David Tennant Audios: Classic FM One Hundred Favorite Humorous Poems (1998)

...an obscure audio collection which became another collection!

In June 1997, iconic UK author, poet, songwriter and Classic FM radio presenter Mike Read conducted a listener’s poll and asked his audience to call in with their choice of favorite poems. Read announced the Top 100 on air on his breakfast show; the audience response was so great Read joined with book publisher Hodder & Stoughton to write and publish a book based on the results of the poll, entitled Classic FM's One Hundred Favourite Poems. This spurred Hodder’s collaboration with Heavy Entertainment (and sponsored by Breakfast Milk) to produce an accompanying audio cassette and CD. It included such notables as Nigel Hawthorne, Sir John Gielgud and Vanessa Redgrave reading selected poems from the book.

Given its previous reception, the following year - in the summer of 1998 - Read decided to do it again; this time, with humorous poems in mind. He was again inundated with suggestions by listeners, and announced the Top 100 on air. Following this, Hodder & Stoughton again wrote and published a book based on the poll results, entitled Classic FM One Hundred Favourite Humorous Poems. Once again Hodder & Stoughton’s audio department decided to produce an audio cassette and CD and secured the talents of a stellar cast of actors to read the selections, including Pam Ayres, Richard Griffiths, Roger McGough, Julia Sawalha, June Whitfield, Richard Wilson, Sir John Gielgud, Joanna Lumley…and David Tennant.

In the summer of 1998, David was quite busy. He was on the back end of his run of double-billed plays, The Real Inspector Hound and Black Comedy, at the Comedy (now the Harold Pinter) Theatre in London (click through to read my in-depth look at the two plays):

Theatre Deep Dive: David Tennant in ’The Real Inspector Hound/Black Comedy’ (1998)

The two plays ran through 8 August 1998. But he certainly had time to contribute his readings before late October, when rehearsals began for his next play, Vassa, which wouldn’t open until late January 1999.

Produced by Heavy Entertainment, Hodder Headline Audiobooks released Classic FM One Hundred Favourite Humorous Poems on audio cassette (ISBN 978-1840321067) and on CD on 3 December 1998 (another version of the audio cassette was published in 1999 with an ISBN of 978-978-1840321111.)

Front and back covers of the audio cassette

The back cover of the cassette says:

“When Mike Reed asked listeners to choose their favorite funny poems he was inundated with suggestions, both familiar and unfamiliar, embracing two hundred years of humorous verse. Here are the top one hundred poems, performed by an outstanding cast introduced by Mike Reed, and whether you laugh out loud or just smile, this is a collection to enjoy and return to again and again.”

David was chosen to read sixteen out of the one hundred poems. He read the following:

Agnus Dei by Spike Milligan

A Subaltern's Love Song by John Betjeman

Bagpipe Music by Louis MacNeice

Brush Up Your Shakespeare by Cole Porter

Executive by John Betjeman

Dizzy Gillespie by E.J. Thribb

Jim by Hilaire Belloc

The Motor Bus by A.D. Godley

Sir Christopher Wren by E.C. Bentley

Sonnet: In Time of Revolt by Rupert Brooke

The Everlasting Percy by E.V. Knox

The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll

The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay by William McGonagall

The Song Against Grocers by G.K. Chesterton

The Village Choir by Anonymous

Village Cricket (or the Non-Player Trophy) by Nigel Forde

—

For the majority of these readings David used his native, lighter-touched musical Scottish accent, with a few noticeable exceptions: for The Everlasting Percy he used a regional British dialect, he chose a heavier Scots burr for such selections as The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay and Bagpipe Music, and for Brush Up Your Shakespeare, he used a ridiculously played up northeastern American accent! (As an aside, in October 2013 David appeared on BBC Berkshire’s Mike Read Show, and he again read Brush Up Your Shakespeare!)

And now, a treat - you can download and listen to all of them here. Enjoy!

All of these poems have stories behind them, of course, but I thought I’d take the time to feature a few in particular:

The Everlasting Percy was written by Edmund George Valpy "E.V." Knox (1881-1971) who wrote under the pseudonym 'Evoe'. He was a comic writer, poet, satirist, and editor of Punch, the world's most celebrated magazine of wit and satire, from 1932 until 1949. The Everlasting Percy was penned by Knox as a parody of poet laureate John Masefield’s poem, The Everlasting Mercy, and was about various forms of misbehavior on the railway. It was published in 1926 in a volume of Knox’s poems, Poems of Impudence.

The poet E.V. Knox, and his 1926 book, Poems Of Impudence

And now, a crueler story: that of William McGonagall, the author of the 1878 poem, The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay. While McGonagall could be more than a bit grandiose - he styled himself a "Poet and Tragedian" and compared himself to Shakespeare - during his lifetime he was ridiculed and called the “World’s Worst Poet”. University of Edinburgh students frequently made him the butt of their jokes.

McGonagall was so bad he became a celebrity of sorts, and had such a lack of humor he didn’t realize when he was being made fun of.

For example, from the 8 July 1879 edition of the Courier and Argus: "A very unruly and uproarious set of fellows in the back of the hall...kept up a running fire of comments on the piece, and by their clamor at times drowned the performer's voice. During the evening, repeated calls had been made for the "Tay Bridge" - at last the poet recited the famous piece. The reading of this piece was received with tremendous cheering and waving of hats and repeated calls to give it over again.”

Sadly, McGonagall’s waxing rhapsodic about the Tay Bridge was prophetic in its way:

McGonagall (see below) weirdly enough, also made his stage debut as Macbeth!

On the left, McGonagall's own words about why he began writing poetry; on the right, his 1880s stage debut in Macbeth - Lothian Courier, 3 October 1902

Lastly, a brief comment on David’s reading of Dizzy Gillespie by E.J. Thribb. E. J. Thribb was actually the creation of Barry Fantoni, the writer and cartoonist for Private Eye, a satirical magazine born in the 1960s. Thribb, aged 17½ and the magazine's “poet-in-residence”, was a rhyming obituary poet who nearly always began all his work with the line, "So. Farewell then..."

And why does Thribb/Fantoni’s poem - ostensibly a poetic memoriam to the great Dizzy Gillespie - also include a mention of dancer Rudolf Nureyev? Because both Nureyev and Gillespie died the same day, on 6 January 1993!

But back to Classic FM.

A little over ten years later - on 9 March 2009 - Hodder & Stoughton Audiobooks and Heavy Entertainment released Classic FM Favourite Poems (ISBN 978-1844567997). The 4-CD set had a runtime of 3 hours and 20 minutes and was compiled using the two late 1990s sets of audios which had come before it (Classic FM One Hundred Favourite Poems and Classic FM One Hundred Favourite Humorous Poems.)

Once again, David was included on the set; there’s a partial track listing on Discogs which indicates The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay was included. The track listing of the third CD of the set’s not listed, so it’s entirely possible another of David’s readings was included.

Front and back covers of the 2009 CD, Classic FM Favourite Poems

The back of the CD says:

"This delightful anthology is a timeless selection of poems chosen through a classic FM listener poll. Enjoy all your favorite verse in this varied selection. An outstanding cast of actors bring to life familiar favorites and more unexpected verses, from humorous limericks and romantic sonnets to modern classics. Whether you're hearing them for the first time or revisiting a classic, this is a selection to enchant, move and delight. Classic FM favorite poems is the definitive poetry collection. Includes poems by Edward Lear, Sir John Betjeman, William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Pam Ayres, Hilaire Belloc, John Donne, Cole Porter and Lord Byron."

In the 13 March 2009 edition of The Express, Kati Nicholl wrote about the release, "There's nothing like poetry to soothe the spirits, and Classic FM Favourite Poems has a selection of a hundred old favourites, ranging from Frost's The Road Not Taken to Robert Browning's My Last Duchess, with such glories as McGonagall's The Railway Bridge Of The Silvery Tay, which is read by David Tennant. Other readers include Samantha Bond, Douglas Hodge, Pam Ayres and Richard Wilson."

The books for all the Classic FM series are easy to purchase off Ebay and Amazon, but the recordings which specifically include David’s readings are hard to find on CD - and especially on cassette. David was only included on the second set published in 1998, and then in a more limited fashion on the set released in 2009. That’s why I’ve included the ISBN numbers above, because if you want to try to find them on physical media, it’s very easy to accidentally order the wrong version!

There are a couple of options for you to listen and/or read along with these humorous poems…er, other than downloading them (*ahem*) from the link I left above, that is! You can borrow the 1998 book Classic FM One Hundred Favourite Humorous Poems from the Internet Archive, which you should consider doing if you want to read along with David’s selections. If you’re in the UK (and perhaps in other countries, too, though certainly not in the US!) you can go to Audible and purchase the 2009 release, or purchase it (even in the US!) on Google Play Books.

And that’s it for this edition of obscure DT audios! I say audios because, well, the 1998 edition transmogrified into the 2009 edition, right, so if you’re a serious collector you have to consider them two separate things. So if you’re that, good luck on your search through the jungles of Ebay and etc.

Me? While I’m admittedly a hunter and gatherer galore when it comes to DT stuffs, my madness tends to land on theatre…

…though if someone reading this does happen to pick up the full 2009 edition of Classic FM Favourite Poems and can tell me if any of David’s readings ended up on that third disc, and if so, which ones, I’d be forever grateful!

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Addendum: A note of thanks goes out to reader Anja for sharing her track list of the 1998 version of this series - thereby connecting the dots with all sixteen tracks David contributed to the project - and sharing her complete copy with me so I could offer it to you.