A Touch of Trivia
I recently gave an interview for a column called Desert Island Pulp Trivia and have included much of it here.
Tony Thorogood was born in Woolwich, but emigrated with his family as Ten Pound Poms, washing up in South Australia. Tony's hybrid education was a mixture of school and self-teaching resulting in a law scholarship at the University of Adelaide, which soon turned into studying "revolutions, politics and the new wave of music and theatre". The late seventies and early eighties saw Tony write a number of plays and undertake many lines of employment (all night waiter, painter, junk mail distributor, gardener, labourer) before embarking on an epic world tour that took him through North Africa, the middle east, India, Bangkok... and the heady sights of Stockport. Not to mention coming close to death's door more times than he's had good cider! But it was in North Yorkshire Tony met Susan and they now live together down under running the successful Thorogoods Apple Wine business and writing books together.
1. What is your favourite book? I love The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan, when Richard Hannay races across the Scottish hills I’m racing with him. The Wind in the Willows is my favourite children’s book, I love the rustic setting and the characters messing about in boats. If we are talking comedy, Jeeves and Bertie Wooster in Joy in the Morning is just a magic, crazy, fun book. I have a great feeling for HG Well’s History of Mr Polly, when Mr Polly runs away from the boredom of suburbia I run away as well and when he comes over the hill and sees the Inn by the little river Mr Polly and I are home.
2. What is your favourite play? My all-time favourite play is the farce Rookery Nook, I went to Sydney when I was in my early twenties and saw it there and years later when I worked in Swanage, England I went up to London for the weekend and stayed with friends and a group of us decided to go up to the West End and catch a play, Rookery Nook was suggested, ‘I’ll be in on that,’ was my reply and I thoroughly enjoyed it again. Since then I have had a great respect for a good farce and have always wanted to write one. That is I have always wanted to write a farce with a little bit more in it so I wrote Hotel Le Big Knob.
3. What is your favourite film? There are three films that I love, a Russian film called Unfinished Piece for Player Piano taken from an unfinished Chekov play, the film is anarchic, crazy, funny and sad, it’s a Chekov play performed as Chekov plays should be performed. Just about my all-time favourite film is On Golden Pond a great movie, very moving, very personal, about two old people reaching the end of their days and how they are there for each other. One more film I like is The Taming of the Shrew by a little known playwright Bill Shakespeare and acted by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, what an explosive magic pair they were together.
4. What is your favourite TV show? The episode of The Good Life called Wind Break Wars is terrific, Tom and Barbara, Margo and Gerry are played by such good actors that the Good Life just has to be one of the best sitcoms ever. The early episodes of Cheers with Sam and Dianne sparring over their love hate relationship is great and the early Rumpole of the Bailey with Rumpole’s irreverence and challenge of the powers that be has been a favourite of mine since I watched the original pilot of the series years ago. Another television show I really enjoyed are the early episodes of All Creatures Great and Small and it’s not the cuddly animals that attract me, it is the comic threesome of Siegfried and Tristan as a double act and Herriot as the straight man, fun is had by all.
5. What is your favourite food? I grow apples and in season there is no fruit as good as a Cox’s Orange Pippin. I also like cheese, cloth matured Wensleydale from Hawes in Yorkshire is one of the best, creamy crumbly and chalky, just lovely. For a ploughman’s lunch there is nothing better than a wedge of Pyengana from Tasmania, French triple cream from the Paris region is a great soft cheese to smear onto a baguette and double Gloucester is the best melting cheese just great on a Welsh rarebit.
6. What’s your favourite drink? Bottle fermented dry cider and sometimes I will drink the odd beer like Old Peculiar.
7. Sports, what sports do you play/watch? I’m not into sport playing or watching but I do love walking. I love to go to the mountains, book into the best hotel and walk without a back pack, I hate back packs, hate encumbrances. I love to go to Cradle Mountain in Tasmania, Mt Buffalo in Victoria and Wilpena pound in South Australia as well as the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District in England and put one foot before another.
8. How do you go about the process of writing? Writingis quite simple I just pick up a pen and paper or switch on a word processor and start putting down words, it’s as simple as that, a little inspiration is good but only a little is needed and the process does the writing for me. I don’t worry about the style or the content, the book creates itself. When I write a character I don’t worry about making them realistic or giving them depth and developing them, I just write and I start to feel good about the book when the characters cut themselves adrift from me and start to have a life of their own, that’s when writing really becomes brilliant for me. I suppose I write in a slightly hypnotic state, Susan comes into the study and tells me dinner is ready and I nod my head but I don’t know what she said.
9. A Foxtrot Through India had a long gesticulation time? It did indeed, I really liked it from the beginning so I didn’t burn it, I often would write something and then, feeling a bit discouraged, I would burn it, but I always knew that Foxtrot was good. Twenty years ago a publisher was interested in Foxtrot but he said: too long for a short story and too short for a novel! The problem is that my style is very intense and concise so it was difficult to lengthen the book but after twenty years I managed to add a few pages and the book is much better for those twenty years, it is like an oak tree that grows very slowly but comes out on top in the end.
10.How would you describe your style? I have two styles of writing: humorous and irrelevant with a dash of realism or realistic and irrelevant with a dash of humour.
11. What are you working on now? Believe it or not a detective story!A comic extravaganza inspired by such famous comedians as Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Spike Milligan and the Goons, John Cleese of Fawlty Towers fame, that great Scottish funnyman Billie Connolly and especially the gang of twenty blokes I worked with in the 1990’s in the Dulux paint warehouse in South Australia, they could be funnier and more hilarious than any television funnyman. It is called Bigfoot Littlefoot and West and it is a surreal, irrelevant, irreverent and irrational comic who-done-it to end all who-done-it’s.
12.Did you write this work in a hypnotic state? Yes, I wrote the stories without stopping to think, I wrote without stopping to check on mundane things like: plot, characterization or truth. I just opened the flood gates and set words down on paper, it was all great fun, a bit like it must have felt to Jackson Polack when he created Blue Poles.
13.I hope it is a great success. It has been already because I have enjoyed writing it so much. I write because I enjoy it.
14.Finally, have you got a photo for the magazine? I think I could find the odd photo or two, there is a great one of me at primary school!
