The Boy Who Shot Down an Airship by Michael Frederick Green

His delight was not so much in the game as his father’s barracking of the players and referee, providing material that was to be recycled 50 years later for Green’s rugby column in The Sunday Times and in The Art of Coarse Rugby. His father, who had lost an arm to a German shell, was awarded a war pension, which maintained a modest home in a suburb of Leicester.Ĭhildhood thrills for Green centred on football and rugby - especially rugby, which was then the chief spectator sport in the Midlands. Michael Frederick Green was born in 1927 into a lower-middle class family intent on keeping up appearances. To this day The Art of Coarse Acting remains essential “how not to” reading for amateur and professional students of drama. The series sold millions of copies and remained in print for 30 years.

Green was to produce 15 Coarse books on subjects ranging from gardening to sex. “His hope is to be dead by Act Two so that he can spend the rest of his time in the bar.” “The Coarse Actor’s aim is to upstage the rest of the cast,” it said. The book was dedicated to those who perform to sparse audiences in church halls amid lethal props, while the coarse actor was defined as one who can remember his lines, but not necessarily in the right order. One of the quirkiest humorists of his generation, Green created a minor classic with The Art of Coarse Acting, an affectionate but all too accurate exposé of the pretensions of amateur dramatics. It missed the head of Spike Milligan, another of the guests, by a matter of inches and, visibly shaken, the comedian barely spoke another word for the rest of the show. When Green appeared on an Eamonn Andrews’s chat show to plug one of his humorous books, The Art of Coarse Golf, he wielded a seven iron in the studio to demonstrate how not to swing the club and, in his excitement, accidentally let go. On one occasion a tray of champagne glasses was wrested from a passing waiter and pitched into the lap of the French actress Marie-France Duquette, an innocent bystander.

It was to do with the way that he would flail his arms around when telling a story. Even Michael Green’s best friends thought him a menace, albeit it a loveable one.

The Boy Who Shot Down an Airship by Michael Frederick Green