This article by Derek Robins was published in the Torbay Express and South Devon Echo on 30 May 1987.
AUTHOR Tom Sharpe looks set for a huge TV success with the Channel Four adaptation of his best-selling comedy novel Porterhouse Blue (Wednesday 10.05pm).
However, the man himself is modest about the fame his work has enjoyed ever since the BBC made Blott On The Landscape into a hit TV series starring George Cole, John Suchet and Geraldine James.
Sharpe said: “The producer David Eastman has done a marvellous job of casting and I’m hoping Porterhouse Blue is as successful as Blott was. It certainly deserves to be a success.”
The four-parter stars David Jason as the cantankerous Skullion, the head porter of a fictional Cambridge college for the past 45 years, whose traditionally comfortable existence is threatened by the arrival of a new master played by Ian Richardson.
He replaces the previous master who expires due to Porterhouse Blue — a stroke brought on by over-indulgence caused by the lifestyle going back 600 years in which oar-pulling prowess and gourmet cuisine have become more important than academic achievement.
Sharpe, 58, denied that any of it is based on his experiences as a student reading history at Cambridge in the late 1940s.
“Rather, it was based on my observation,” he recalled. “There were and there still are people like Skullion about and I had a lot of sympathy for the porters I used to know. But I was never a dipso or a Hooray Henry when I was a student.
“There used to be people going around thinking that Cambridge was the centre of the universe — most of the dons there were fine, but there were still a few very old diehards who lived in a nostalgic world like those in the series.”
Sharpe, who wrote the book in 1974, is full of praise for producer Brian Eastman, who also worked on Blott On The Landscape, and actor David Jason.
He said: “People have said that you couldn’t make one of my novels into a series or a movie but Brian has proved them very wrong.
“As for David — he couldn’t have done Skullion better. He couldn’t have achieved a more exact image than I had of Skullion when I first wrote the book.”
The series has been adapted for TV by University College of Leicester-educated Malcolm Bradbury, 54, the same man who adapted Blott for the BBC.
Producer Eastman added: “This series has a different feel to Blott. However, the distinctive Tom Sharpe humour is still the key factor and the outrageous antics of the characters presented the same large-scale production problems.”
Meanwhile Sharpe, who lives in Dorset with his wife, Nancy, and three daughters, is busy writing his 12th novel — due for publication in the autumn.
Photograph caption: Author Tom Sharpe, actor David Jason and Malcolm Bradbury, who adapted Porterhouse Blue for TV.