More Rosebud Poetry Special: Roger McGough

Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth

Gyles Brandreth / Plain Jaine Media

Society & Culture

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2025

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A special episode of More Rosebud today with a great poet, and filled with great poetry. Roger McGough tells Gyles about his striking first memories, his childhood in Liverpool, and interweaves this with some readings of poems inspired by his life. Roger remembers his hardworking father, the long line of men who came to the house to pay their respects to his father laid out in the coffin after his death, meeting Philip Larkin at Hull University, and then his early days performing poetry and sketches in clubs in Liverpool in the sixties - which led to his fame as a poet and as an unlikely pop star in the group The Scaffold - with hits like "Thank You Very Much" and "Lily the Pink". Plus Gyles and Harriet enjoy a poem written by a Rosebud listener.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's GK Barry here and my podcast, Saving Grace, is currently sponsored by Experian,
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0:58.4	Music Beery and check your credit score today. Welcome to More Rosebud.
1:02.8	It's Rosebud, but it's a bit different, and there's more of us.
1:04.3	There's me and there's Harriet.
1:05.2	How are you, Harriet?
1:06.3	I'm fine, thanks.
1:09.1	We've got an exciting week because we're meeting again tomorrow, because tomorrow we're going to Holland Park Opera.
1:12.1	Yes.
1:12.4	Because our friend.
1:13.8	Tamara Matheson.
1:15.1	Wonderful Australian actor who came and did an extraordinary rosebud as Beethoven.
1:22.9	And a lot of people were quite cynical.
1:24.6	Sort of, come on now.
1:26.2	Come on to get some real guests.
1:44.6	And they listened and they thought, well, this is uncanny. It is a real guest. It's somebody channeling Beethoven so effectively. You feel you're with Beethoven. Yeah. And he's going to give us, I think, later in the year, Lord Baden, George Barron, the great poet. I want to talk to you about poets in a moment. But before that,
	...

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