This article by Noreen Coltman was published in the Shields Daily Gazette on 4 February 1993.
‘Hamlet’ is a clown
BEST-SELLING writer Tom Sharpe, once described by a critic as “PG Wodehouse on acid” discusses his colourful life and eleven hilarious novels with presenter Bob Langley in the Tyne Tees Television series Put It In Writing tonight.
As Langley, a best selling author himself, puts it: “Every clown wants to play Hamlet – but it isn’t often you meet a Hamlet who can actually make people laugh.”
Tom Sharpe is such a man who began his literary career and a playwright attacking the injustices of the South African political system. But as tonight’s programme reveals, it was only after turning to humour that he realised just how savagely effective his writing could be.
Those eleven hilarious novels have won him an army of devotees across the world, satirical farces which lampooned everything from Apartheid to British middle class hypocrisy.
Researcher Sheila Matheson pays him a visit at his Cambridgeshire home where he works in a garden shed creating his comic masterpieces with a Platignum fountain pen. As she discovers, he is most comfortable in austere surroundings — probably a throwback to his upbringing as the son of a stern Northumbrian Unitarian minister who admired Adolf Hitler.
Sharpe talks about his younger days in South Africa when he protested against the evil political system before the authorities eventually threw him out.
He hit back with his first comic best seller Riotous Assembly and went on to enjoy international acclaim.
He adds: “I didn’t sit down to write a funny book… I just took off into a mad whirl!”