Nobody hurt in small earthquake: The sequel to The boy who shot down an airship

by Michael Frederick Green

This second part of Michael Green's memoirs gives an account of working as a journalist in an austere post-war Britain. He describes a succession of bed-sits and badly paid jobs on provincial newspapers interspersed with bouts of heavy drinking, amateur dramatics, rugby and cricket. His break into Fleet Street and a disastrous first foray into television finally end in the publication of a bestseller called "The Art of Coarse Rugby".

245 pages, Hardcover

First published March 19, 1990

About the author

Michael Frederick Green ( 2 January 1927 - 25 February 2018) was a British journalist and author of humorous books. He is best known for The Art of Coarse Rugby, The Art of Coarse Acting and other books with similar titles.

Reviews

[Dan]

Most newspaper memoirs are about the eccentricities (or worse) of the author and colleagues; some hold extra interest because of the notable people they covered. This lacks either, except for a few pages near the start about courthouse characters in and around Northampton, England, in the 1940s, and the fact that rural court dockets in those days often featured cases of illicit romance involving livestock. Of amusing office screw-ups we also hear little, except that (a) London's Star once underwhelmingly printed the first paragraph of a front-page story twice, and that (b) Star apologies took the form of a paragraph repeating the original accusations against those libeled, followed by "We are now satisfied that these allegations are totally untrue" and so forth, which meant it was always best if you didn't accidentally omit the second paragraph. OK, that one made me laugh.

There's entirely too much for my taste about Green's adventures in amateur rugby, cricket and dramatics, although since he made his name writing books spoofing those and other pastimes - the kind of thing you might buy as a Christmas gift for a rugby- or amateur-theatricals-loving cousin - I may have missed the point of the exercise entirely.

The title, incidentally, is the possibly apocryphal winner of a contest by copy editors at the Times of London, in its staid pre-Murdoch decades, to publish the dullest headline imaginable. It has nothing to do with Green's career, although the book aptly illustrates the point he makes that journalism, like war, is 90% boredom and 10% terror or excitement.