v.

The Star: 'A plan to televise a poem packed with obscenities caused outrage last night. ITV chiefs intend to screen a reading of Tony Harrison's verse v. which is full of four-letter words.'

Daily Mail: 'A torrent of four-letter filth… the most explicitly sexual language yet beamed into the nation's living rooms… the crudest, most offensive word is used 17 times.'

Gerald Howarth, MP: 'It is full of expletives and I can't see that it serves any artistic purpose whatsoever.'

Mary Whitehouse: 'This work of singular nastiness.'

Harold Pinter: 'The criticism against the poem has been offensive, juvenile and, of course, philistine. It should certainly be broadcast.'

Tony Harrison's v. was written during the Miners' Strike of 1984-85 when he visited his parents' grave in a Leeds cemetery and found it vandalised by obscene graffiti. In the book-length poem, he confronts the foul-mouthed skinhead thug responsible, who becomes a foil for his own anger and alienation. The political and media reaction to v. would make a book in itself. This is that book. As well as Tony Harrison's poem and Graham Sykes's photographs, this new edition of v. includes press articles, letters, reviews, a defence of the poem and film by director Richard Eyre, and a transcript of the phone calls logged by Channel Four on the night of the broadcast.

'If I had the slightest influence over educational policy in this country, I'd see that v. was a set text in every school in the country, but of course if we lived in that sort of country, the poem wouldn't have needed to be written' – Richard Eyre.

Channel Four’s film of v. won the Royal Television Society’s Best Original Programme Award.

The ebook with audio edition uses a recording of Tony Harrison reading v. made by Whistledown Productions and first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 18 February 2013. The feature v. by Tony Harrison was rebroadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 6 November 2025.

Tony Harrison (1937-2025) was Britain's leading film and theatre poet. He published eight titles with Bloodaxe from 1981 to 1995, including The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award, and his book-length poem v. (1985/1989).

His films using verse narrative include v., broadcast by Channel 4 television in 1987 in a film directed by Richard Eyre which won a Royal Television Society Award. The controversy around the broadcast led to v. becoming his best-known work.

Tony Harrison (1937-2025) was Britain's leading film and theatre poet. He has written for the National Theatre in London, the New York Metropolitan Opera and for the BBC and Channel 4 television. He was born in Leeds, England in 1937 and was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University, where he read Classics and took a diploma in Linguistics.

He moved to Newcastle in 1967 to become the first Northern Arts Literary Fellow (1967-68), a post he held again in 1976-77, and was resident dramatist at the National Theatre (1977-78). His work there included adaptations of Molière's The Misanthrope and Racine's Phaedra Britannica.

His first collection of poems, The Loiners (1970), was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1972, and his acclaimed version of Aeschylus's The Oresteia (1981) won him the first European Poetry Translation Prize in 1983. Bloodaxe published his Dramatic Verse 1973-1985 in hardback in 1985, with a paperback following from Penguin under the title Theatre Works 1973-1985.

He published several poetry titles with Bloodaxe, including A Kumquat for John Keats (1981), U.S. Martial (1981), v. (1985/1989), The Fire-Gap (1985), A Cold Coming (1991), The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992) and Permanently Bard: Selected Poetry (1995). The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992) won the Whitbread Poetry Award. Neil Astley's critical anthology Tony Harrison (1991) included several essays and texts collected or published there for the first time.

Harrison's adaptation of the English Medieval Mystery Plays cycle was first performed at the National Theatre in 1985. Many of his plays were staged away from conventional auditoria: The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus was premièred at the ancient stadium at Delphi in 1988; Poetry or Bust was first performed at Salts Mill, Saltaire in Yorkshire in 1993; The Kaisers of Carnuntum premiered at the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Carnuntum in Austria; and The Labours of Herakles was performed on the site of the new theatre at Delphi in Greece in 1995. His translation of Victor Hugo's The Prince's Play was performed at the National Theatre in 1996.

His films using verse narrative include v., broadcast by Channel 4 television in 1987 and winner of a Royal Television Society Award; Black Daisies for the Bride, winner of the Prix Italia in 1994; and The Blasphemers' Banquet, screened by the BBC in 1989, an attack on censorship inspired by the Salman Rushdie affair. He co-directed A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan for Channel 4 in 1994 and directed, wrote and narrated The Shadow of Hiroshima, screened by Channel 4 in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atom bomb. The published text, The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems (Faber, 1995), won the Heinemann Award in 1996. He wrote and directed his first feature film Prometheus in 1998. In 1995 he was commissioned by The Guardian newspaper to visit Bosnia and write poems about the war.

His most recent poetry collection, Under the Clock (Penguin, 2005), was followed by Collected Poems (Viking, 2007) and Collected Film Poetry (Faber, 2007). His latest book is Fram (Faber, 2008), a work for theatre premièred at the National Theatre in 2007. He received the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2015.