Its protagonists work to compile the miscellaneous, unimportant parts of the newspaper – the "nature notes" column, the religious "thought for the day", the crossword and so on. The paper seems sunk in a state of torpor, and the journalists' work is extremely dull. Feeling their lives and careers are stalled, they spend most of their day complaining about work and dreaming of better things. John Dyson, the lead protagonist, longs to work in television, and is at last given his chance towards the end of the book. However, fate seems determined to thwart him.

Some review or other of this book mentioned "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" by Orwell. That is a good reference point for this work. The cover review quotes of this book mention jokes and humour. I can see the parts of the book where I'm supposed to laugh. I managed a couple of stifled grunts. I wonder if my reaction to the book is my own cynicism or simply the gap in the cultures of the 1970s where things were somehow still "jolly" and 2017 marked by war all the time, the growing gap between the people and the capitalist class and the shift to the populist right. The book was written when the defeat of fascism in Europe was still fresh in the memory and post-modern capitalism was still a young beast. This being a satire, the professionalism of The BBC is questionable, when after this sorry and hilarious episode, another program invites the same ‘expert on the color issue’ for a new representation…when asked if they saw the previous program, the woman who is moderating now admits that nobody on the team is familiar with it, only this time there may be another formula for this show…Towards The End Of The Morning is a 1967 satirical novel by Michael Frayn about journalists working on a British newspaper during the heyday of Fleet Street. This fabulous, but alas forgotten (it only has a few lines on Wikipedia) Magnum opus describes the shenanigans, procrastination, heavy drinking, leisurely pace of the life of journalists decades ago, in the glory (is that the appropriate term to use I wonder) days of Fleet Street, before the catastrophic years when many have been eliminated from the market, leaving tabloids and some extremist media outfits (Murdoch empire) to rule the arena… Their work lives are dull and their personal lives are dull. But what lifts this novel above the average is the writing; it has an ingenious, imaginative, glimmering edge to it, often most serious even when it is being so damn funny. It has a somewhat skewed approach to approaching the world through metaphor that so many other books of this author’s generation have (I’m thinking in particular of Malcolm Bradbury’s ‘The History Man’ here) where it’s almost like certain images come to dictate the existence of the characters beyond what we would normally expect in a realistic novel. It’s not only that metaphor is defined by the subjective experiences of the characters here, but it’s as though the literary device is an experience which is waiting out there in the world for these slightly dull and perfectly ordinary men to stumble across it.

Yes, well, that seems to put the profession nicely in its place, and indeed in its context. I read those words when I was a schoolboy in Cambridge in the early 1960s and had already decided that only journalism would do. First published in 1967 this could be seen as bit of a museum piece now in its fictional depiction of live in the media. I say media rather just a newspaper as it also touches on radio and TV. It does leave aside the hard news side of both broadcast and print media, but there are plenty of others who have trodden that path.

John Dyson Invites the surveyor that lives in the area for dinner, ‘but whatever it was the man surveyed, it was done mostly through the bottom of a glass’ and later on, there would be hopes that maybe Bob will move nearby, once he is engaged with Tessa – here there was a misunderstanding, for the two young people (he is twenty nine, and I am not sure if we know what her age is) had been invited for dinner, and during that, the two sons of the hosts had had an argument and in the confusion, generated by the noise and misapprehension, it seemed that the two of them intend to get married. John Dyson has the chance to be in a television studio, for a discussion on the ‘color problem’, on which he is supposed to be some kind of expert, he prepares for the appearance, informs everybody, drives with the family to see aunts and other relatives, calls all those he knows, prepares some notes, but when it comes to the evening of the big day, he drinks too much and if the effect is on the one hand salutary, for he is intoxicated and has lost all fear (while the other guests are febrile), on the other hand, he is clearly unable to contribute anything to the discussion, except ‘this is very interesting’ Various members of the staff emerged from Hand and Ball Passage during the last dark hour of the morning, walked with an air of sober responsibility towards the main entrance, greeted the commissionaire and vanished upstairs in the lift to telephone their friends and draw their expenses before going out again to have lunch."

The Observer drank in Auntie's, though I've forgotten whether it had any other name, and even who Auntie was. The Guardian had a foot in two camps. One was the Clachan, a rather undistinguished Younger's house grimly decorated with samples of the different tartans, where we drank our best bitter watched by a mysterious official of one of the print unions, who sat on his own at a corner of the bar every day from opening to closing time, wearing dark glasses and referred to in respectful whispers, but speaking to no one, apparently paid by either union or management just to sit there and drink all day. A few themes seem to be emerging from the way in which our novelists have treated our journalists: copious gin (or whisky, or port, or what you will), mediocrity, cynicism, sloth, and meanness of spirit. This is to say nothing of the greatest of all les déformations professionelles: shameless and indeed boastful fabrication. And I entirely forgot to mention the fiddling of expenses. All professions are deformed by this, of course, but only journalism has made a code out of it:Bob tried to remember why he hadn’t told her...But he couldn’t really remember the reason. It was already lost – part of the jetsam of discarded immemorabilia which disappeared astern all the time. From hour to hour one’s life slipped away into the haze, before one had really looked at any of it properly... Indeed, the under signed has had a brief flirt with this profession, for he met Michael Meyers from Newsweek (and is proud to have been included in the article on the fall of Ceausescu, about three decades ago, when he was a hero of the revolution), then James Wilde from TIME, some others from Radio Sweden and various media channels and could see the big difference between the budgets and operations of those with television networks and the rest of the journalistic crowd, who had had lesser material, financial means The Amises are the only ones of the authors I have mentioned who didn't serve time on a national newspaper. Fleming was a foreign editor for Kemsley when that family owned the Sunday Times, Waugh was a correspondent and Greene had been a subeditor as well. Powell toiled at the Daily Telegraph, and Frayn we all know about. They mostly did quite well out of it. Orwell never had a steady job, but he haunted Fleet Street in search of work and knew the argot. Yet they all unite in employing the figure of the journalist, or the setting of a newspaper, as the very pattern and mould of every type of squalor and venality.