Funny Side of the Street

When I was at the grammar school, I belonged to a small coterie of young smartyboots whose parents took the Observer. Every Monday morning we would gather to discuss the latest ‘Oddly Enough’ column by Paul Jennings, a whimsical humorist whose world view (largely derived from sheer bafflement at the bizarreness around him) we found much to our taste.

He would meditate upon the eccentricities of Rules and Regulations, or odd signs half-glimpsed in shop windows and the darker reaches of railway stations, or the hidden meanings of English place names, as in: ‘Bovey Tracey, headstrong: “None of your bovey tracey ways here, miss”.’ (A notion that was taken up by Douglas Adams in The Meaning of Liff thirty years later without, as far as I could see, any acknowledgement.) Jennings is currently out of print and out of fashion, though he seems to be rediscovered every so often; his slim volumes of reprinted columns, all with ‘Oddly’ in the title, are not too hard to come by, however. I revisit my complete collection often. At some point in the early 1960s Jennings was supplanted in the Observer by someone altogether more bracing: Michael Frayn. It was about the time of That Was the Week That Was and Private Eye, and though as far as I know he never had anything to do with either of them, Frayn was absolutely in tune with the Zeitgeist; in fact I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I first came across the word ‘Zeitgeist’ in one of his columns, probably in the guise of a German art critic called Ludwig von Zeitgeist. Unlike Jennings, Frayn had a political edge, and he had characters who reappeared regularly. Our favourites included Rollo Swavely, the PR man; Christopher Smoothe MP, Minister of Chance and Speculation; Sir Gwatkin Rockfast, Vice-Chancellor of Twicester University; and Ngodli Nvective, Prime Minister of Nghanyika. Our Monday morning discussions were informed by the realization that if someone as clever as Frayn felt moved to take the mickey out of just about everybody in public life, then it was obviously necessary for us to do so too. Towards the End of the Morning, Frayn’s third novel, was published in 1967, by which time the Fraynites had scattered to the four corners of the further education system. I like to think of us, in Keele and Caius, Warwick and Wadham, eagerly cracking open our hero’s new hardback on publication day, but in truth we probably waited for the paperback like everybody else. Towards the End of the Morning is Frayn’s ‘Fleet Street’ novel, as the man himself ruefully acknowledges in an Introduction to this new edition, claiming that nobody can remember its real title anyway. You might, though, just as well call it his ‘BBC Television Centre’ novel (or do I mean ‘Lime Grove’?), because the aspirations of its central character, John Dyson, are firmly directed towards that holy grail of the shallow journalist who doesn’t make enough money –television. Dyson, as we might expect, is a man riven by doubts and uncertainties, both professional and personal. He presides over the odds-and-sods department of a dim national newspaper – nature notes, crosswords, ‘In Years Gone By’, and so on – with the doubtful support of Bob, a man with troubles of his own, and a character invariably described as ‘poor old Eddy Moulton’, who eventually, and inevitably, dies at his desk without anybody noticing. Apart from the occasional foray to Bush House and the Gates of Jerusalem pub, Dyson spends his working days in the Dickensian gloom of Hand and Ball Court, chasing lackadaisical rural clerics for their copy, haunted by the feeling that Life is passing him by. This conviction is underscored when he arrives home to Jannie and the boys (Gawain and Damian) at 43 Spadina Road, SW23, a crumbling piece of terraced Victoriana. Although it is all he can afford on his meagre earnings, Dyson sees himself as the advance guard of a wave of middle-class gentrification. Unfortunately, the middle classes have so far failed to follow his lead, obstinately refusing to appreciate the village-like attractions of SW23. Meanwhile somebody, either Mr Cox the lorry-driver and his vast family on one side, or Ecosse and Princess St George on the other, is chucking tins and bottles over the garden wall after dark. Yet it is on the strength of living next door to West Indian immigrants that Dyson becomes, in that capricious and random way found both in satire and in real life, a talking head on a TV programme about race relations. (His appearance on The Human Angle is one of the great comic set-pieces of all time.) After it, Dyson becomes, if such a thing is possible, more sententious and self-regarding than ever, droning on endlessly about fame and responsibility: ‘I have a serious point,’ said Dyson, ‘and that is that nowadays it’s not excellence that leads to celebrity, but celebrity which leads to excellence. One makes one’s reputation, and one’s reputation enables one to achieve the conditions in which one can do good work.’ ‘You do talk a lot of shit sometimes, John,’ said Bob mildly. It is poor old Eddy Moulton’s replacement, graduate trainee Erskine Morris, a ghastly youth on the make who drinks Pernod in the pub, and (to Dyson’s fury) gets hold of the first electric typewriter ever seen in the department, who sets in train the emergence of a sadder but wiser Dyson. Struggling back to his next TV appearance from a crisis-ridden press junket in the Persian Gulf (another comic masterpiece), Dyson has an epiphany of sorts in a field outside Ljubljana: He was rather a silly man, he could see that. Vain and splenetic – passionately devoted to futile objectives . . . that evening he was supposed to be in a television studio in London, sitting in a pool of unnaturally brilliant light and greasing up to the second Baron Boddy, who was if anything a sillier tit than he was himself . . . the views which he might or might not exchange with the second Baron Boddy . . . were as factitious and insubstantial as fairyland. Not that this sudden rush of self-awareness prevents Dyson from puffing his way into the studio at the eleventh hour to find that he has been pipped to the post by Morris; also a silly tit, talking exactly the same piffle as himself, but clearly destined for a brilliant career. There’s lots more: the Editor, whose comings and goings pass completely unnoticed; Mounce, the ghastly and corrupt picture editor, and his flirty wife; the boozy hacks at the Gates; Samantha Lightbody from the BBC with her clipboard. The novel may be getting on for forty years old, and ‘Fleet Street’ may be long gone, but with one or two exceptions (I don’t suppose anybody eats toffees out of a paper bag any more) it doesn’t feel dated in any way. Frayn has skewered for all time the febrile, self-deluding self-importance of the press, and television too come to that. And did I mention that it’s extremely funny?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 4 © Mike Petty 2004