More than any other literary genre, poetry seems to be the focus of endless initiatives by official and unofficial bodies aimed at making it look popular, accessible and hip. We've had Poems on the Underground and the Buses, Poetry in Schools, National Poetry Day, Young Poet competitions and indeed Murray Lachlan Young (remember him, with his Byronic smouldering and his million-pound EMI deal? Ubi sunt...) - all much-needed endeavours, because poetry ought to be seen as lively and relevant. Yet for many people the idea of it remains trapped in shudder-inducing schoolday memories of interminable recitation or forced deconstruction.
Couple that widespread perception with the perennial difficulty of presenting anything literary on television and you'd imagine that the suggestion of a poetry series would inspire only glassy expressions and polite refusals among producers and schedulers. But the potential appeal of the flourishing spoken word and performance poetry scene, with its intimate connections to comedy, rap and contemporary music, has not escaped the attention of Steve Coogan and Henry Normal's Baby Cow Production company (responsible for, among its many programmes, Marion and Geoff, The Sketch Show and Paul and Pauline Calf). As executive producers, they have put together Whine Gums, an eight-part series, directed by Roger Pomphrey (better known for comedy shows such as Brain Candy and Armstrong and Miller) and featuring established performance poets such as Benjamin Zephaniah, John Cooper Clarke and Lemn Sissay alongside those associated with the more traditional poetry book lists - Wendy Cope, Michael Donaghy and Jackie Kay - and, naturally, John Hegley, the master of straddling both media.
The series, beginning on 6 July, is to be screened not on BBC4, the natural habitat for arts and literature programmes, but its younger, hipper sister channel BBC3, and has been designed for maximum pop appeal with Top of the Pops-style opening sequence and energetic, quirky camerawork, matched by many of the contributors with the kind of high-octane, in-your-face delivery required to hold an audience's attention at a live poetry gig.
'Most poetry programmes are about poets who are dead and usually very twee,' says Normal, a former performance poet who used to open for bands such as Pulp. He set out to create a programme that would bring together a diversity of voices: 'the kind of poets who I've seen entertain a crowd in the way of a band or a stand-up. I wanted the programmes to have some of the excitement you feel at a live event.'
The overall impression of each themed 15-minute show is fast, funny, provocative and hugely entertaining, with short, punchy pieces from each poet filmed with a single camera in a variety of distinct locations: Hegley loiters in a London street in the shadow of a converted warehouse; Attila the Stockbroker squats like a tramp next to a fire on waste ground; Malika Booker sits amid the antique furnishings of a Georgian stately home. All these poets are experienced performers and, as might be expected from the Coogan and Normal cowshed, many of their contributions share a tradition with stand-up comedy; on the whole, the snappy comic poems, where the emphasis is on puns, rhyme and repetition, work better in this visual format.
The fact that a large proportion of these poems is in an essentially comic mode, even when the subject matter is not (as with Lemn Sissay's 'Suitcases and Muddy Parks'), throws the others into relief; Malika Booker's poems are painful and dark, but in her beautiful velvet voice create pools of shade and stillness in the colour and bustle of the programmes.
It's not Browning or Eliot, or even Heaney or MacNiece, and purists may protest that the series is a long way from offering a representative cross-section of contemporary poetry. They are right, of course, but there is no automatic correlation between a facility with poetic language and stage presence. There are excellent published poets who mar any qualities of their own work by giving incoherent, mumbling readings, just as much performance poetry (and rap lyrics) can seem flat on the page without the unique music of the author's voice and style. The producers considered the work of 50 different poets before producing their eclectic mix, which includes Nigel Planer (formerly of The Young Ones), not usually embraced in the same line-up as Cope and Donaghy.
Even if the series promotes poetry's entertainment value over its potential for profundity and soul-searching, Whine Gums is a shot in the arm for contemporary verse.
