This article by Jenny Rees was published on 4 March 1985 in the Daily Express.
As Blott, Lady Maud and Sir Giles cavort naughtily on TV, their creator settles for the quiet life
THERE ARE no blots on the Dorset landscape. Everything is cosy and domesticated — some bantams, a rabbit on the lawn, a cluster of cats sunning themselves.
Tom Sharpe, 56, creator of Sir Giles Lynchwood, Lady Maud, Nanny Whip and Blott the gardener—who gallop outrageously across the BBC2 screen in Blott On The Landscape on Wednesday and Saturday—was collecting lettuces.
A big shambling figure, he has his trousers tucked into his socks.
Quite a few of Sharpe’s 11 hilariously funny novels—he has now reached the four million mark in paperback sales alone—have been written in the garden shed of the school he bought in the small country town of Bridport 16 years ago and which he’s been trying to de-institutionalise since.
Rose fanatic
Some borrowed sheep graze on what used to be the playing fields. A rose fanatic, his garden is crammed with, at the last count, 1,000 bushes.
As he talks, it is as if one of his own idiosyncratic characters is about to come bounding round the next bush. “Built by a Scot in 1938,” he says. “And doesn’t it look like it. All these straight concrete paths and logically placed trees.”
But this, say his publishers, Secker and Warburg, for whom he’s been writing for almost 15 years, is Tom Sharpe all over.
He doesn’t have to make up those absurd characters who make millions of readers laugh so much that one critic said his wife made him go and sleep in the spare room if he insisted on reading Tom Sharpe at night.
They exist, he says, for all of us to see in real life.
He has been watching the series on TV. But being Tom Sharpe, he has not quite got to grips with his video recorder and lost two episodes. He is as pleased as he can be with it. It is the first of his books to be filmed.
“When the BBC said they wanted to do it, I did the only thing a writer I can do. I just threw it at them. I had nothing to do with the excellent casting or any of it,” he said.
Perfect
He was thinking of Ludlow as Worford when he wrote the book and is impressed that the BBC, unwittingly, found its way back to Ludlow as the perfect location.
Sharpe is a little vexed by the fact that Sir Giles’s sexual frolics with Nanny Whip have become so explicit on screen.
Blott is one of his novels that is light on sex. His fiercest critics accuse him of pornography, especially in his adventures of Henry Wilt, the hapless liberal studies lecturer at the Fenland Tech.
They are based on his own experiences to try to teach English Literature to gas-fitters, plasterers, butchers and plumbers on day-release courses in Cambridge.
“I like Henry Wilt,” says Tom Sharpe. “He and his wife, Eva, are the two sides of my own character. But I’m not a pornographer. I’m an anti-pornography. I’m taking the micky out of sex. I just find it all very funny.”
He totally shares Henry Wilt’s distaste for trendy promiscuity and drugs and what Wilt calls scrathingly, “a lot of middle-aged with-it kids doing their withered thing.”
In this sense Sharpe is a complicated man. On the one hand he is poking fun at trendy liberals, yet in 1961 got thrown out of South Africa, where he had been a social worker, teacher and photographer since he came down from Cambridge.
Being the way he is he manages to be less angry than amused by his unfortunate South African experience.
He was deported because he wrote a play about Chief Lutuli, the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize winner, and what might have been a painful exit turned into a Tom Sharpe farce.
The ship he was put on bound for England called in at ports all around the South African coast before it got on its way.
“And at each stop I was dragged off, being a dangerous, subversive person,” he said.
Triumph
But Sharpe had one brief moment of triumph, he remembers. “They presented me with my warrant. I read it carefully.
“I found I was being deported by order of Her Majesty. I pointed out South Africa was a Republic. I hoped that might make them think a bit.”
The dangerous subversive returned to Cambridge, where he started to teach at the local technical college, where he had some more laughs which are now familiar to his Henry Wilt fans.
“There was absolutely no point in so-called liberal studies for butchers’ apprentices. I learned more from them than they ever did from me.”
Son of a Unitarian minister, the twice married Sharpe had a very traditional education himself, Lancing. Cambridge. “As a result I couldn’t write a word of English until I was 41,” he says.
His big break came with his first film option in 1971. “I love options,” he says, “because they keep running out and I can sell them again. My first was for 25,000 dollars and so I could give up work.”
Shy
Says Sharpe: “An Englishman in California has bought Wilt. But Wilt, poor chap, has been transferred to an American liberal arts college and my inspector, Flint, is supposed to being played by Kojak.
“I don’t really know what’s happening.”
What has happened so far is that the film man asked Sharpe where he could get hold of an inflatable female doll, like Judy in Wilt.
“I suggested he went to a sex shop. He was too shy to go by himself and took along his lovely girlfriend.
“When he made his request in the shop, the bloke said, ‘Surely you don’t want an inflatable doll, when you’ve got a chick like that.’”
“The foul, horrible doll got to the film man’s house in St. John’s Wood, where she was put on a chair.
“The secretary came in the following morning and nearly had a fit because she thought she’d found her boss’s wife totally naked.
“She didn’t know what the Hell was going on and had to run upstairs . . .”
Photo Captions:
Getting to grips with Sharpe’s wit: Nanny Whip (Julia McKenzie) and Sir Giles (George Cole)
Pointed stuff: Maud (Geraldine James), Blott (David Suchet)
Tom Sharpe: ‘I’m taking the mickey out of sex…I find it very funny’ Picture: LARRY ELLIS