Between the lines

Radio 4 poetry and arts editor James Cook tells us about a project that mixes history and versifying

We British: An Epic in Poetry

RADIO Radio 4, scheduled for Thursday 8 October

What does it mean to be British? One way to answer this question is to look at the nation’s history through specific events – great victories, cataclysmic defeats and moments where the political weather abruptly changed. Yet there’s another way, and that’s to focus instead on people’s day-to-day lives. It’s this latter approach that informs We British, a day of poetry programming weaved through the Radio 4 schedule on, appropriately enough, National Poetry Day.

“We’re interested in the intimate, the more domestic… more bedrooms than battles,” James Cook, Radio 4’s poetry and arts editor, tells BBC History Magazine. “We want [to show] the emotional lives people were entrenched in, the way in which the majority of people lived.”

Presented by Andrew Marr, the day will feature around six hours of readings, archive material, interviews and conversations. Marr’s guests will include actors such as Dominic West, Charles Dance and Fiona Shaw, and poets, including Michael Rosen and Daljit Nagra. Over the day, we’ll hear Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti and Ted Hughes, as well as less famous names, and pieces where the authorship has long been forgotten.

According to Cook, Marr has been a key part of a “glorious extended conversation” to decide which pieces of verse to include. “There are certain poets that he’s very keen to talk about, that he feels are neglected, and there are certain very famous poets he feels are maybe a bit overrated,” says Cook. “He’s not a big fan of Wordsworth, we can probably say.”

The programming will begin with some of the earliest surviving verse and “roll through the day in [a] chronological fashion” so that listeners get a sense of the sweep of British history, as well as a sense of our forebears’ lives in specific eras – grandness and intimacy together.

The idea of competing identities will also be important. “I don’t want it to feel too polished,” says Cook. “I want it to feel like cases are being made and, actually, that Britishness is a bit rough around the edges, and that it’s not even easy to settle on what pieces should or shouldn’t be in a day like this – because it’s not.”

“Andrew Marr has been a key part of a ‘glorious extended conversation’ to decide which pieces of verse to include”

Andrew Marr is presenting a day of poetry programming on Radio 4