As part of the BBC's celebration of the birth of Philip Larkin, 100 years ago, there was a series of programmes where poems were "road-tested" by Simon Armitage who travelled the country trying out poems on various audiences.
He took Going, Going (which I've written about before) to a meeting of the Environmental Funders network at Wortley Hall in Yorkshire.
Not all the audience was impressed it's fair to say. Rather unfortunately, I thought, the programme didn't really give the background to the poem which was commissioned as a prologue to a UK government report, How Do You Want To Live? (HMSO, 1972). This was one of the UK's papers submitted to the landmark 1972 UN Stockholm Conference on the Environment.
Larkin was always going to be a risky choice for such a venture, and it's a matter of record that officials did not wholly like what he wrote – too polemical, perhaps, or far too near the truth. Indeed, the commissioning committee was so discomforted that they cut a verse out of the poem, something which Larkin went along with at the time only to publish the full version in his collection High Windows.
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