Is the poet an observer or a commentator? Auden described himself as ‘a pen for hire’, and Betjeman was very happy to present TV programmes that had little to do with poetry; but if poetry is about the minutiae, the intimate detail seen from a unique perspective, exploring the rhythms and structures of language, where what you say is less important than how you say it, then surely he or she should avoid the media marketplace? Is there a conflict between the private role and the public role of the poet? Please don’t feel obliged to answer these questions, but they were occupying my attention in the back of a cab last Friday afternoon on my way to Broadcasting House to take part in a discussion on Radio 4’s The Message with Michael Schmidt of Carcanet Press and the Irish poet and professor Brendan Kennelly, with Jenni Murray in the chair. I assumed that Brendan, a familiar face on Irish TV adverts, like myself would be on the side of Auden and Sir John, while Michael, a critic and editor, would be in the puritan corner. However, that proved not to be the case and the discussion, though short, was lively and Michael Schmidt was very generous about my attempts at writing to order, particularly on screen. At least, I think he was because, to be honest, my mind wasn’t one hundred per cent on the job.
I was scheduled to arrive at the studio at 4.15 in good time for the programme, which goes out live at 4.30, and in the cab wondered if the conversation might touch on ‘the poet as celebrity, and the dangers therein’, a topic that always had me reaching for a short verse called ‘Fame’:
The best thing about being famous
Is when you walk down the street
And people turn round to look at you
And bump into things
And when the studio laughter had eventually subsided, I would refer back to my Scaffold days and the shallowness of instant celebrity, the claustrophobia of public recognition. I might even recall the incident in the bedding department of John Lewis in Liverpool some years after the group had broken up, when I was approached by a middle-aged lady who said: ‘Excuse me, excuse me, I’ve had this little bet with my husband, can you settle it for us?’
‘Well, I’ll try.’
‘Didn’t you used to be Roger McGough?’ ‘Er, yes.’
‘I thought so, that’s a duvet cover he owes me.’
Much more consoling, I would aver, to be known as a voice or a name on a dust jacket than as a face. Pausing to let Brendan or Michael throw in a few words of support, I would impress the listeners with my experiences of the previous evening when I had attended the opening night of Victoria Wood’s new musical Acorn Antiques at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket. Celebrities were there in abundance, and real ones, stars of stage and screen who by dint of talent and hard work had achieved wealth and fame, and as they fizzed on the red carpet leading up the steps into the foyer, flash bulbs flashed, and the cordoned-off crowd gasped and applauded. The poet and his wife slipped in unnoticed.
It was close to midnight when we said goodbye to Victoria after the opening-night party at the Café Royal and, amazingly, the autograph hunters were still out in force, as head down, I dragged Hilary out into Piccadilly. I’m not completely autographobic, in that I am happy to sign a book or an album sleeve, but I don’t like writing my name in autograph books or on bits of paper for people who don’t know me from Adam, but who might be able to sell it to someone who does. I thought I’d got away with it, until some ageing hippies cornered me at the traffic lights, where I obliged with a few thumbnail squiggles. Then the cry went up, ‘There’s someone!’ Before the pack could descend, the someone was across the road and hailing a taxi. Then two young men came out from nowhere: ‘Please, you must sign.’
‘I’m sorry, we’re in a terrible hurry.’
‘But you must, ve are coming all the way from Hamburg.’
I accepted the Edding 380 permanent marker on offer and began the pathetic ritual. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘It doesn’t matter, you party mit Julie Valters und Sir Ian McKellen. You must be very famous.’
Back in the cab on the way to Broadcasting House, I was refining the above dialogue for the delight of my studio companions, not to mention the listening millions when my mobile rang. It was Sue Boardman, John Gorman’s partner: ‘Roger, where are you?’
‘On my way to the BBC.’
‘Radio Merseyside?’
‘No, Radio 4 in London.’
‘You’re not coming to Liverpool, then?’
‘What for?’
‘The show at the Philharmonic with the Scaffold?’
‘But that’s not until next month.’ ‘It’s tonight.’
‘Shite!’
In January I had received an e-mail from John saying that the Scaffold had been asked if they would take part in a tsunami fundraising concert at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool on 11 February. He could make himself available, and Mike was keen, so would I be up for it? I hesitated because relations between Mike and myself had been strained since I’d ducked out of a reunion gig at the Everyman Theatre two years before, but here was a chance to build bridges, ford rivers, grapple hooks, sew on patches and so on, so I said yes and made a note of it in my diary. The trouble was that I put it down as Friday 11 March. Whether this sleight-of-mind was a senior moment, or my subconscious secretary wilfully getting it wrong, I don’t know, but once ‘Scaffs’ appeared in the little box designated 11 March it was writ in stone, for the e-mail dropped below the plimsoll line and there was never a contract, a phone call or a piece of paper to make me question the date.
‘I’ll hand you over to John,’ said Sue and, curled up on the floor of the cab I whined, grovelled and mumbled my apologies. It was obvious that I’d made a stupid mistake, but nonetheless I’d put them in an embarrassing position.
SCAFFOLD REBUILT ran the headline in the local paper, ‘The 60s band will re-form for one night only at the Liverpool Echo tsunami concert …’ next to a photograph of Mike ‘looking forward to turning the clock back with the Scaffold’. Obviously, neither he nor John would ever speak to me again and no doubt the keys to the city would have to be handed back in to the town hall. Once in Broadcasting House I rang the arts editor of the Echo, blubbed my pathetic tale and asked him to convey my sincere apologies to all concerned, before racing into the studio to record The Message. My brain certainly wasn’t the finely tuned instrument that I like to pretend it is, and as a counterpoint to Michael Schmidt’s erudition and Brendan Kennelly’s mellifluous musings, I provided the high-pitched keening and strangled sobs.
The cab was still outside waiting to run me back to Barnes, where I planned to get drunk and lie low for a year or two, then Hilary rang: ‘Just get on a train and go.’ Why hadn’t I thought of that? What is it about wives that enables them to see the bleeding obvious? In a trice, out of a trance. ‘Change of plan,’ I said to the driver, ‘Euston Station.’
I arrived at the venue just prior to the interval, and when I walked into the Green Room, instead of having stale sandwiches and beer cans hurled at me for being the dozy git that I undoubtedly was, everybody cheered and applauded. I was the hero home from the war and suitably bedraggled, for I was dressed for radio, not for stage. So Mike lent me his elegant black overcoat to cover my grey woolly jumper and after a quick run-through in the dressing-room with our backing band, The Chip Shop Boys, it was time to follow Mel C. on to the platform of the huge auditorium where I had recited poetry as a schoolboy on Speech Days. But this time it wasn’t John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’, or ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ that had the audience shuffling in their seats, but ‘Thank U Very Much’, ‘Liverpool Lou’ and ‘Lily the Pink’ that had them if not dancing in the aisles, at least waving their arms and singing along. For just under ten minutes I was a celebrity and after the show, as I slipped through the stage door, had anybody thrust an autograph book in front of me I would gladly have signed. But nobody did.