Just The Tonic, Series 2, Episode 4: The Power of Poetry, with Ian McMillan

Introduction (0:00)

[Music]

0:00 Katie: Hello, and welcome to Just The Tonic, the podcast that shines the spotlight on the positive impact of the arts. I’m Katie Derham, and welcome to episode 4 of our current series. If you missed previous episodes, and series one, do catch up wherever you get your podcasts – we’re in all the usual places.

0:25 In the first series we heard how listening to and creating music helps children learn numeracy, literacy and emotional skills. I chatted to Nicola Benedetti about the impact of her Benedetti Foundation, which has done so much to make music accessible to children of all backgrounds. And in this episode we’ll be hearing from the youngest member of The People’s Orchestra, eight-year-old Aurora Chin Chan…

0:47 Aurora: I like all kinds of music. Now I am very happy to play in The People’s Orchestra, because I can play a lot of movie music here.

0:55 Katie: …we’ll be hearing from some fabulous young poets taking part in the Birmingham Children’s Poetry Festival…

1:00 Leo: I can use my legs to run. It is fun. I can use my legs to climb. I am proud. My body is mine.

1:10 Katie: …and I’ll be chatting to one of our best-loved poets, the wonderful Ian McMillan.

1:14 Ian McMillan: Everybody can do this, and that’s been my mission: to convince everybody that they can be writers, and just say, have a go – have a go at this. Have a go.

1:26 Katie: I look forward to bringing you more from Ian later – such a great chat.

[Music]

Aurora Chin Chan (1:40)

1:40 Katie: As we’ve heard throughout both series of Just The Tonic, The People’s Orchestra is a community of orchestras and choirs based in and around the West Midlands – and increasingly further afield too. One of their newest members is eight-year-old – yes, only eight – Aurora Chin Chan, from Hong Kong. And as she told our reporter Jamie Parker, she’s already a multi-instrumentalist.

2:05 Aurora: I play cello, piano, flute, cornet and recorder.

2:10 Katie: Aurora plays the cello with The People’s Orchestra, and at eight years old she is a student at the Birmingham Conservatoire.

[Music]

2:35 Jamie Parker: What do you like best about playing in the orchestra?

2:38 Aurora: I like the sound of all the musical instruments playing together. It is gorgeous, and sounds amazing. I like all kinds of music. Now I am very happy to play in The People’s Orchestra, because I can play a lot of movie music here.

3:05 Jamie: Who are you inspired by in music? What sort of musicians inspire you to play?

3:10 Aurora: I like my teachers at the conservatoire, because they are very good musicians. I also like Beethoven. He is a great musician and composer. I like his Symphony No. 5.

3:30 Jamie: Would you like to have a career in music?

3:33 Aurora: Yes. I want to be a professional musician in future, because I want to play in an orchestra. I also want to be on YouTube or a TV show.

[Music: Aurora plays an excerpt from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1]

3:56 Katie: That’s Aurora playing an excerpt from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. Many thanks to her, to Aurora’s mum, Athena, and to Jamie. I’m sure Aurora has a very bright future ahead of her.

Birmingham Children's Poetry Festival (4:10)

4:10 Katie: Now let’s hear from another very talented young person.

4:13 Leo: I can use my legs to run. It is fun. I can use my legs to climb. I am proud. My body is mine.

4:20 Katie: That’s Leo from Raddlebarn Primary School in Selly Oak, performing the fantastic poem he wrote for the Birmingham Children’s Poetry Festival. It’s one of many events for young people at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games Festival, and it’s organised by Birmingham Cathedral. Here’s their head of learning, Jane McArdle, to tell us more.

4:42 Jane McArdle: We were really wanting to make sure that we did something at the time of the Commonwealth Games and the Birmingham 2022 Festival, to really celebrate what is great about the city, but to involve young people and schools from across the diocese and the city and the region as much as we could. So we came up with the idea of a poetry festival. We wanted it to be something where all schools could take part, regardless of their location, and something that could be done in school and very much part of the curriculum and learning – which poetry is. So it was very embedded; it wasn’t an extra thing for teachers to take on, but something that was still relevant and meaningful to their daily curriculum. So poetry seemed like an obvious choice.

5:40 And we wanted to be able to use our outdoor space, which is in a very central location in Birmingham, to display the poems we got back, so that during the summer, when people are coming to Birmingham for the Commonwealth Games, they can see children’s poetry inspired by sport and by the Games as they’re wandering around, whatever time of day it might be. We also wanted it to be an opportunity for families to come into the city as well, because in a large city like Birmingham, we often find that families are very much invested in their local communities but often don’t come into the city centre at all. So this would offer them an incentive to come into the city, and into the cathedral, and see our wonderful spaces.

6:22 The poetry festival itself is the first time we’ve done it, so it’s really been a bit of a learning curve. We decided to base the themes for the festival on the themes of the Commonwealth Games, which are humanity, destiny and equality. And then, following on from that, linking again with the cultural festival, we wanted to look at the power of the human body, a sporting moment, and the spirit of the Games. So this gave a realm in which teachers could pitch the poetry for the children. We were also very welcoming of any type of poem – it could be free verse, it could be haiku, it could be limerick. We’ve actually ended up with a lot of acrostic poems, which seem to be a very popular choice. So we’re very, very open to different types of creativity. And we’ve actually been really overwhelmed with the response. I had no idea how many people would respond, but we’ve had a thousand entries to the festival, which is just wonderful.

7:25 Katie: Here’s Harley with his poem for the festival.

7:28 Harley: I can run. It is a lot of fun. I am fast. I never come last.

7:40 Katie: Great stuff, Harley, thank you. And here’s Kaia from Raddlebarn Primary School with another great poem.

7:46 Kaia: My race, my race – I’m so lucky to be in a race. I hope I win. I wonder what there will be – all the crowds sharing my race. My race, my race – I hope I will win. I have to win, of course. I have to be strong. My race, my race, my race, my race – I’m starting now. I really, really hope I win. Finally, it’s time. My coach says, “you can do it”. My race, my race – I run and run. I won!

8:21 Katie: Thank you, Kaia – that was fab.

Casey Bailey, Birmingham Poet Laureate (8:25)

8:25 Katie: Birmingham Poet Laureate Casey Bailey is supporting the Children’s Poetry Festival. He has tons of experience encouraging young people to write poetry, and he’s also a head teacher.

8:35 Casey Bailey: Any student I talk to, I talk to about literature. I talk to them about whether they read and what they like to read. If they tell me that they don’t like reading, I would almost always say, “it’s not that you don’t like reading – it’s that you haven’t found something that you like reading yet”. And I talk to them about what I like to read, and what I might suggest that they read. I don’t think I’ve ever worked at a school where I haven’t had at least one or two students who I’ve had a little book exchange with – whether it’s they give me a book and I give them a book that I really like, or sometimes I just lend them my books. Those are my personal books, that I really appreciate, and I really think this individual child will get something from them. And I think on that level, you can really develop a passion for writing.

9:18 I’ve also, at every school I’ve been at, I think, run some form of writing club, which is outside of the curriculum – it has no real relationship to the curriculum, if I’m honest. It’s not there to serve getting students better grades; it’s there to serve them expressing themselves, and feeling comfortable and happy doing that.

9:43 Poetry looks less daunting. Writing really good poetry – or poetry that people think is really good – can be very difficult. But looking at a poem and thinking, “could I write something of that size, of that nature?” feels more achievable – even though when you get into it, and you actually want to hone your craft, you realise, “oh God, this is really hard”. If I give you a novel and say “write that”, that’s ridiculous – if you’ve never written anything like that, you can’t write that. But when someone says to you, “here you are – here’s 16 lines, here’s 15 lines, here’s 22 lines; do you think you could write that?”, you think, maybe, maybe I could say that much stuff. And then you start to work on actually honing it, and developing it into a real skill and a real art form.

10:30 Katie: Being his city’s Poet Laureate is a real point of pride for Casey.

10:35 Casey: I still remember when I first realised I wanted to be the Birmingham Poet Laureate. It was the same time I realised that Birmingham had a Poet Laureate. I’d seen a poet called Roy McFarlane, who is just a stunning poet, and they introduced Roy as a former Birmingham Poet Laureate. I watched him and saw how powerful he was as a performer – but also, his writing in and of itself is stunning – and I thought, I want to be everything that this man is. So if he was Poet Laureate, I want to be the Poet Laureate.

11:05 I grew up in an area of the city of Birmingham that doesn’t necessarily have a great reputation – it isn’t one of the places you look to when you think about the great things that are happening in Birmingham. But it’s full of great people, it’s full of a great community. And I think to hold an official title in the city, coming from where I come from, is a beacon to people who come from where I come from, to say: actually, none of this is off-limits to us. And beyond that, I said at the start of doing this role that I wanted to bring poetry to Birmingham and to bring Birmingham to poetry. So I want more people in Birmingham to see what poetry is and what it can do, and I want more people outside of Birmingham to realise that this poetry scene that we have here is very special. I’m just privileged to be a part of it, and to be an ambassador for it at this moment in time.

11:55 Katie: I’m sure the Birmingham Children’s Poetry Festival will be an inspiration for many young – and not so young – people. Here’s Freddie from Raddlebarn Primary with his poem for the festival.

12:05 Freddie: Every four years we dive into all those sports. We push through the water, we flip, we bend. You are a star when you swing the racket as hard as you can. We play lots of sports, we win prizes. Get back up – no one loses; we all win for trying. We dive right into teamwork and happiness.

12:30 Katie: Another excellent one, Freddie – thank you very much. And thanks also to Jane and Casey, and to Leo, Harley and Kaia for their brilliant poems. You can find out more about the festival at birmingham2022.com.

Ian McMillan (12:45)

12:45 Katie: Now, from some up-and-coming young poets to one of the best-loved poets in the land: the wonderful Ian McMillan. He’s poet in residence at Barnsley Football Club, he’s been resident poet at English National Opera, where he wrote the libretto for the world’s first opera in a South Yorkshire dialect, and he presents Radio 3’s poetry programme The Verb. I could listen to him all day. Former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy called Ian world-class – one of today’s great poetry performers – and according to the Times Educational Supplement, he is the Shirley Bassey of performance poetry, which I will have to remind him of next time I see him. His latest book, My Sand Life, My Pebble Life, recalls childhood days at the seaside, and I began by asking him if his interest in poetry started at a young age.

13:31 Ian McMillan: It began for me at junior school, because, being the age I am, I went to a junior school in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire was run by a godlike genius, the education officer Sir Alec Clegg, who is forgotten these days. But at that time he said all children are creative. He wrote this wonderful book called The Excitement of Writing, which included work by established poets but also work by children from schools. And he said all you’ve got to do is make things all day in school. So we sang, we danced, we wrote, we painted, we made sculptures. At the end of the maths lesson we’d write a poem; at the end of history we’d sing a song. So it became just the thing to do. You felt, all right: I am a creative human being – that’s what I am.

14:20 And I kind of gravitated towards words, partly because my dad liked to tell a tale – my dad was a storyteller, if you like. My mother and father met as pen pals in the Second World War. My dad was from Scotland, my mother was from Barnsley. He was in the Navy, she was in the WAAFs, and they had this scheme where single service people could write to each other. So they wrote to each other, and my dad wrote these most romantic letters, making quite a lot of the things he was telling her up! So if it comes through your DNA, then that’s where it comes from. Writing is important – I’m here because they met through writing.

15:00 And then at my school, we were told, “yeah, you can be a writer” – they would say that in as many words. My teacher, Mrs Roach – I remember writing a thing, when I was about seven, about when the giant came out of the mouse hole. A lesser teacher than Mrs Roach would have said, “Ian, don’t be silly – giants can’t come out of mouse holes”. And she went, “that’s great”, and gave me a star. And I thought: well, that’s it. And then I thought, everybody can do this. And that’s been my mission ever since: to convince everybody that they can be writers – that they can be artists of whatever sort, but my speciality is writing – and just say, have a go. Have a go at this. Nobody’s going to tell you off – but if they do, don’t listen to them. Your writing is as valid as anybody else’s.

15:45 I’ve just been doing a series of workshops in Doncaster with people with mental health issues. We just sit together and have a laugh. I have a flip chart, we make a group poem together on the flip chart, my mate will turn up with his piano accordion, we’ll turn it into a song, and at the end of it they feel fantastic – and not only that, they feel like they are creative people. So for me it’s a kind of lifelong mission, and I’ve decided that once I’ve met everybody in the world, and I’ve got everybody in the world to write a poem, I’ll have a day off!

[Laughter]

16:15 That’s the plan. It’s not going badly – it’s not going too badly. My other plan was to do a gig in every village hall in Britain, which I’ve now kind of given up on, because there are 36,264, I think, and I’ve been to about 500. But there are still a lot. And it’s the same thing: it’s this idea that wherever you visit, wherever you go, that can be a nexus for art. That can be a place where art can happen. Probably like you, whenever I visit a building, whenever I go past an empty shop, whenever I go past a church, I think, “gosh, what concerts can we put on there? What workshops can we put on? What exhibitions?” Until in the end there is no difference between the high-art cathedrals that we all love and the low-art lean-tos that we can also love. I’ve just invented that phrase – “the low-art lean-to” – and I’m going to keep it. I think it’s good. I’m going to jot it down.

17:15 Katie: I think the work that you do is unbelievably admirable, and it’s interesting to hear that you come from that environment where it was considered normal. When you’re now doing workshops with young people, how easy is it for them to unleash that creativity which is in all of us? Do you find that kids are open to it?

17:36 Ian: Kids really are open to it – partly because school these days, as we know, is not much like the West Riding. There isn’t that sense of unfettered creativity. There are a lot of fronted adverbials to be done; there’s a lot of “you’ve got to do this for the exam”. And that does stamp a bit on creativity. So when I visit schools, I am, hopefully, a breath of fresh air, saying, “let’s just have a go at this – let’s make this up”. And honestly, they love it.

18:05 My favourite age group to work with is infants. Infants are fantastic, because infants have such joyous creativity, and as long as you go along with it, that’s fine. And I also like juniors, and I like Year 6s – because Year 6 is when, as very rarely happens in your life, you’re at the top of a tree and the world is full of possibilities. In Year 6, your body’s changing, your mind is changing, you’re at the top of the tree, you’re about to go to the big school, and they’ve got such fantastic ideas.

18:39 When I go to schools, I always try and make their space magic, because that’s what my teachers did for me – they made my space a magical space. I’ll walk into a classroom that they’re used to, and I’ll see a watering can, and I’ll say, “oh yeah, see that? That’s the watering can that was lost in 1824 by…” – so let’s tell some stories about this watering can. And then the space that they’re in becomes magical, and we start making things about the watering can. I’m a big one for people going out and coming in – I’ll get a child to go out of the room and come in with some news, and then we’ll make up this thing. It’s to get away from… you know, when you visit a school there’ll be the ones who are good at writing. This is great, and we love them very much – but they’ll be the ones putting their hand up, and I’d rather work with the ones that aren’t. So that’s why I do a group thing to start with: I can pick out the ones, get them doing it, and then we’ll do something individual.

19:36 I remember working at a pupil referral unit years ago, with kids who, for whatever reason – sometimes they didn’t like school, sometimes school didn’t like them – had been excluded from school. And I wish I’d filmed this terrible error that I made. There was me, a musician and a dancer, and I said, “right – we’re going to make up a rap about our names”. They all sat in these rows with their hoods on. It was on Beckett Road in Doncaster, this pupil referral unit. I said, “right, I’m just going to go: I was walking down Beckett Road one day, and I saw some people coming my way…” – and they were going to give their names. And as one, they lifted their hoods up, put them over their faces, and shrank like turtles into a shell! I met a lad recently who said, “I remember that”. And that was me getting it wrong. With that kind of age group, you have to take your time with them.

20:40 I’m not as good with teenagers. Some people are fantastic with teenagers. I like the juniors because they’re as enthusiastic and as daft as me, and you can do ridiculous things with them. But then again, when you can unleash what teenagers do – teenagers write about themselves, teenagers write about the world; we know how concerned teenagers are with the state of the world – they can write about that. But I realised that my approach then was a bit off-beam.

21:11 Katie: You never feel anything as deeply as you do when you’re 15, do you?

21:15 Ian: No – goodness, never again. I look back at some of the poems I wrote when I was 15, when I thought that simply by the act of writing this poem – even if nobody reads it – I would actually change the world for the better. And yes, we do want teenagers to feel that, and that’s why I want them to feel valued, and to say: look, your work is as valuable as anybody else’s. That’s the thrust of what we’re about, surely.

21:42 My secondary school teacher, Mr Brown, who I still think about – he did things like, he’d get us to write a poem, and then he’d type it out and put it in a little book. And there are your poems in a book, and you think, “goodness gracious me, there’s my poems in a book!” He validated the poems by putting them in a book. Mind you, I was so daft I thought “essay” was spelt S full stop, A full stop, and stood for “S. A.”! And I remember writing on my essay, “by Ian McMillan, future Nobel Prize for Literature winner”, and Mr Brown taking me on one side and going, “Ian, Nobel Prize winners don’t come from Barnsley”. And that’s the thing I disagree with him about, actually, because I think, as we know, they come from anywhere. This idea of the sacred place where art can be made – it can be made absolutely anywhere. And I think I always had quite a bit of confidence, and it was mainly thanks to these teachers. A lot of us – people like us who’ve done well – can point to particular teachers who just said, “you can do this”. And that’s why I always do it.

22:46 Katie: What was the leap, then, for you? Because obviously your teachers were telling you – but also all your classmates – that you can be a writer, a singer, a dancer, you can make and create. But presumably not everybody in your class went on to be an artist or writer or dancer. So what made you keep going?

23:05 Ian: As you can tell, I’ve always been a show-off! I like the idea of showing off. So I would write poems and then think, where can I perform these poems? Me and my mate would go to the local folk club, and there’d be singers’ nights, where somebody would sing a shanty, and then somebody would sing a Bob Dylan song, and somebody would sing their own song, and then somebody would get up – like me, or somebody else – and read a poem. And you think, well, wait a minute – I could stand up and read poems. The first time you do it you’re terrible – your voice is going like this, you’re so nervous, and as you stand up you think, “I’ve written all this tripe”. But then people respond to it, and you think, “ah, that’s interesting – could this be a job? Could this reading out of poems be a job?”

23:50 Then I went to see the Liverpool Poets – Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough – in a pub in Doncaster, and I thought, that’s their job. Meanwhile, I’d just got married, and you think, they’ll get no money, so I’m going to have to get a job before I can do it as a job. So I went to work in various manual jobs. And then – wonderfully, just the way a little bit of money helps; we all know a little bit of money helps – in 1983, the Yorkshire Arts Association, which was like a branch of the Arts Council, was giving out these grants. They’d give you up to a thousand pounds if you gave up your job and went freelance. And a thousand pounds – it’s a lot of money now, but it was a lot of money in 1983 – and you go, “I can give up my job and be a freelance writer-performer. Yes, I’ll do it!” And I’ve always been encouraged – so my wife said, “yeah, go on”, and my parents went, “go on”. So I applied for this thousand quid, and they gave me 800 quid! Which is a lesser amount – not by much, but psychologically so much less. But luckily my wife and parents went, “go on then, give up your job – you want to do it, do it”. So I did it.

25:10 And then that thing happens to everybody who’s gone freelance, where you go, “right, I’m here – come on, world, form a queue!” And nothing happens. Nothing happens at all. Your 800 quid starts to dwindle. So then I did what we’ve all done as freelancers: when somebody rings you up, you go “yes, yes, yes, yes”. So I started doing writing workshops all over South Yorkshire for the WEA – the Workers’ Educational Association. I was writing little reviews of bands for the New Musical Express. I’d go and see a band somewhere and write the review, get the bus to Barnsley station, type the review out, then send it by Red Star parcel – remember that? – to St Pancras, where it got picked up. They’d pay me £9.23 or something for the review, and it cost me £10 to send it – but it got my name there! And then somebody said, “do you fancy coming to a school and doing poems?” And I went, “yeah, all right”. And I was terrible, but after a bit you realise you can do it. And it was thinking, all right, I can actually make a living from talking about it as much as writing it. The writing, especially for the first few years, was just a thing I did; it was the talking about it, the encouraging, the workshops. So that was 1983, and since then I’ve not had a day off.

26:30 So you say yes. Saying yes leads to adventures. And after a bit, you realise that if it doesn’t work, they won’t ask you again. I always think in geological time. I say to people: look, if something goes badly – in 200,000 years, who cares? At the moment it’s going badly, it’s the worst thing that ever happened, and you think, “why am I doing this? This is awful”. But even six weeks later nobody remembers, and a year later nobody remembers. So don’t worry. That’s why I always say to people as well: if you want to go freelance, times have always been hard, so don’t worry. Always say yes – it leads to adventures. And it’s an exciting world out there, it really is.

27:10 Katie: What is it, do you think, about poetry that distils emotion and makes it so powerful – as opposed to writing a wonderful short story, or writing the great Yorkshire novel?

27:20 Ian: I think the thing about poetry is that its basis is in three things: rhythm, song and white space. To me, the rhythm of a poem is based around the rhythm that we’re living through now – where the sun comes up and the sun goes down, and your heart beats, and you walk up the stairs, and the rhythm of that, and you walk down the street. We’re surrounded by rhythm, and what poetry can do in language is replicate that rhythm. Poetry is also very close to song – people have said that song began with people shouting to accompany music. Somehow that’s what we are: we are people who want to make a noise with our mouths, and poetry is about that. Poetry is about trying to express emotion – to tell people what you’ve just seen.

28:20 And then, to me, the other real essence of poetry is the white space at the edge of the page. A story nudges the edge of the page; a poem ends halfway across a page, giving you such licence to do what you want with the end of that line, because there’s all that white space around it – like a field you can play in. So you can write a line that’s tiny. One of my favourite poems is William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”: so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens. Oh my goodness, what a great poem that is. I’ll take that to writing workshops, and people turn the page expecting more – but that’s it, that’s the lot! That wouldn’t work as a short story; it’d be terrible as a film. But to see those words – and he divides it up, so you’ve got lots of white space – to me, that’s what poetry can do. It can, as you said, distil language; it can turn language into jewels. But it can also be about the things that we experience every day. William Carlos Williams, living in Paterson, would have seen this wheelbarrow, and so the wheelbarrow becomes an emblem for all kinds of things. That’s the difference, in a way: it is language at its purest, because it’s got the heartbeat, it’s got the echo of song, and it’s got the space around it.

29:35 Katie: Now, I’ve got to ask you, Ian, about the Boy Noah, because the Boy Noah is my favourite person on Twitter, I’m not going to lie!

29:42 Ian: Well, the Boy Noah – I’ve got three grandchildren. I’ve got Thomas – we now call him Young Man Thomas; he’s now driving, unbelievably, despite the fact that he’s still seven, in my head. We’ve got young Isla, who is very, very artistic – really beautifully artistic. She sent me a Father’s Day card, because I’m her granddad, but she wrote it back to front, because she will be a poet or something. And the Boy Noah is just the most energetic and loving young man. He’s five, and for a year we had him every Tuesday. He would arrive at half past seven and run into the house: “come on, granddad, let’s go!” Me, the 66-year-old man, had to run as fast as him, up and down. And he would say, “right, granddad, we’re going to make a story now. You’ll be the Hulk, I’ll be Spider-Man, and we’ll do this and you do that”. And then he said, “you make up the best stories, granddad”. So we had to make up stories all day. It was like the storytelling square in Marrakech, Jemaa el-Fnaa – he was like that all day. And then he’d say, “come on, granddad, push me on the swing, and at the same time tell a story”. Or we’d be playing at something and he’d go, “we should play granddad – make it into a story”. So I’d have to go, “Granddad and Noah were sitting in the house…” Yes, the Boy Noah – he’s an absolute whirlwind. You’ve seen him on Twitter. He keeps me young, and he keeps reminding me that I’ve got to keep making stuff up, and keep telling stories. Yes, it’s a great thing, being a granddad.

31:15 Katie: Absolutely. You make it sound like poetry is an extreme sport!

31:20 Ian: It is – that’s exactly what it is. Poetry is an extreme sport. Which of course it was, in the early days of the Olympics: they would run the marathon, and then they’d do a poem. So poetry has always been an extreme sport. We should bring that back!

31:40 Katie: Well, I suppose we have the Cultural Olympiads, don’t we – but I’m not sure…

31:45 Ian: Yeah, I’d like to see it properly combined once again.

31:48 Katie: No, that would be grand.

[Music]

Close (31:59)

31:59 Katie: Huge thanks to Ian, Casey Bailey, Jane McArdle, Leo, Harley, Kaia and Freddie from Raddlebarn Primary School, and to Jamie, Athena and Aurora from The People’s Orchestra. In the next episode we’ll be hearing from some young people who’ve been dipping their toes into the wonderful world of opera, and I’ll be chatting to the marvellous operatic tenor and all-round force of nature, Nicky Spence.

> Note: the Series Two playlist on YouTube currently ends with this episode; the Nicky Spence episode trailed here isn’t in it.

[Music]

32:30 If we’ve inspired you to pick up a pen to write poetry, or to pick up an instrument to make music, search online for writing and music groups in your area, or get in touch with Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Wales, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland or Creative Scotland. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and follow us on social media for updates – we’re on Twitter and Instagram – and if there’s someone you think we should include in the podcast, let us know. Thanks for listening.

33:00 Just The Tonic with Katie Derham was produced by Jill Davis and is a Peanut and Crumb production, supported by The People’s Orchestra and Arts Council England.

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