Thursday, 16 July 2009
"The BBC's poetry season was let down by poor production"
I largely agree with this piece on The Guardian's Books Blog by Nathan Hamilton and would be glad to know others' thoughts.
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I tend to agree, although I think he's probably being a bit hard on the Armitage programme - I thought that was one of the better efforts.
ReplyDeleteThe Owen Sheers series had lots of ups and downs. On the plus side, he didn't always go for the obvious choices (I was delighted to see George Mackay Brown and Lynette Roberts in there). On the down side, he seemed only to talk to a limited number of poets, most of them his mates, about the actual work. In the case of Roberts, he also managed to make it sound as if she wrote even less than she actually did. I found the My Life In Verse programmes similarly frustrating - too little on the actual work, although there was still plenty of interest (I enjoyed Cerys Matthews' effort the best).
The Milton and Beowulf programmes were my highlights, though. Loads of real enthusiasm, and they let the work speak for itself far more. Plus I always like Michael Wood when he gets into historical detective mode.
I've got a total aversion to Simon Schama, though, so had to give that one a miss.
My main gripe, though, would be that putting it all on in such a short space of time made it very hard to keep up with it all. I hope they'll repeat some of it during the long winter evenings.
Oh, and the poetry edition of the Book Quiz was good, with George Szirtes the star.