BBC Radio 4 to broadcast Tony Harrison's poem V containing 25 instances of the f-word
The station defends its decision to broadcast the literary work next month saying "you cannot tamper with the integrity of the piece"
BBC Radio 4 is to court controversy and broadcast a reading of Tony Harrison’s expletive-laden poem V.
Written during the 1984-85 miner’s strike, the poem examines religious, cultural and racial divides in Beeston, Leeds. But it does so by using what Harrison calls “the language of the football hooligan.”
Indeed, V is replete with usually unbroadcastable epithets like f***, clear_post_images.sh and n*****, Harrison having been inspired to write the poem after visiting a Leeds cemetery covered in obscene graffiti.
Radio 4’s controller Gwyneth Williams has pre-emptively defended the station’s decision to air such a controversial poem. Speaking on Today she said: “The audience doesn't like swearing and I don't like it. I tell my children not to swear.
"But you cannot tamper with the integrity of the piece. We would never do it gratuitously.”
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V, which stands for ‘versus’, runs to about 3500 words and was first published in Harrison’s Penguin Selected Poems in 1985.
Director Richard Eyre filmed a version of V for Channel 4 two years after it was published, which caused such a furore when it was broadcast that it prompted an early day motion in the House of Commons.
Tony Phillips, Radio 4’s arts commissioning editor, said it was apt to air a new version of V now because Beeston was where one of the 7/7 bombers grew up, and assured listeners that V would only be aired with “signposting and messaging” before the broadcast to ensure that no-one is caught unawares.
V, which will be read by Harrison himself, will be aired on Radio 4 at 11:00pm on Monday 18 February.
BBC Radio has found itself at the centre of a number of swearing-related controversies in recent years: The Today programme famously turned the air blue in 2010 when presenters repeatedly mispronounced the then-Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s name, and Radio 3 raised eyebrows in 2011 when it broadcast an expletive-laden version of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
