Review: My Life In Verse: Robert Webb, BBC2 (From Blackpool Citizen)

Review: My Life In Verse: Robert Webb, BBC2

10:47am Thursday 11th June 2009

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THE half of Mitchell and Webb that isn’t Mitchell is obviously looking to spread his TV wings beyond comedy and shows plenty of promise in this programme in which he traces the story behind TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.

Prufrock’s hardly cheery stuff (“I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid”).

But its tone fits the mood Webb creates. Webb proves an engaging and warm presenter, especially when talking about how his mother’s death when he was just 17 changed his life.

“Like everyone who has lost someone close, and I feel as if I’m speaking to most of you, I had all these dreams where I believed she was still alive,” he says.

Webb even reads through his teenage diary of angst, loneliness, fear, jealousy and anger, and recites a poem his ex-girlfriend wrote for him just three weeks into their relationship — she’s now his wife — and he reasons: “Love is the biggest and oldest subject for poetry and it is easy to fall into cliché, but good poetry doesn’t.”

A cheery Philip Larkin poem, This Be The Verse, takes the melancholy further: “Man hands on misery to man, It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can and don’t have any kids yourself.”

Webb attends a village poetry society reading, much of which he is bored by, and is right to be so as most verse is pretty damn poor, the best streets ahead of the rest.

He is also right when he says poetry should reflect your life, but as Morrissey, who many believe to be pop’s very own poet, once sang: “Hang the blessed DJ, because the music that they constantly play, it says nothing to me about my life.”

Webb concludes by saying that poetry can mentally save your life. He might just be right. I’m off to get my Pam Ayres collection . . .

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