Seamus Heaney: A Life in Pictures

The islands lie like stepping stones

in the long river of our past.

As soon as he starts to talk,

To come back to your question,

A completely successful love act

He's an absolutely wonderful communicator. He has a true touch.

It's important to realise Seamus Heaney understands television.

border counties is recorded

as sharp and accurate and green

or he'll say, "I need a dram now."

I believed, at that minute, and I have never ceased believing,

something new was possible, something better could happen.

I think the vast television

is something that could keep the poems wonderfully alive,

for many generations to come.

It means once in a lifetime

and hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney has expressed himself

As he turns 70, this programme will explore how he has used television

to speak to the public, and how the medium has portrayed him.

This rich and unique archive reveals the man behind the poetry.

A few years ago, the bishop whose diocese extends to the water here,

made a ruling that there was to be

and, indeed, he even forbade people

on a bright, sunny morning like this,

and I knew then that something

Seamus Heaney, a little-known poet,

films a television programme

and one of the first times that a writer from Northern Ireland

and present a TV programme.

For Heaney, this was just the start of many appearances on our screens,

which would span the next 40 years.

I discovered no man is an island, in a sense, when I discovered love.

this self possession and independence

and trust in another person.

I come from Scotland, where men didn't talk about their emotions,

and here he was doing something

Producers at the BBC in Belfast knew Heaney was a great communicator

coming from the Irish word, "bog"

Cameraman Rex Maidment worked with Heaney on three schools programmes,

like that piece to camera -

the imagery he conjures up.

..was a gentler operation, a hand to hand encounter between man and earth.

The dark wound of a turf bank or the study form of a turf stack

were almost natural works of art.

is just like a poem, isn't it?

Amazing when I listen to it again.

but he had a set idea in his head.

Most people have to go away

But Seamus, I think he just glanced at the general idea

Country people became so identified

started to call them by its name,

call them bogtrotters and bogmen,

and they even said that you could

and when we finished we came back.

In those days, it was more relaxed.

You want any more tea, fellas?

I remember this. This, again, is in West Donegal, near Lettermacaward,

who used to run the bar, where

In these programmes, Heaney explained to school children

of the place they were living in.

between Catholics and Protestants.

However, broadcasters in London

wanted Heaney to explain something

There was a great avalanche of Heaney film documentary,

in the rest of the British Isles.

was on ITV at, my guess is, probably immediately after News at Ten,

That was a good slot to have.

Even cultural programmes on ITV had a chance of making an impact.

a young TV producer from Belfast

He felt a poet might be able

in a way never seen on TV before.

There was a good position, where we could see the whole of Belfast,

and the shipyard laid out behind,

and it seemed to me a good place

quote, situation, end quotes.

and Seamus came off with this.

Whatever's wrong in Northern Ireland, and whatever its origins and history,

the ugliness of the extreme

and the very real injustices that civil rights people have been

is more like a polluted atmosphere that people are breathing in,

rather than an ugly townscape

It shrivels people's trust and grows a shell on their generosity,

and makes them very alert for the mote in the eye of their brother.

We're a society, if you like, that has fallen from grace.

straight out of his head then.

But it wasn't pre-arranged,

situation, that was a poet speaking.

you might see your neighbours

Did he feel that he'd been too political or not political enough?

"I want to do that bit again,"

Or that he was in any way worried.

In the cool of the evening,

You are wondering if we heightened what Seamus was saying there

I suppose by a bit of fast cutting

He didn't say that was in any way

However, Heaney was careful to show

that although coming from one side

BOTH the entrenched positions.

Whether it's ignorant vituperation

or the insulated and heroic boasting that has passed for politics,

spectator and participant share a similar sense of deja vu.

the effect of their actions.

I think he was quite precise

you're sitting in your house

and, literally, the windows rattle,

to reveal more of his own politics,

There are two or three poems I had written long before this began

that I think are probably as relevant

and in some way they define people like me within Ireland.

the Croppies, who are, um...

in County Wexford, famous in song and story, and they were mowed down.

And stampede cattle into infantry

Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown

been burst apart since then,

with the explosions and the emergence of the provisionals and so on.

Seamus always treated these things with the complexity they deserved.

And he was not willing to be drawn into the black and white arguments.

But he could still surprise audiences with his raw language

the sump of the northern soul,

both Protestant and Catholic, should be drained in public.

And that it was up to the writers to let out their dirt in some way.

When Heaney said at the end of Quiet Word that the sump had been drained,

he was trying to put a more optimistic view on the situation.

And I think we all wanted...

I think they're exhausted now.

Generally. I think the common mind,

whatever you want to call it,

That would be as close to that condition I would approach, I think!

I know, hearing him say it,

As it so happened, the sump still had quite a lot left in it.

Seamus Heaney became a household name throughout Britain and Ireland

and his poetry was a fixture

To some people, he had become

I had gone over to interview Seamus,

I'd scarcely done it before.

The car has vanished out of

the millionth of a flicker.

It's in north Antrim, on the road.

And you're out the other side.

I've always found something

They're in a parallel line.

Just like he's a very good prose

Norman Mailer communicated extremely well, in a different style.

But I can't think of anyone who told it as it was for them,

The poem just tries to catch

or a rabbit skimming through a thing.

There are still benighted souls

who think being on television,

May they wander away in peace.

But Seamus Heaney takes it on.

You get a lot of fussing from some people, but not with Seamus Heaney.

even when things don't go smoothly,

when he gave his first interview

Seamus Heaney was finally tempted

for the Field Day Theatre Company,

I was thrown into that interview

And I wouldn't do it again. I've always felt bad about it.

I've never watched it since.

'What attracted you to that story?

But when I got there, suddenly it's, "Oh, well, you do it. You're on.

and in the theatre of public life,

So when The Cure At Troy came out,

even though I knew nothing about it when I did the interview,

I knew when I saw the play,

cos I went to the opening night

I thought, "There's something

A lot of it was in the chorus, and

there were references to the policeman's widow collapsing

and when that was happening,

I could detect in the audience sharp intakes of breath, you know?

it wasn't popular nor profitable

it's a way of working out -

in a salubrious and a helpful way -

but it's like an experiment,

And I often consider that the low-point in my professional career.

Fortunately, in later years, I've had many opportunities

properly, and professionally,

in the snugs of public houses.

the words of The Cure At Troy resonated through television news.

In his final speech, he quoted poet Seamus Heaney, whom he'd met today.

And flood tide in the heart

Suspect too much sweet talk

I leave half ready to believe

That a crippled trust might walk

had a hand-written copy of it

The lines have entered the lexicon, hope and history and all of that.

and I think they helped describe a feeling, or an aspiration,

more and more people share.

Heaney received global recognition

reserved for sporting heroes.

Ireland's newest Nobel Laureate

I think my life will be changed

because of people like yourself interviewing me for a good while!

paraphernalia around Seamus,

he hasn't 50 people booking

He just is there, in his big tweed jacket, and he wouldn't,

do the conveyor belt of interviews

because that's not what he's about,

wham, bam, thank you, ma'am.

I'm sure he realised, handy enough,

in the media scramble that ensued,

absolutely, that things weren't

that he was going to have to put up with more intrusion into the life,

that there were going to be greater demands made on his time,

that if those demands were all met

Northern Ireland was in upheaval.

he revisited the same landscape

Neil Martin co-produced the film.

Something To Write Home About

or essay, that Seamus wrote.

The Sluggan was the working title,

and maybe divided parishes,

This was called The Sluggan,

first of all, two townlands.

It divided the townland of Tamnearn

and the parish of Newbridge.

I grew up between the predominantly loyalist and Protestant village

and the predominantly nationalist and Catholic district of Bellaghy,

between the railway and the road.

On a border between townlands

Sometimes none of us actually fit absolutely in one camp or the other.

I used to move my loyalties across from Bellaghy to Castledawson.

I was moving across the division

this field belonged to so and so,

And, "How are you getting on?"

They're living in a kind of shell, a kind of hiatus, or limbo.

the responsibility, and the strain,

and the pain of changing their way of thinking and feeling and living.

people themselves must change.

of old sectarian allegiances

had been only an aspiration.

It seems to me that as a symbol of the reality of our lives,

the March drain is a better one

Marching season is O'Neil and Essex on either side of the river.

of our experience embittered.

The March drain seems to me

In 1999, as Northern Ireland

the poet to explain politics.

Do you think this is a moment

where everybody has arrived together.

Whether you're DUP, Sinn Fein, SDLP,

whether you think of yourself

the story, somehow, has become one story in the last while.

What I really admire about Seamus

is you get the sense that he broods.

a kind of dour man at all, at all.

In that way, I think of him as a really old-fashioned intellectual.

But he wears that intellect

But the time of his 60th birthday,

television wanted to elevate Famous Seamus into the realms of celebrity.

and joy and laughter and thinking new thoughts to so many of us.

It's an eternal voice that he has.

I wish I were there to give you

Seamus and myself went for lunch in Dublin, and I remember...

And I know the thoughts that were coursing through my mind.

and that's one of the expenses of being a global figure, I guess.

In the past decade, Heaney has shunned the role of celebrity.

granted to high-profile journalists.

Heaney discussed his reworking

In your version, it's Antigone

George Bush practically said these very words. I know, yes.

Well, the pressure from the world from the Bush administration

was the surrounding reality.

the very words caused anxiety,

Because you can't have war on terror.

If I meet him, he says, "Oh, I saw Newsnight the other night."

He doesn't seek to tell you that he knows everything about politically

the tallest towers be overturned,

those in high places, daunted, those overlooked, regarded.

or your anger at this trauma,

Well, I spent 14 years coming

I felt implicated in some way when the Twin Towers thing happened.

but a realisation that retaliation

and just a sense that the world was going to be disturbed in a big way.

I felt it much more strongly

that he felt "very acutely"

what was happening in America,

more so even than he had felt about Northern Ireland in all those years.

Perhaps because what was happening in Northern Ireland was in his bones

and he'd try and make sense of that for a very long time.

But now he had a broader canvas

his personal feelings with us

Global events and family life

new collection about your father

and distance in our relation,

he was almost always an archetype to me, rather than a parent,

Well, the sayings were few therefore

The way he corrects himself,

again, that he thought of him as an archetype, and I said "the sayings".

he talked about his father,

because the first poem of his that I read was Death Of A Naturalist,

Seamus Heaney from that poem.

in the film we made, about, what...

was a very satisfying circle

I would always be very leery

if they themselves had not been reasonably explicit about it.

in The Blackbird Of Glanmore.

and I always remember him kind of rolling over with delight, you know,

as an infant, really, almost.

I thought, for him, he'd obviously come to a point in his life

that idea that he would see his brother turning over, dancing,

was an image that had almost

the older that he was getting.

There's a phrase in the poem,

That more than anything else

orphaned quality in my mind.

I hate to described him as a kind of a wise uncle, but he's a wise man.

And I think we should try and extract the wisdom from wise people,

you know, while we have them.

Television is a lie detector,

is that the man is speaking

and people just trust that.

That archive is incredibly important

found is that it is a way of talking to the greatest number of people.

and when he's digging with his pen,

because the inner place of dreams

where all Seamus's creativity

where part of that is shared,

cool hardness in our hands.

Than any other man on Toner's bog.

Corked sloppily with paper.

Nicking and slicing neatly,

For the good turf. Digging.

Between my finger and my thumb

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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