Michael Green
Highly inventive comic writer behind the ‘Art of Coarse…’ books and the spoof ‘Haggard’s Journal’
MICHAEL GREEN, who has died aged 91, was an eccentric newspaper man and the author of The Art of Coarse … books, a series that with breezy wit covered pastimes such as rugby, acting and sex. They started after he wrote a piece for The Observer about his nonchalant approach to rugby playing: “A publisher phoned me up the next week and offered me a few quid to try making a book out of the idea,” he recalled.
It led to The Art of Coarse Rugby (1960), which he described as “a hack job for 75 guineas to pay a few bills” but which became a bestseller and was praised by EW Swanton for its “hilarious caricatures” of rugby types. Three years later came Even Coarser Rugby, the books turning Green into a folk hero to rugby fans.
The “coarse” approach to a subject, he explained, was the way something happens in real life as opposed to the theoretical way of doing it – “nothing to do with crudeness but with stark, unrefined reality”. It was a quintessentially British attitude that involved “losing and being rubbish and incompetent, while aspiring to so much more”.
The Art of Coarse Acting (1964), with drawings by John Jensen, was one of his most enduring titles, and it went on to inform a series of plays. His definition of a “coarse actor” was “one who could remember the lines but not the order in which they come” and a feature common to all coarse actors was, he said, “that they think every performance is a success”.
The Art of Coarse Sex (1980), subtitled “Or how to love better and die with a beautiful smile on your face”, spoofed the sex-advice manuals that were flooding the market. It was packed with ribald tales such as that of a friend’s tent which collapsed while its occupants were in flagrante, leaving the friend commenting: “It was easier to re-erect the tent than me”, and included chapter headings such as “How to attract women” and “Starting an affair”.
Michael Frederick Green was born in Leicester on January 2 1927 and educated at Wyggeston Grammar School, where he enjoyed amateur dramatics and even-more amateurish rugby. According to one profile he played for “more clubs than Jack Nicklaus”, including Leicester LTC, Leicester Harlequins, and Leicester Thursday. It was in his match-playing days that his understanding of “coarse rugby” evolved. “Most of us were cowards,” he recalled. “In all honesty the first couple of pints after the game were usually to celebrate my survival.”
Meanwhile, Green had joined the Leicester Mercury as a messenger boy, but that came to an abrupt end after he boasted to a colleague that he knew how the huge printing presses in the basement worked. Having brought them to life, an enormous reel of paper broke, spewed on to the machine room floor and continued doing so until he could locate a mains switch.
He resurfaced at the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, where he was assigned to cover the local rugby team, often travelling with the Saints. His first big interview with their captain took place during the post-match shower, with Green fully clothed. On another occasion he was forced to eat dinner in a Liverpool hotel trouserless after the team had debagged him on the train journey; fortunately, his modesty was protected by a trench coat. As an amateur thespian, Green developed a keen ear for the absurd, whether on-stage or off. He was always nervous about the actor’s traditional cri de guerre “break a leg”, having once done just that by falling off stage and being ferried to hospital dressed as an 18th-century pirate complete with eye patch and wooden leg.
His newspaper career took him to the Birmingham Gazette and then The Observer, where he later recalled asking the sports editor: “Why don’t you give some space to the real rugby, the sort played by ordinary blokes like me?” The response came back: “Do a feature on it if you feel so strongly.” Later Green would write a rugby column for The Sunday Times.
He recalled his early experiences in Don’t Print My Name Upside Down (1963), a sharply observed novel about life on a small-town paper.
There were more than a dozen Art of Coarse books, including titles dedicated to sailing (a coarse sailor was one who “in a crisis forgets nautical language and shouts, ‘For God’s sake turn left’”) as well as drinking, golf, moving house and office life. In the 1970s he took a degree at the Open University.
He also wrote two volumes of memoirs: The Boy Who Shot Down an Airship (1988) included reminiscences about his National Service just after the war, and Nobody Hurt
in Small Earthquake (1990) covered his rake’s progress from provincial newspapers to Fleet Street.
Green’s other great literary creation was “Haggard’s Journal”, a very funny parody of a monstrous, drunken 18th-century squire’s journal, originally written as occasional contributions to the Telegraph’s Peter Simple column from 1962 and adapted as a book in 1975.
A representative entry read: “Dec 10 1777. Rain. Amos Bindweed d from Putrefaction of the Inward Parts. Jas. Soaper hanged for stealg a nail … Ate a pease puddg for dinner but it was bad, so gave what remained to my wife, and consumed two botts of Madeira to expunge the taste. ITEM: to purgatives, 0£ 0s ¼d.”
Extracts from the squire’s journal were read out on the BBC television sketch show Grubstreet (1972) and in 1990 it reappeared both as a regular column in The Daily Telegraph and as Haggard,a Yorkshire Television series with a script by Eric Chappell that ran for two seasons and starred Keith Barron.
For many years Green was a member of the Questors Theatre in Ealing, and in 1985 he wrote Coarse Carols for their choir.
Despite being fond of a drink, Green continued playing tennis into old age. He was a member of a club in Ealing that he described as “a very nice unstuffy place where, thankfully, they are inclined to throw you out if you turn up in whites”.
In 2004 Michael Green, who had once bolted from the register office on the day of his intended nuptials, married his partner of many years, Christine Waite, a school music teacher. She survives him.
Michael Green, born January 2 1927, died February 25 2018