This article was published in the Daily Telegraph on 29 September 1996.
The questions you’d really like to ask comic author Tom Sharpe, creator of Porterhouse College, Cambridge
Put together your perfect High Table.
I’d have Dr Johnson as the master, Peter Ustinov as the chaplain, Disraeli as the dean, the Duke of Wellington as praelector and Frank Muir as the senior tutor. Unfortunately, they would all sit in silence watching Dr Johnson sweat as he ate.
What’s your greatest social gaffe?
Tipping a duchess I mistook for a waitress.
How do you set about causing a stir in the Senior Common Room?
Suggest making Mark Thatcher an Honorary Fellow.
What would you do if your characters turned up on your doorstep?
But they have – and I’ve always invited them in to tell me their stories. How do you think I get my material?
What’s your greatest extravagance?
Monte Cristo cigars.
What haunts you?
The documentary film of Buchenwald concentration camp and Bergen-Belsen.
Social worker, amateur dramatist, photographer… what was your worst job?
Collecting black patients with terminal TB who, because they were incurable, were sent home to die and infect their relatives in Soweto. That was called social work in South Africa in 1952.
“Burglars are a dirty sort, but murderers wash.” As a prisoner in South Africa for anti-apartheid activities, did you find this was true?
Quite true. The murderers I shared a cell with were extremely clean; on the whole they tend to be very respectable people.
What’s the most bizarre piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
“Don’t polish your shoes too well. People will know you don’t have a servant.”
As a boy, you wanted to be a poet. What happened?
The death of lyrical poetry in Britain. More probably I had no talent.
Your books are famously bawdy. What would your father, a strict Unitarian minister, have said?
Being very well read, he would have said that Chaucer, Shakespeare and the 17th- and 18th-century playwrights left me standing.
Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore or Owl: which one are you?
Early in the morning, Pooh; by lunchtime, Piglet; after lunch, Eeyore; at night, after several whiskies, Owl. In general, Tigger.
What sets you on edge?
Chalk on a blackboard.
What skill do you most regret not acquiring?
Writing fast with a pen, legibly and tirelessly.
What puts a blot on your landscape?
Council estates. They are designed to create a sense of depression.
Which tyrant’s court would you like to have satirised?
Rupert Murdoch’s.
Idi Amin or Mrs Thatcher: which would you rather have to dinner and why?
Idi Amin. To find out what he really ate.
Tom Sharpe’s novel “The Midden” (Secker & Warburg, £15.99) has just been published
Cathy Shrank