Vanessa Redgrave, Blake Morrison and Melvyn Bragg are among the stars of page and stage who celebrate one of the UK’s most versatile – and angry – poets
In this week’s podcast we join a star-studded celebration, at the British Academy, of one of the UK’s most political and versatile poets, Tony Harrison, who is still firing rhyming broadsides as he enters his ninth decade. Melvyn Bragg talks to Harrison himself, while actors Vanessa Redgrave and Barry Rutter perform his work.
The playwright Lee Hall explains how his musical Billy Elliot would never have existed without Harrison’s demonstration – through plays such as The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus at the National Theatre – that the voice of the northern working class could hold centre stage, while Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, remembers the writer who lit his political fire as a schoolboy growing up in Harrison’s native Leeds.
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