"V" describes the author's visit to his parents' grave in a Leeds cemetery "now littered with beer cans and vandalised by obscene graffiti". At the beginning of the Eyre film, Harrison, standing like so many northern iconoclasts before him on top of a hill overlooking his home city, describes the "panoramic view". A quarter of a century ago, when it was shown as part of a Richard Eyre film on Channel 4, the expletive-laden poem was denounced by a holier-than-thou trinity of Mary Whitehouse, Conservative MP Gerald Howarth and the Daily Mail.
But why inscribe these graves with CUNT and SHIT? And it was mine. Almost the time for ghosts I’d better scram. This world, with far too many people in, starts on the TV logo as a taw, then ping-pong, tennis, football; then one spin to show us all, then shots of the Gulf War. And, as the corpses of its dead parent industries rotted, Harrison's home city had become an unforgiving place. Can’ I you speakthe language that yer mam spoke. ‘The only reason why I write this poem at all on yobs like you who do the dirt on death ’s to give some higher meaning to your scrawl.’Don’t fucking bother, cunt! If love of art, or love, gives you affront that the grave I’m in’s graffitied then, maybe, erase the more offensive FUCK and CUNT but leave, with the worn UNITED, one small v. Victory? The map that’s colour-coded Ulster/Eire’s flashed on again as almost every night. What is it that this aggro act implies? Progress was a mirage; they felt like strangers in a strange land. The poem was written during the 1984–1985 miners strike, and makes reference to this as well as to National Union of Mineworkers leader, Arthur Scargill. Folk on t’fucking dole ’ave got about as much scope to aspireabove the shit they’re dumped in, cunt, as coalaspires to be chucked on t’fucking fire. For vast, slow, coal-creating forces that hew the body’s seams to get the soul. A matter of mere time and it will swallow this place of rest and all the resters down.

The poem gives a description of the graffiti on the grave, and pays particular notice to the use of the word united, exploring its ambiguous meaning, either as the name of a football club (e.g., Leeds United) or as the concept of unity. This lot worked at one job all life through.Byron, ‘Tanner’, ‘Lieth ’ere interred’They’ll chisel fucking poet when they do youand that, yer cunt, ’s a crude four-letter word. [2] Prior to the broadcast, both tabloid and broadsheet press articles openly criticised the move. Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard to find my slab behind the family dead, butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread. It wasn’t just the singing angered me. The word’s once more a mindless desecration by some HARPoholic yob supporting Leeds. But a voice that scorns chorales is yelling: Wanker! They yelled ‘damned vandal’ after me that day ... ’. [3] When told of this, Harrison retorted that Howarth was "Probably another idiot MP wishing to impose his intellectual limitations on the rest of us". With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short of company, and Wordsworth’s opposite. No one clamoured in the press for its removal or thought the sign, in wartime, rude at all. He aerosolled his name. The language of this graveyard ranges from a bit of Latin for a former Mayor or those who laid their lives down at the Somme, the hymnal fragments and the gilded prayer. class v. class as bitter as before, the unending violence of US and THEM, personified in 1984 by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM. If mi mam’s up there, don’t want to meet ’erlistening to me list mi dirty deeds,and’ave to pipe up to St fucking Peterah’ve been on t’dole all mi life in fucking Leeds! The poem aroused much controversy when broadcast in film version on British public-service television's Channel 4 due to its extensive use of profanity and racial epithets.

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