Porterhouse Blue on TV

I'm watching the Channel 4 TV adaptation of Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue from 1987. Somebody uploaded it to YouTube. It's very good so far. I was frightened it was going to be a cartoonish version, with lots of mugging and exaggeration and frantic running scenes. But it's not at all.

Porterhouse Blue was Tom Sharpe's breakthrough novel, published in 1974. He's an intriguing novelist. His plots are farcical, bawdy, and full of black humour, while his prose is very literate and full of high culture references.

Recently I've been drawn to fictions with a university setting. Porterhouse Blue is set in the fictional Cambridge college of Porterhouse-- a richly-endowed college with minimal scholarly standards, full of wealthy "hearties" (or jocks). A "Porterhouse blue", the book explains, is a stroke brought on my too much eating and drinking, common among the college's sybaritic staff. (It's a pun on the Oxford and Cambridge term "blue", which means an athletic distinction.)

As I've mentioned several times on this blog, my first encounter with the title Porterhouse Blue is quite amusing in retrospect. To me, at least. I was sixteen years old and reading The Oxford Book of Proverbs, a collection of proverbs that used quotations from various books to illustrate how each proverb was used. Porterhouse Blue was quoted on several occasions.

I really liked the title and imagined the book had to be some dense philosophical novel full of speeches, internal monologues, and dreamy vignettes. It summoned the image of the blue reflection in the glass of a bottle of porter, so I thought it would be both reflective and distilled. (I knew porter was an alcoholic drink but mistakenly assumed it was something like brandy or whiskey.) I really liked the idea of the imaginary book I'd conjured up.

When I eventually read it, I discovered my mistake, but I liked it just as much for what it actually turned out to be.

Here's a review of the book that I wrote twenty years ago.

Given that I'm an Irish nationalist (although I'm increasingly sceptical that Ireland is going to survive globalization, or that its population even really wants it to), people are often surprised that I'm also a fervent anglophile. Well, my anglophilia is rooted in things like Tom Sharpe books. (And Carry On and Hammer films, English poetry, English placenames, English situation comedies, P.G. Wodehouse books, and so on.)