Since taking early retirement from teaching at the age of twenty-four, I’ve never really had a proper job, so when Sara Davies rang from BBC Bristol forty years later, inviting me to be the new presenter of Radio 4’s Poetry Please, I suddenly felt very grown-up. Twenty-seven half-hour programmes a year is not too onerous and I get the chance to learn all about the poets whose work passed me by when I was at school, as well as keep up with my contemporaries. In truth, it takes me longer to write the scripts than I had fondly imagined. Turn up at the studio in Bristol with a bagful of poems and listeners’ letters and wing it like the DJs do? I’m afraid not. The regular listeners know their poetic onions and will not easily be fobbed off, so, with the help of the producer and an assistant, I wade through literary biogs and critical essays before spending at least a day, possibly two, writing something that hopefully sounds as if I’ve just arrived in the studio in Bristol with a bagful of poems and listeners’ letters and am winging it. Like the DJs do. (Or do they? Perhaps, like me, when not on air they’re busily scribbling away for hours on end in order to make the whole thing sound off the cuff. Mmm, perhaps not.)
Occasionally a particularly astute poetry lover will request one of my poems, which puts me in a tricky position as you can imagine. I’d hate to be accused of using my position to feather my own career, further my own nest, flog my own books, but often the producer will cajole, entice, bribe, insist, threaten until I give in. A process that takes an amazingly short time, actually. Last week I read ‘At Lunchtime’, a poem written in the early sixties when the threat of a worldwide nuclear disaster was uppermost in people’s minds. In the poem passengers on a bus, upon hearing that the world is coming to an end in the much publicised four minutes, indulge in a communal bonkfest. Surprisingly (to me) it caused quite a furore in the years following publication, because of its supposed call to permissiveness. When it was used as a school text, concerned housewives would complain to the Head, and then to the local newspaper. MPs were written to, questions were even raised in the House. Amazingly, a copy of the collection it appeared in was denounced in southern California and publicly burned by irate, fundamentally concerned parents in Virginia. The poem ends:
And the next day
And everyday
in everybus
In everystreet
in everytown
In everycountry
People pretended
that the world was coming to an end at lunchtime.
It still hasn’t.
Although in a way it has.
The last line says it all. It was a moral tale, for when so many people jumped on the free-loving bandwagon, it was only a matter of time before one of the wheels would fall off, and although I think it’s a poem very much of its time, it remains popular, particularly with young actors and drama students, and more particularly, for some reason, with young actors and drama students from Australia. When over there, I’ve often been genially accosted in a bar or theatre foyer and asked to listen to a rendition of the poem that got someone through their audition and into college. It goes without saying that I’m always bubbly and enthusiastic, and would never in a million years mention that the accent I have just heard belongs to Birmingham and not Liverpool. Although why it needed an accent other than the reciter’s own I could never quite fathom.
In February 1981 I was lucky to be in Perth, western Australia, as a guest of the Festival and staying at the Riverside Hotel with members of the Old Vic company including Timothy West, Prunella Scales and Robert Lindsay. At 1 p.m. we were all sitting by the pool toying with oysters and sharing a bottle or two of Houghton’s white burgundy when a car horn signalled my lift had arrived. As well as doing evening performances as part of the literary festival, I had been snaffled up to visit schools on a daily basis, occasionally twice daily. Parked outside the hotel was a minibus, dusted with red sand and sporting the inevitable roo-bars. (It hardly needs explaining but roo-bars are large ‘don’t mess with me’ reinforced bumpers that serve to protect the car and its occupants should a kangaroo leap out suddenly from the roadside. When I first heard the locals talking about them I thought they said rhubarb. ‘Never drive out into the bush unless you’ve got rhubarb fitted to your vehicle.’ Strange old custom I thought.)
Doug Russell was the English teacher in charge of the day’s school visit and as I climbed in there were twelve fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds in a state of high excitement. The drive took longer than I expected with the kids becoming increasingly giggle-some. We were on a dirt track in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, when suddenly from the back came a chorus of screams. As I turned round there was a squeal of brakes, and the minibus screeched to a halt in front of what appeared to be a woman and her daughter. The woman flung herself across the windscreen, no doubt with the aid of the rhubarb, and I saw that it was a boy in drag. The two ‘females’ climbed aboard, one sporting a pair of balloons up his or her jumper, as everybody began to recite ‘At Lunchtime’. They were well rehearsed, knew the poem by heart, and as a piece of dirt-track theatre it took some beating.
And that wasn’t the only present I received that day from the kids. After my reading later in the afternoon I was presented with a jar of Vegemite with the lid inscribed ‘To Roger McGough with love from Tuart Hill High School’. It was a great day and if any of the kids happen to read this, I just want to let you know that I’ve still got the jar. Still full of Vegemite, of course.
To Chalk Farm now and the Roundhouse, in the days when it wore flares and waved joss sticks in the summer air. I was taking part in one of those marathon ‘Love-ins’ that were popular in the sixties. A charity concert to raise money for the people who had organised it. I had done my ten-minute stint and was hanging around at the bar in the hope of being molested, when a tall, skinny youth in white shirt and jeans came on stage and mesmerised the audience with a weird set that included poetry, mime and some existential crooning. Very Left Bank and off-the-wall, he went down a storm (a quiet, puzzled sort of one) and afterwards came over to me at the bar and introduced himself. Those strange eyes, one blue, one grey, and that voice, affected but effective, Mayfair by way of Bromley. David Bowie told me that he had enjoyed my reading and was a big fan. In fact – and he hoped I wouldn’t mind – he often included a couple of my poems in his act, his favourite being the one about people making love on the bus. We have never met since, but needless to say, I have waited and waited for the Bowie album (a hit single at least) called simply ‘At Lunchtime’.
I met Bernard Wrigley, known as the ‘Bolton Bullfrog’, in 1977 when the Scaffold recorded the theme tune he’d written for The Fosdyke Saga scripted by Alan Plater and based on Bill Tidy’s cartoon characters. A likeable, talented performer, he was constantly in and out of Granada TV studios in Manchester, where our paths crossed, and we did a few shows together. One evening at a cabaret club over a pint of Pedigree and a curried cockle pie, Bernard said: ‘By the way, Roger, that poem of yours, you know, the one about the people …’
‘Making love on the bus?’
‘Aye, that’s the one. Well, I occasionally recite it in my act and come to think of it, I suppose I should pay you for the use of it. But you don’t mind, do you?’
‘No, Bernard, that’s fine. But do you ever mention my name? I mean, do you tell the audience who wrote it?’
‘Well, to be honest, Roger, only if it goes down like a sack of cacky.’