Tony Harrison's V: Why a poem outraged 1980s Britain

Forty years ago, Northern English poet Harrison published a powerful work inspired by vandalised gravestones in his hometown Leeds. Then, when it was screened on TV in 1987, a national furore erupted.

"FOUR LETTER TV POEM FURY" thundered the front page of one British newspaper, condemning the "cascade of expletives". "FROM BAD TO VERSE" was the headline of another article, that quoted a Conservative Member of Parliament questioning whether the said poem "serves any artistic purpose whatsoever". And a group of particularly exercised MPs called for a debate in the House of Commons.

The furore was about a poem called V by northern English poet Tony Harrison – a work inspired by vandalised gravestones in his hometown Leeds – which was originally published in January 1985, but really became a cause célèbre when it was screened on national television in the UK two years later, in November 1987.

It is not often a poem becomes a hot topic of conversation among the general public. The last time it happened was four years ago when Amanda Gorman read her poem The Hill We Climb at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration, although the poet's youth and outfit excited as much comment as her verse. Before that, it was WH Auden's Funeral Blues, after it featured in the hit 1994 romcom Four Weddings and a Funeral. 

But if it is unusual for a poem to escape the confines of the world of literature, it's virtually unheard of for one to provoke angry newspaper headlines, and prompt politicians to demand action and members of the public to furiously call TV channels. 

V had its origins in a visit by Harrison to Holbeck Cemetery in Beeston, Leeds, in May 1984. The cemetery stands on a hill – beneath which there are worked-out mine seams – and overlooks both Elland Road, home of Leeds United Football Club, and the University of Leeds, where Harrison, a poet and playwright, had studied Classics and Linguistics. Harrison, there to tend his parents' graves, found the cemetery strewn with beer cans and gravestones defaced by spray-painted graffiti – four-letter words, racist abuse, swastikas and a series of "V" letters. The nature of some of the graffiti suggested football fans were responsible.

At this time, unemployment was soaring, and went on to reach 11.9% later that year, a level not seen in the UK since 1971 – and not seen since. The previous year, an award-winning BBC drama, The Boys from the Blackstuff, about unemployed tarmac-layers in Liverpool, had captured the zeitgeist and made a huge impact. The Miners' Strike had started some weeks earlier. In fact, the country was deeply divided under a polarising Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher. In the vandalism and the spray-painted daubings, Harrison saw further evidence of societal division, and it gave him the idea for his poem.

Harrison was, at this point, an established and well-respected poet, playwright and translator. He had published several volumes of verse and been the resident dramatist at the National Theatre, while his 1973 translation of Molière's The Misanthrope had won great acclaim.

On 24 January 1985, V was published in the London Review of Books.

It consists of 112 four-line stanzas, or quatrains, with an ABAB rhyming scheme, the same form as Thomas Gray's celebrated 18th-Century poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which Harrison sought to evoke in contrast with his own work.

The "V" of the title stands for "versus" – which is also a pun on "verses" – but maybe also for "victory", and perhaps it is further intended to refer to the two-fingered "V sign" gesture considered rude in British culture.

One verse reads:

These Vs are all the versuses of life

from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White

and (as I've known to my cost) man v. wife,

Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right.

The poem imagines the poet engaging in a dialogue with the person who has defaced the graves, and it features the obscenities and racist epithets used in the graffiti.

"We didn't need Harrison to tell us then that Britain was divided, and we don't now, but V was a powerful articulation of those divisions and some of their causes," says Sandie Byrne, Professor of English at the University of Oxford. 

"The football supporter who, taking a shortcut through the cemetery, takes out his rage on the gravestones, is treated sympathetically, albeit with aggressive language to match his own. The Harrison figure understands the frustration of the third-generation unemployed among headstones celebrating lifelong professions.

"The poem's power and endurance come from its energy, the impetus of the verse and the language, its anger, and its use of the personal in the service of the political."

V did not appear to cause any outrage when first printed in the London Review of Books. It was subsequently published in book form by Bloodaxe Books in November 1985 and, again, troubled neither the UK's legislature nor its newspapers. Neil Astley, founder of Bloodaxe Books, and still the publisher's editor and managing director, recalls that, soon after the publication of the poem as a book,  Harrison performed the entire thing in a late-night arts slot on Tyne Tees Television, which catered specifically to audiences in North East England, and "it went out without arousing any opposition as far as I'm aware".

But then in 1987, it became known that a televised version of the poem had been made for national broadcaster Channel 4, directed by celebrated theatre director Richard Eyre and featuring Harrison reading the poem along with footage of, among other things, striking miners, Holbeck Cemetery and Thatcher doing a "victory" sign. At that point, all hell broke loose.

In October, a few weeks before its broadcast, the Daily Mail reported on the "FOUR LETTER TV POEM FURY" on its front page. The activist and anti-obscenity campaigner Mary Whitehouse called the poem a "work of singular nastiness". Conservative MP Sir Gerald Howarth, who earlier that year had attempted to introduce legislation that would make it a crime to air material that might cause "gross offence" to a "reasonable person", was another who opposed its broadcast. He officially called for a debate in the House of Commons to try to stop it. One hundred and twenty one MPs signed the proposal. Howarth later admitted he had not read the poem in full. Harrison recalled in the 2013 BBC Radio 4 documentary, Exploring V, that at the height of the furore, a reporter from the Telegraph knocked on his door. "I said, 'Have you read the poem?'’ He said,'No. I'm New'."

Opposition to the TV programme came principally from right wing commentators but the Sunday Telegraph columnist and editor of the Literary Review, Auberon Waugh, whom no-one had ever mistaken for a left winger, found the poem "well written and extremely moving", as he wrote in his Telegraph column at the time. Ian Hislop, the editor of UK satirical magazine Private Eye, wrote an article defending it in The Listener, as did Bernard Levin in the Times, calling it "powerful, profound and haunting". And the Independent printed the whole poem in its news pages, with an introduction by Blake Morrison in which he wrote: "Those MPs are right to believe that the poem is shocking but not because of its language. It shocks because it describes unflinchingly what is meant by a divided society, because it takes the abstractions we have learned to live with – unemployment, racial tension, inequality, deprivation – and gives them a kind of physical existence on the page."

The film was broadcast at 11pm on Channel 4 on Wednesday 4 November 1987. According to the logs of the Channel 4 staff on the switchboard – which were reproduced in the appendix of Bloodaxe's second edition of the poem, along with many of the newspaper and magazine articles about the furore – there were several calls from viewers irate at the "disgusting language". But others approved. Mr K of Watford suggested "politicians should address their energies into the social problems featured in the poem". Mr W of London said: "I am so moved the tears are running down my cheeks". The majority of calls were in favour of the broadcast.

"The irony is, of course, that while Bloodaxe had sold a couple of thousand copies of the poem before 1987, as a result of the attacks on the Channel 4 film, V reached an audience of millions who might otherwise never have heard of it," Astley tells the BBC. "And if you read the poem today, it feels every bit as vital and relevant as it was 40 years ago."

Sandie Byrne says: "I remember friends reading about the poem in the press, and assuming that it was just a meretricious piece studded with swear words by a shock jock seeking attention. Others picked up that it mentioned [miners' leader] Arthur Scargill, and showed scenes of the miners' strike, and assumed that those were its only subjects. Even among those who actually read it, the poem seemed to revive ideas about appropriateness in poetic diction that one would have thought long dead. 

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"What was unexpected and possibly shocking about V," Byrne tells the BBC, "was less the dialogue that represented a young football supporter swearing – what a surprise – and more the use of iambic pentameter quatrains, at a time when closely patterned, regular verse was regarded as outmoded, an unfitting vehicle for modern concerns. The transplantation of Gray's elegy from a small country churchyard to a large urban cemetery, the use of ellipses, slang, ordinary speech and Northern pronunciation perhaps suggested that poetry wasn't a sleepy dusty backwater, or necessarily couched in prissy, posh Southern or elaborate language."

The poem was once again broadcast in its entirety on Radio 4 in 2013. Although the press anticipated controversy, there was actually little fuss. Perhaps listeners had become more used to four-letter words being used in all sorts of media. The racist epithets would have if anything, been considered even more offensive in 2013 than when the Channel 4 film was broadcast. The half-hour Radio 4 documentary that was aired before the reading of the poem that contextualised the swear words and slurs must have helped listeners understand their use in the work.

Both poet and poem are now an accepted part of the literary canon. The website of the Poetry Foundation, a well-respected US organisation set up to promote poetry, describes Harrison as "Britain's leading poet-playwright", and says that V remains his "most famous poem". But while V's power to shock may have been somewhat diminished, it has lost none of its ability to engage and move the reader.

The full text of Tony Harrison’s V can be read on the London Review of Books website. Warning: it contains swear words and highly offensive racial slurs

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