Television
A man's world
Wendy Cope
0 n Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble.' On screen leaves and branches shook violently in the wind. You got the message: this wood was in very bad trou- ble. I only hope nobody was hurt while they were out in the gale filming it. They can't have had much fun.
Despite the troubled wood, and despite sound-effects (booming guns) to go with `Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries', the Poetry in Motion programme on A. E. Housman (Channel 4, 9.15 p.m., Wednes- day) was better than the one on Hardy the previous week. The moral seems to be: if you don't want television people to do silly things with your poems, write short ones. Several poems were given to us straight, without any pictures at all.
One quarrel I have with the programme concerns the pronunciation of the poet's name. Alan Bennett calls him Houzman. So do lots of other people and it has always irritated me, though I was afraid they might be correct. To settle the matter, I managed to find out what the BBC Pro- nunciation Unit has to say on the subject. According to them, the 's' should be pronounced as in 'house'. They got it from the poet's brother. Hooray.
Apart from that little problem, Alan Bennett was, once again, very easy to listen to. His portrait of Housman was intelligent and entertaining. It was a pity he didn't put in any of the funny poems, but a good idea to include Hugh Kings- mill's parody ('What still alive at twenty- two? /A clean, upstanding lad like you?').
One interesting point that Bennett raised was about Housman and women readers. 'I'm not sure that the poems actually appeal to women,' he said. 'Cer- tainly I can't find any woman critic who has written about him.' Housman is very high on my list of favourite poets but, come to think of it, I haven't heard other women enthusing about him. The poet's sister Clemente seems to have enjoyed his work. On first reading A Shropshire Lad, she is said to have cried out, with a mixture of sorrow and relief, 'Alfred has a heart!'
Maybe some women readers are put of — as I was for a long time — by the title of Housman's best-known book. If you don't know Shropshire and you've never been a lad, it is uninviting. Some viewers will have noticed that the title misled Channel 4's presentation department. After the end of the Hardy programme we were told that next week's would be about 'the Shrop- shire lad, A. E. Housman'. A week later, in a pre-programme announcement pre- faced by the words 'we're told', he was described as 'a solicitor's son with no rural connections'. That isn't exactly true either — I suspect that an angry memo winged its way to presentation and somewhat over- stated its case.
Having devoted a lot of space to poetry two weeks running, I suppose I should try and write about something else next week. You will appreciate that the scope is limited at present. It seems that an impor- tant football competition is taking place somewhere in southern Europe. If proof were needed that the world is run for the benefit of men, you need only look at the current television schedules. Of course, as I've said before, it is possible to get interested in almost anything — even football or golf — if you spend enough time gawping at it on the box. But, as Housman frequently reminds us, we tarry here for a very short time. I'm glad I didn't spend any of my allocation watching Eng- land and Holland fight it out to a goalless draw.
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