. Brit. of Sharpe. The two novels being adapted were written in the mid seventies and are, in their different ways, both about the demolition of Britain’s fixed symbolic assets. In Blott, the stately home of Sir Giles and Lady Maud Lynchwood, is threatened by a motorway. And in Porterhouse, the takeover of a low-brow, bibulous, gluttonous Cambridge college is by a new master, who wants to do away with privilege.
A little of the Porterhouse spirit of hospitality had washed over from their lunch when I met Bradsharpe in the production office. Bradbury always game, finishes a bottle of Rioja and enthuses about the novels. Sharpe, abstentious for the moment, is a large neat man, whose appearance could disguise any calling from barber to businessman.
The screen version, which will be seen early next year, can hardly be called a collaboration. From the start, Bradbury was given a free hand — Sharpe was impressed by his first script; better, he says, than versions by other hands over the years.
Then, he is not promising simply a faithful adaptation. With Blott himself — the nationality of the puzzled foreigner trying to make sense of the English — has been changed to east European; but he still reads Arthur Bryant, that unfashionable historian. “The biggest mistake he makes is to read Bryant,” says Sharpe. It’s one of his better jokes; much better than the recurrent ones about fat ladies, and contraceptives.
In the six 50 minute episodes, which is stretching the book, the producers have actually exercised restraint. “I’ve seen the rushes,” says Sharpe. “They’ve downplayed it. They haven’t gone over the top.”
You don’t have to talk to Sharpe for very long before that phrase comes up, because he is so often accused of excess. Bradbury acknowledges this, too, and says the other danger with Blott On The Landscape is that, given the country house theme, and with the long shadow of Brideshead lingering over television drama, it would have been tempting, but utterly wrong, to go for nostalgia.
“Saving the manor house; the ecological cause — that would be the easiest card to play. But I’ve argued that this is not a nostalgic story. It is topical in the way we vote for Englishness. But it doesn’t come up with an easy answer.”
Bradbury reckons that the baldness of the passion makes Blott On The Landscape, for instance, “a story about where human nature comes from. It says that when the chips are down, people will fight at all costs.”
Sharpe interrupts the flow, “He’s trying to say that my work lacks intellectual content,” he says with mock seriousness.
Not quite. But there is a bigger accolade coming. “Tom is in the great comic tradition of the English novel,” asserts Bradbury.
The unexpected juxtapositions which Sharpe introduces, instead of the expected turns of plot, are particularly evident in the endings. Both books, says Bradbury, are about who inherits England? Handyman Hall is demolished so Blott cannot become lord of that; but he — the ex-POW Italian gardener — marries Lady Maud.
The inheritor of Porterhouse College is equally unlikely. The porter, Skullion, is elevated to the mastership, having killed the previous, hapless incumbent — and escaped detection. The fact that a stroke reduces him to a cypher, is another Sharpe irony.
These are fantastic doings by characters which some critics find parodies of stereotypes, so far from life are they. Sharpe defends his vision which some critics say is a moral squint. He admits that the idea of national characteristics is attractive to him, and that, after his years in South Africa, he feels himself something of an outsider here. But these are not disadvantages for a comic writer; just the opposite.
Sure, there are stereotypes in his work. Bossy Lady Maud, lady of the manor; or the sleek, lazy tutors and chaplains of the Cambridge book. “What puzzles me though,” says Sharpe “is what constitutes the character of the English. It’s not fixed, but there seems to be an element which is constant.
“As I said to the British Council in Paris, we’re a nation of skinheads. I feel that lurking inside every Englishman is a skinhead who wants to get pissed on a Saturday night and have a punch-up.”
Photo caption: Tom Sharpe, left and Malcolm Bradbury — Picture by Frank Martin