This article appeared in the Daily Expresson 8 September 1995.
LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO PORTERHOUSE BLUE SEES AUTHOR RETURN TO HIS OWN BRAND OF BIZARRE FUN
Interview
By PETER GROSVENOR
Literary Editor
It has been a long wait. In fact, it is 11 years since that master of black comedy Tom Sharpe wrote his last novel. Now he has finally produced his new work, Grantchester Grind, and addicts will be delighted to learn it’s a sequel to the hilarious Porterhouse Blue.
Porterhouse is that legendary Cambridge college — Sharpe denies it’s based on Peterhouse or his old alma mater Pembroke — where the fiendish bowler-hatted porter Skullion kept his manic grip on college life.
Skullion (remembered for his homily “Gentlemen is not gentlemen no more”) resented the reforming new Master Sir Godber Evans (played by Ian Richardson on TV).
Porterhouse Blue, you may recall, ended in a mighty explosion. As a result of which, condoms collected by randy undergraduate Zipser, anxious to bed his bedder (or servant) Mrs Biggs, are blown like confetti through the college grounds.
Admittedly, it’s all a novel, but I sometimes think Sharpe exaggerates. He denies it utterly.
“I drew much of Skullion’s character from an old porter called Fuller, who had once been a servant at Trinity. He was a real traditionalist who didn’t mind if young gentlemen climbed in after hours in the traditional way — over the wall over revolving spikes — because that was sporting. When the midnight curfew was abolished and students could just walk through the lodge gates at any time, he still kept watch over the revolving spikes, just as Skullion does.
“The tales that man told me of college life would make your hair curl. You couldn’t possibly print most of them. Some of the Fellows were perpetually drunk each evening.
“One old boy became incontinent, even at High Table. They regularly mopped up his seat after dinner.”
So why the long wait for the continuing adventures at Porterhouse? Sharpe explains that Porterhouse Blue has been a hard act to follow.
“It’s a bit difficult when you’ve left everything in the last book in such a mess,” he says. “After all, if you blow up Zipser and Mrs Biggs, kill the Master and leave Skullion in a wheelchair after a crippling stroke, it’s bloody hard to write a sequel.”
For several years he struggled. “I must have gone through at least three drafts,” he tells me.
“I wouldn’t call it writer’s block. I wrote every day. Chapters of the stuff. It’s just that I wasn’t satisfied with the tone of the book.
“You never get things 100 per cent right. But it’s got to be 80 per cent right and not 60 per cent.
“I’m not prepared to publish a book I don’t like, and since I don’t have to then why do it?”
He finally cracked it. Grantchester Grind to his own satisfaction when he left his Cambridge home — “too many dogs and relations and distractions” — and spent three months early this year in a small hotel in an isolated fishing village on Spain’s Costa Brava. He says there was “absolutely nothing else to do but write”.
There was another problem. He is 67 and after a heart attack five years ago he had to give up smoking. Nicotine, he reckoned, had a stimulating effect on his brain.
But he was actually puffing a large Havana as we talked. “Yes, I’ve started again,” he confesses, “but don’t inhale. And if I get any angina pains then I stop at once.”
As Kipling said: “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.”
SO IT might have been the inspiration of his cigar that makes Grantchester Grind such a cracking good read — in the best Sharpe tradition of macabre, over-the-top black comedy.
Skullion, despite his stroke, is now Master of the College.
Sir Godber Evans, who died of an untimely fracture to the skull, supposedly nominated Skullion on his death-bed — though it is now quite certain he was misunderstood. As he whispered the word “Skullion” after his accident, he was naming not his successor but his murderer.
Such bizarre accidents are par for the course in a farce by Sharpe, who was once likened to “PG Wodehouse on acid”.
In fact, he is much more savage than Wodehouse.
In Sharpe’s much sterner world, Porterhouse is on the verge of bankruptcy, and the entire fabric is crumbling. The Fellows, all bitterly antagonistic, are lumbered with a Master who appears only to speak in grunts and gurgles — and, quite frankly, they will stoop as low as needs be to raise funds.
If this means consorting — and it does — with a ghastly but wealthy American paedophile Edgar Hartang, ostensibly a TV mogul, really a launderer of drug money, then so be it. Nor is that the only difficulty. Sir Godber’s widow, convinced (rightly) that her late husband has been murdered, appoints an interfering Fellow with a vast financial endowment to investigate the crime.
In all his novels Sharpe’s imagination for grotesque images has never deserted him. His ostriches are force-fed with gelignite, inflatable women paralyse a city, bull terriers high on LSD roam his childhood home of Croydon, a man blows up a neighbour’s house by pumping gas up his lavatory pan.
Sharpe is up to all his old tricks in this new novel. The dean hates the senior lecturer, who hates the bursar — and all hate Skullion and are determined to get rid of him. You have the perfect recipe for mayhem, litigation, skulduggery, blackmail, deviance in rubber suits and outrageous drunkenness.
In the end, it is Skullion, played to perfection by David Jason on TV, who has the last laugh.
AFTER his undergraduate days at Cambridge, Sharpe so hated the post-war austerity he emigrated to South Africa where his mother had been born.
He became a social worker in Soweto, watched Africans dying of TB in dire poverty, and became such an opponent of apartheid — “mad, bad and unworkable” — that he got deported.
He spent the Sixties as a teacher in England and didn’t write his first novel Riotous Assembly, until he was 41.
Now he is a worldwide best-seller, though not in America. All the Americans in Sharpe’s latest book are exceptionally lazy. Hartang’s sidekick Kuzduvine, named after a weed common in the Southern States, can’t complete a sentence without at least two four-letter words.
Is he anti-American? “How could I be? My wife Nancy is an American.” They have three daughters and the eldest is now married and living in Portland, Oregon.
No more troubles with writer’s block. He has already written his next novel. Grantchester Grind looks like becoming a new TV series. David Jason said that Skullion was his favourite role. If he stars in the new series, it can hardly miss.
– Grantchester Grind is published by Secker at £14.99.
Photo captions:
POINTED MOMENTS: Sharpe’s Wilt with Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones and Porterhouse Blue with John Sessions and Paula Jacobs
SAVAGE: Sharpe has maintained his talent for producing grotesque images
OLD SCHOOL: Skullion, played by David Jason, in Porterhouse Blue
UPPER CRUST: Geraldine James, George Cole and David Suchet in Blott on the Landscape