This article was published in the Cambridge Evening News on 1 February 1985 as part of the ‘South’s Week’ column.
AFTER six and a half years in deepest Dorset, Tom Sharpe is pining for Cambridge and his Cambridge friends.
Britain’s funniest naughty novelist, whose Rabelaisian romp “Blot on the Landscape” [sic] is about to stain our BBC TV screens, longs to live again in this city where his great success started.
“Don’t give people the idea we’re house-hunting for a mansion,” he begged. “I’m not made of money.” And then he added in that droll, doleful, donnish way of his: “I’m not a tax exile and they have a way of taking it all away…
“But I would like to live again in Cambridge where so many of my friends are… and where the University Library is, too. Somehow the public library in Bridport is not quite the same… I don’t know what it is, but… there’s something not quite the same,” said the former CCAT lecturer who has made sex funny in an age determined to take it terribly, terribly seriously.
Fresh from a private preview of “Blot,” Mr Sharpe said he was well pleased with the TV version.
“I have a sense of humour, well you know I have or I wouldn’t have written all those books; but, even so, I laughed out loud… at my own jokes. It’s very well done.”
Those of us who have seen little more than former Maplins commandant Simon Cadell’s backside in the TV trailer can only suspend judgment on how Mr Sharpe’s fantasy world has translated to the little screen.
Whether or not this one works, there’s a lot more of the Sharpe oeuvre, including “Riotous Assembly,” “Indecent Exposure” and “The Throwback” to come.
Despite all Mr Sharpe’s protestations of relative poverty, he could easily settle himself, wife Nancy and family in a palatial pad with room for his pets and roses, too. But he tells me he has totally turned his face against rural life.
“We definitely have no plans to move into a village outside Cambridge. I just can’t imagine myself living in a village. I detest the countryside.”
“What I like about Cambridge is that you can walk everywhere you need to go. It’s a place to retire to,” he said to my surprise, and then added emphatically at the age of 56: “Not that I’m thinking of retiring.”
Thank heavens for that.
Photo caption: Tom Sharpe… well pleased with the TV version of “Blot.”