Proof that television has changed a bit since 1972 came with an archive clip shown on BBC4 on Sunday. ‘My first guest:’ Michael Parkinson announced matter-of-factly on his Saturday-night chat show, ‘W. H. Auden.’ Auden then made his way gingerly down the stairs, lit a fag and began by discussing the failure of the poetry of the 1930s to effect political change. ‘Nothing I wrote,’ he told Parky, ‘postponed war for five seconds or prevented one Jew from being gassed.’
The clip appeared in Great Poets in their Own Words, the first of a two-part series combining archive film with talking heads to provide a useful if workmanlike history of 20th-century British poetry. In fact, given that Sunday’s episode covered the first half of the century, where the archives are pretty hit-and-miss – there’s no TV footage of Dylan Thomas, for example – the heads had quite a lot of talking to do.
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