Here’s a radical suggestion for the BBC’s next poetry season. How about making some programmes about poetry? Not poets’ unhappy marriages or their sex lives, but actually having someone who knows and cares about poetry talking about language and verse.
The worst offender of the recent BBC poetry season—which ran from 20th May to 13th June on BBC Two and Four, as well as on Radio 3 and Radio 4—was, predictably enough, the historian Simon Schama. It is now a decade since his book on Rembrandt and 20 years since Citizens, his great history of the French revolution, which made his name. Those were the days when he wrote about what he knew. Now he’ll talk about anything but.
There was much to be grateful for in Simon Schama’s John Donne (BBC Two). No ghastly cheap dramatisations, as in the infamous Caravaggio episode of Simon Schama’s Power of Art in 2006. A simple format, even glimpses of the words, and Fiona Shaw, one of the best actresses of her generation, reading the poems. There was even someone who knew about Donne, the literary critic John Carey. The problem was that there was someone else who didn’t and he did most of the talking.
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