Comic writer Tom Sharpe inspired by WWI trench humour

British veteran comic novelist Tom Sharpe derives much of his dark humour from his upbringing, when he heard First World War veterans tell grim jokes of life and, often, death in the trenches.

In an interview, he recalled a fund of humour he acquired in the company of his preacher father in the northeastern English county of Northumberland, including a joke about two privates marching up a hill who asked their sergeant for a rest.

"The sergeant replied: 'What do you want a rest for now, lad? You'll be dead in half an hour!'"

Speaking on the sidelines of the inaugural edition of the comic writing festival "La Risa de Bilbao" (The Laughter of Bilbao), Sharpe said he did not set out to be a comic writer as such, but wanted in his first novel to attack the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, where he lived for 10 years before being expelled for sedition in 1961.

"It just happened. Before that I'd been reading Thomas Mann, and Sartre, and Kafka and Kirkegaard," he added.

"I didn't care what I wrote. I saw such horrible things in apartheid, I came to detest it. That's why they deported me. I was in five prisons."

The result was his 1971 novel "Riotous Assembly", in which intrigues lead to ostriches exploding as they run along city streets.

That was followed by a 1973 sequel, "Indecent Exposure", and "Porterhouse Blue" in 1974, which sent up the inner workings of an ancient university, amongst many others.

Sharpe admits that he also began writing because he needed the money.

At the time, he was teaching apprentices at a technical college, which later inspired him to create his character "Wilt", a lecturer accused of murdering his wife after he was seen trying to hide a blow-up doll. A film version was released in 1989.

"He's not seriously wanting to murder his wife, he just feels like it. He was damned annoyed with her, and she is a bully," Sharpe said, smoking a cigar in a wheelchair to which he has been confined by an ankle injury.

He is an admirer of PG Wodehouse, but does not meticulously plan his novels as the prolific British 20th century humourist did. He wrote his first draft of Wilt in 24 hours, although he spent six months revising it.

"I don't have any idea what I'm going to write about when I start," he said. "I have a character there, and I just see what happens.

"I found that Wilt was such a good character, and the book itself was sufficiently funny, even I laughed at parts of it, and then I wrote another one, and another, and in each case he is an innocent."

Earlier this month, Sharpe released his fifth book in what has become a series, "The Wilt Inheritance", in which the hapless lecturer is enjoined by his wife to tutor an aristocrat's son to help pay school fees for their wayward quadruplet daughters.

As in his previous outings, Wilt comes close to doing serious time in prison on charges of which he is entirely innocent, this time ranging from murder to body snatching.

Now 82 and dividing his time between Britain and Spain, Sharpe is working on an autobiography of a life in which he ran away from school, served with the Royal Marines, did social work in South African township Soweto and worked as a photographer before he began writing.

"I'm wondering whether to write another Wilt or not," he said, "but I don't know, I honestly don't."