Michael Frayn Meet the Author

Collected Columns.

Few writers have equal success as a novelist and a playwright.

Michael Frayn is one of that rare breed.

He made PG Wodehouse laugh, he's written farce and serious

drama, and a clutch of prize-winning novels.

He's also a celebrated newspaper columnist,

in the Guardian and the Observer in the 60s and 70s, and then again

in a later flowering in the 90s.

And a new collection of those newspaper columns is just out.

Welcome.

Michael Frayn, it's a long time since you became a columnist.

Was it deliberate or accidental?

It was a long series of accidents.

I was a reporter on the Guardian, and I was supposed to be writing

a reported-type column, interviewing visiting dignitaries

and whatnot, and I just couldn't get around to collect enough material

to do three columns a week, so my former boss, the news editor,

made this brilliant suggestion that I should do what other funny

columnists had done, which was introduce some

fictitious characters.

I've been making it up ever since!

I discovered making things up is much, much easier.

You've mentioned characters who can be created.

Do they then take on a life which has an energy

of its own, and can lead

you on and give you ideas, as it were, as if they're a part

of your mind you haven't been conscious of?

Well, it does.

Fictitious stuff is pretty much, in fact is a lot better

than real staff, really, because they don't put in awkward

wage demands and whatnot, but it's also because the world

inside your head is much better organised than the world

outside your head, and the danger of writing fiction is it all seems

too organised, and too easy.

What an idea for something is, for a fiction, is something

organised into a plot, into a story.

Definite characters, definite places.

And I've often thought that writers of fiction ought to be required

by law to go out occasionally and do a bit of real newspaper reporting,

because when you get out there and look at the world outside,

it's not at all like the world inside your head.

It's all muddled and curious, nothing fits together,

nothing leads to anything else.

People will know your work on stage, Noises Off, consistently voted one

of people's funniest and favourite plays,

which of course is a picture of everything falling apart.

Do you have that sense of chaos around us which we're always

struggling to try to put back together and are doomed never

to quite succeed?

I think this is what human activity is, an attempt to reverse the second

law of thermodynamics, which says that everything

is gradually sort of falling to pieces, to simplify it slightly!

Yes!

And to try and stop things falling to pieces.

I mean, at the simplest level, just trying to keep your house

organised and stop it falling down, that takes a lot of effort.

To actually keep society running takes an enormous amount

of intellectual and physical effort.

But why is the human struggle to do that,

which may be doomed, so funny?

Why is anything funny?

I think it is some mismatch between our hopes and intentions,

and reality.

The basic joke that, the archetypal joke of someone

slipping on a banana skin, what's funny is not that they slip

but that they think they're in control of the situation,

walking in a dignified way, and suddenly it's gone.

You've been making people laugh and making them think in plays

and books and in newspaper writing from many, many years now.

Looking back to those newspaper times, what was the joy

of writing a column of 800, 1000 words, finishing it,

and seeing it on the page in the Guardian, the Observer,

or somewhere else?

What's the thrill of it?

One of the joys of writing a funny column in those days is that

newspapers were much smaller, and on the whole more impersonal.

Most of the news in the serious paper, like the Guardian

or the Observer, was impersonal news about the world.

For someone to be expressing personal opinions and being flippant

about things that other people were taking seriously,

it stood out quite sharply from the stuff around it.

A wonderful playground to be able to operate in?

Absolutely wonderful playground.

Nowadays, papers have changed.

They're so vast, there are many, many personal columns,

and it's much more difficult to make your personality

as a columnist stand out in a newspaper.

There must be something satisfying about filling that space,

having a comic idea, a sense of absurdity,

a sense of rage about something that you want to expose,

not in a pompous way, but by making people laugh at it,

and knowing that if you find the right words and the right

structure, you can do it and tie it up with a ribbon in that little

space at the bottom of the page?

It's a very special feeling, isn't it?

Well, it's very nice when it works.

When it goes...

It's like writing a book - when it's working, it seems

to be writing itself, but you have to do a lot

of preparation for that.

When it goes wrong, it's horrible.

I often thought you really earn your royalties with the things

that don't work, and I certainly had days when I was writing that column

when I just simply could not do it, and had to go to bed,

get up very early in the morning and write it in desperation

before my deadline first thing in the morning.

But it never failed.

I think it was Douglas Adams who said, "I love deadlines.

I love the whooshing sound they make as they pass."

You can't miss a newspaper deadline, that would really be the end.

I don't think I ever did.

But you'd come right up against them, and that's lovely.

Very close, yes.

A whooshing sound comes very close.

Finally, do you think of yourself, looking back, people will enjoy

these collective columns as they've enjoyed your successful novels

and plays, of course.

Do you think of yourself, at root, still, somewhere in your head,

as a newspaperman?

Those first couple of years I spent as a reporter won't cut very deep

into my personality.

Actually doing serious newspaper reporting,

looking at the world and trying to make sense of it,

is an education in itself.

The idea of trying to write short for newspapers, trying

to catch people's attention in the opening paragraph,

I think is not a bad training for all kinds of writing.

And just because it's fun doesn't mean it doesn't matter?

All the best things are fun!

If your job's not fun, you should be doing something else.

Michael Frayn, thank you very much.