This article by Jane Freeman appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on 21 October 1996.
MASTERPIECE:
TOM SHARPE
SBS, 8.30 pm
WRITERS do not always make great talent for television but publishing has become such a marketing-driven venture that if the writer won’t schmooze the broad-spectrum media, the book probably won’t sell.
Which accounts for the fact that British writer Tom Sharpe pops up talking to Melvyn Bragg just after breaking an 11-year publishing drought with Granchester Grind.
It’s fascinating to see the writer of such books as Wilt, Porterhouse Blue and Riotous Assembly (his books are generally described as “bawdy, riotous farces”). It turns out that Sharpe looks much like any other old English duffer, with bad glasses, a white shirt and a book-lined study.
He has a fascinating story to tell, starting with his elderly father, a keen fan of Hitler, who brought Sharpe up to be an enthusiastic Nazi. Then Sharpe Snr curled up his jackboots and died in 1944, just before the pictures from concentration camps were released. That left Sharpe Jnr, at the vulnerable age of 15, seeing photographs from hell — proving, in his words, that everything he had been told had been a lie.
The result of such an extraordinary childhood is a man who is compassionate and self-deprecating (he proclaims his sense of humour to be “adolescent” and says his 11 unpublished years were caused by a “bad case of pretentiousness”).
Sharpe recounts his experiences of apartheid in South Africa in the ’50s, as well as talking about his novels, the influence of Waugh and Wodehouse (the latter apparently keeps an eye on his similes) and his writing process. There’s some interesting dramatised footage from TV versions of the novels, which is a blessing because the conversation between Bragg and Sharp occasionally feels laboured, despite all those cutaways of Bragg grinning madly.
But Sharpe is still an interesting man with an intriguing twist of humour. His life philosophy is summed up in the story of a posse of footsore World War I British soldiers marching to the front, one of whom begged his commanding officer to let them have a rest. “Why do you want a rest? You’ll be dead in half an hour,” the officer is said to have replied. Sharpe opines happily: “I find that attitude admirable.”
Photo caption: Writer Tom Sharpe . . . he turns out to be much like any other old English duffer.