Porterhouse Blue

Tom Sharpe's novels are among the funniest of the past quarter-century, mixing sharp satire—usually of British academic and upper-class life—with the bawdiest sort of Carry On farce. But the novels have been difficult to film, since much of the humor depends on the author's combination of artful prose and outrageous puncturing of class pretension. This four-part miniseries, scripted by Malcolm Bradbury (himself a fine novelist), is the best adaptation of Sharpe thus far. Porterhouse Blue is actually one of the novelist's milder works, focusing on the efforts of a longtime Cambridge college porter to defeat the plans of a newly-installed headmaster, who hopes to reform the hidebound, corrupt, and impoverished institution (run by an intellectually hopeless faculty given to greed and gluttony) through appeals to aristocratic alumni and canny use of the media. Juxtaposed with this story is a seemingly unrelated subplot following a horrendously randy student who becomes unaccountably obsessed with his frumpy housekeeper, but—as usual with Sharpe—the two plot threads eventually collide and explode in slapstick violence and unexpected reversals. Blessed with a superlative cast, headed by David Jason as the indefatigable Head Porter Skullion and the late Ian Richardson (undisputed master of the haughty sneer) as the shrewd but henpecked new headmaster Sir Godber Evans, this 1987 production bows on DVD with extras including a biography of Sharpe and cast filmographies. Highly recommended. (F. Swietek)