In praise of journalism a o ;Paperb 'acks -of the month' Towards the End of the Morn- ing By Michael Frayn (Fontana. 85p) It is a very funny business, the newspaper business. Those of us wto scavenger our daily bread in it are used to the re- actions of mingled curiosity, hostility, and amusement from srnmgers when we sheepishly admit. at some ghastly dinner party, what we do for a living. Some people zoom at once into attack about the increasing number of misprints, or bias, or sensationalism. Others pro- fess to be incredulous that it is serious work for a grown min. Others (and these care- fully hit on the most wounding thing that can be said to the morbidly sensitive vaity of a hack) say that dw thik'they once saw a piece by you, but have you now stopped writing and gone into management, or why don't you write those amusng pieces that you oace wrote any more. A friend of mine in the trade asserts that as we grow older, we journal- ists increasiwglv like the com- pany only of other joulrn2ains so that we cn bathe together in a warm bath of mtual SYm- pathy, selfesteemn, and flattery: a gruesome prospect, if- true. it is odd that a business that clearly interats, excites. and annoys muany people. should remain so hermetic to outsiders. Few books or films (are there any ?) capture the authentic atmosphere of a newspaper office, that strange dailv cres- cendo of chaos,. flap, and order that somehow. with a little bit of luck, gives birth to to- morrow's paper. Michael Frayn's high comedy is presumably drawn from the old Manchester Guardian and The Observer, where he wrote the funniest humorous column in journalism for several years. His gentlemanly. and ineffec- tual hero tries to run a country. side columnn as well as obits and the crossword. But in parts it is uncannily like home life in our dear old Printing House Square before we moved house. Nobody has ever recorded so truthfully and s' funnily the facts about the nutters who besiege the front door of a newspaper with messages from God, expenses (or exes, as we call them in the trade, to make their petty accountancy sound 4 ess of a nighimare), galley Proofs, and freebies or facility trips, in which commercial enterprises try to buy favour- able editorial mention by flying a.ssorted hacks somewhere to look at something, and filling them with booze until their eyes bubble and their fingers tap even more wrong keys than usual. It is a lying myth that journalists write better or becomue more favourably dis- posed to their hosts when wmotherless (drunk) on free alcohol, though I suppose I shall be drummed out of the Wig and Pen for betraying this shameful professional secret. Outsiders can learn from this book the mystery of sub- bing, or sub-editing (no, dear, the sub-editor is not next in- the hierarchy -after the editor himself, though he is in impor- tance). There is nothing to it, really. It is jusvt a matter of c'iecking the facts, and the spelpcling, crossing. out\ the first sentence, and removing any attempts at jokes. * Apart from the farce-in the newspaper office, and its out- stations like the King's Arms and international airports, the biook is also wistfully comic and perceptive about the hang-ups of middle-class, middle-aged man, not sure about where he is going, or why, or if he will like it when he gets there. In fife as in the reporters' room, when you get to the end of a page in a hurry, you find you have put the carbons in back to fr-ont and have got to start again. Wlhat the book misses, how- ever, is the work. Of course newspapers are. crazy places in their spare tirae. We have a man who sleeps under his desk to escape from the open plan, and crawls around the floor pinching the girls' ankles when the moon is fulL. Nevertheess, in fits and starts, especially around 5 pm, a great deal of clever, careful, on -occasions brilliant work gets done by. subs and reporters. Indeed, indeed. all hacks tend to grumble and day-dream about beifag a sudden success in television chat shows s that they never have to work or put typer to paper again. But still- the intolerabe daily wrestle with words and mean- ings gets done prefessionaiiy. Secretly we love it. and would be miserable doing anytbing else. : x Towards the- End of the Morning, because it is comedy, catches the quirks and eccen- tricities of newspapers better than any previous bok. But it misses the central engin-e-room, the business itself. Outsiders wi}l still not understand what fun, and wDat hard work it is. , Philip Howard In praise of journalism