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Across ten programmes and ten iconic Phillip Larkin poems, Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate, finds out what happens when he unpicks Larkin's poems in his centenary year, and lets the language that entered the culture resonate as he goes about his own life as a poet ( ‘Sent out of sight/ Somewhere becoming rain.’, ‘It becomes still more difficult to find/ Words at once true and kind/ Or not untrue and not unkind.').

Larkin's poems still feel like contraband: saying the unsayable, facing the reality of time and its passing - whilst offering moments of astonishing beauty and transcendence. Simon has lived with Larkin's work ever since he was told as a teenager that there was a real poet living in Yorkshire. He is fascinated by the way his poems are constructed; the way they often seem to tear things down, often exposing the truth of something difficult, and yet can also be freeing – the opposite of platitudes.

The poems Simon has chosen to explore (including ‘Aubade’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’) show Larkin's range and achievement; they are poems that face the truth of relationships, of death, as well as poems of place and civic life like 'Bridge for the Living' (an unusual commission for Larkin which celebrates Hull as an 'Isolate city').

In this series Simon takes us to the places Larkin’s poems understood intimately – Coventry, and Hull – as he ‘roadtests’ different poems, to see what survives of them in 2022, especially when we know so much more about the private world of this complex and contradictory poet, than his first readers would have known.

Episode one;
Simon Armitage explores Philip Larkin's poem 'Born Yesterday' - a poem written to celebrate the birth of a baby girl, and which suggests she might be happier if she can be dull.

Producer: Faith Lawrence
Mixed by: Sue Stonestreet