The satirist who skewered the 1980s in What a Carve Up! is approaching elder statesman status.
He talks about Brexit, prizes, cancel culture – and his Hollywood hero Billy WilderOne Sunday evening in 1975 in a leafy suburb of Birmingham, 14-year-old Jonathan Coe put off his school dread by switching on the telly.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was on BBC One, the beginning of the author’s lifelong fascination with director Billy Wilder, who was to become “a far more influential figure on the way that I write than any novelist,” he says, 45 years later.
Such was the impact on the young Coe that he started recording the soundtracks of his favourite films from the TV so he could lie in bed listening to Wilder on his Walkman until “the rhythm to his dialogue kind of seeped into my subconscious”.
That screening “set a lot of ripples in motion,
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