Tom Sharpe obviously heard this one coming. Sic transit perhaps the master of comedy of our era - who could have reduced this, or do I mean elevated it(?), to a level of true farce. He deserves to be remembered for much - but perhaps most of all for the wonderful invention of "a Porterhouse blue" - so good it should have been true in life and not just true to life. I have never forgotten the real 'life-caught-out-by-art' experience of finding a colleague had placed a copy of the original Wilt in my pigeon hole in our staff club on the very morning of a CNAA visitation. (A form of bureaucratic torture devised by Higher Education 'managers' to do governments' biddings in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.) I ever after concluded that his farces had to get more fantastic just to keep an inch or two ahead of the real madnesses of our times. What a loss!
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