This programme contains some strong language
and some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting
We live in divided times...
..an age of rising populism
and tribal identity politics.
We've had enough!
But many of the arguments that divide us today
have their origins decades ago.
THEY CHANT
INDISTINCT COMMENT
Since I was born in 1945, epic changes have marked our country.
The end of empire...
NEWSREEL: The tide of Britain's imperial power has ebbed.
..the dawn of mass immigration...
The Empire Windrush brings to Britain...
..social and sexual revolutions,
fierce battles over our land.
Time and again these transformations have made us ask,
who are we now?
We can't look for answers just in the speeches of politicians,
the daily news cycle, and certainly not in the blare of social media.
Rather, we should search where the beating heart of a society
truly lives - our common culture.
Culture is always upstream of politics.
That's why culture matters.
It's the arts that have heralded dramatic changes in our lives.
It just made me think, "Oh, yeah, we do exist
"or we do count in some way."
Movies that fight back against convention.
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
That's one thing I've learned.
Paintings that turn the tables on those who look
and those who are looked at.
Music, poetry and fiction that cross tribal boundaries.
I'm often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman.
A new breed, as it were.
In the most tumultuous times,
our culture does more than merely capture the changing
face of Britain.
The arts connect us in rare and precious moments.
Together, they tell us the complicated,
gloriously contentious story of us.
In 1972, the poet Philip Larkin wrote a dark prophecy
about the future of the British countryside.
"I thought it would last my time -
"The sense that, beyond the town,
"There would always be fields and farms,
"Where the village louts could climb
"Such trees as were not cut down;
"I knew there'd be false alarms
"In the papers about old streets
"And split level shopping, but some
"Have always been left so far;
"And when the old part retreats
"As the bleak high rises come We can always escape in the car."
The story it tells is one I recognise from my own lifetime...
..of the rapid transformation of Britain,
and nature's struggle to keep up.
"Things are tougher than we are, just
"As earth will always respond However we mess it about;
"Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
"The tides will be clean beyond.
"But what do I feel now? Doubt?
"Or age, simply? The crowd Is young in the M1 cafe;
"Their kids are screaming for more -
"More houses, more parking allowed,
"More caravan sites, more pay."
Well, Larkin didn't really think very much of his own poem.
He called it "thin, ranting, conventional gruel".
But I absolutely love it.
I think it's one of my favourite poems, probably because in my,
you know, long lifetime, Britain's really been transformed.
To have... So much has happened.
Rising population, ribbons of motorways.
When I was growing up, there was just one motorway.
Um, catastrophic loss of species.
But there's also such a perfect match
between the man who's writing it
and the subject, which is that anxiety about the perishing
of the English landscape, which he loved so much.
Everything I write, I think, has the...the consciousness
of approaching death.
What one writes is based so much
on the kind of person one is
that one doesn't really choose the poetry one writes.
One writes the kind of poetry one has to write.
As usual with Larkin, it's melancholy, and there is something
of the grumpy old geezer about it,
but it is actually about something
that was really important for his generation,
the sense that eternal England,
the gorgeousness of the countryside
and everything about it, was under siege, really, from, um,
the kind of grasping quality of philistine economic growth.
From his hometown of Hull,
Larkin witnessed first-hand the unsettling pace of change
and voiced what so many people across Britain were feeling.
"It seems, just now,
"To be happening so very fast;
"Despite all the land left free For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,
"That before I snuff it, the whole
"Boiling will be bricked in
"Except for the tourist parts..."
And I think the reason why he felt so deeply about it
was because he thought that to be English, was somehow
to feel that strongly about all the kind of beauty of the countryside
and the sort of sense of, because so many of us love
it so much, it's the one thing that really unites us all.
I think back to my mum and dad's generation, and me, actually,
growing up as a kid after the war, you think, what is it we fought for?
And you have a vision of kind of all of this.
This is Britain.
And when I fly into England - this is daft, I know -
when I fly into England and there's that patchwork quilt,
you know, I mean, I feel deeply and profoundly moved.
So the poem is actually a kind of drama of what's going to happen
to the country.
"And that will be England gone,
"The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
"The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
"There'll be books: it will linger on
"In galleries; but all that remains
"For us will be concrete and tyres."
You read it today,
it seems so prescient.
We're still talking about traffic and crap being thrown into the sea.
I mean, just in 2023, there were more than 800 incidents
of sewage spills in the Humber, behind me.
You know, you take the poem on board and it can read
like a kind of rightly indignant and worried opinion piece
from one of last Sunday's newspapers.
But it's much, much more powerful because only culture and poetry
can actually pack that kind of tragic punch.
MARCHING BAND PLAYS JAUNTY TUNE
NEWSREEL: For 11 days in June 1972,
Stockholm was a magnet for everyone concerned
with the environment.
Larkin's poem was conceived at the exact moment when Britain
and the world were waking up to the environmental
cost of progress.
1,200 official delegates from 113 nations were in Stockholm
for the first International Conference on the Human Environment.
If you happened to be in Stockholm in June 1972
and you were a British delegate,
you would have in your briefcase this publication
of Her Majesty's Stationery Office, an official document
of the government which, despite this amazing photograph
of a young woman with virtually nothing on rising
out of a misty pond -
I mean, this is kind of naughtiest photograph for the, you know,
the pinstripe delegates to have in their suitcases -
but inside this document was, extraordinarily,
Philip Larkin's poem.
The report had been masterminded
by glamorous socialite the Countess of Dartmouth
to help inform the government's environmental position.
We were optimistic, and we thought that we could achieve
what many other people have failed to do.
The risque cover was her idea, as was the decision to commission
Larkin to write the poem as a prologue, an inspired move
to co-opt the power of art to rouse Britain's delegates.
Our science and our wisdom are coming together, and our faith
and our reality are beginning to coincide.
But there was one verse of Larkin's poem that the delegates never got
to read, one that had triggered consternation in Whitehall,
and which Larkin was ordered to purge from the final text
because it laid bare an inconvenient truth.
"On the business page, a score Of spectacled grins approve
"Some takeover bid that entails
"Five per cent profit (and ten
"Per cent more in the estuaries): move
"Your works to the unspoilt dales (Grey area grants)!"
The verse was just too close to the bone because it exposed
the fact that the needs of prosperity might often be at odds
with the preservation of our green and pleasant land.
Amazingly, Larkin actually agreed to change his poem, but he said
the result made my flesh creep.
So he wrote to Dartmouth and he said, well, this seems to me
to put the blame on everybody else,
except the people really responsible.
The spectacled grins who are out there for a kind of cheap killing,
and who'd be completely reckless in their disregard
for the environment.
And sure enough, when he republished it and gave it the new title
of Going, Going, as with an auctioneer's hammer, he restored
the original bits of the poem.
You know, we think of him as a kind of grumpy curmudgeon,
not really a political animal,
but, in this particular moment, he's kind of an eco warrior.
He's got a kind of passion.
He's got a cause to fight.
So out of that comes this fantastic bringing together of England
in peril and the forces of modern attack that are endangering
its beauty and everything that we feel so deeply,
that makes the country home.
It's no accident that when people talk about where they're from,
they use a word drawn from nature -
roots.
Belonging to a land
means holding a landscape dear.
And Larkin is part of a long tradition of inspired British
artists who have instilled this idyllic vision of rural beauty
at the heart of our national sense of self.
Today, 85% of us live in cities,
and that idyllic vision still holds
a tight grip on our collective imagination.
Whether it's our online yearnings...
..appetite for period dramas...
Mr Darcy.
..and affection for the National Trust,
for many of us, the countryside remains a bastion of continuity
in a rapidly changing world.
But, in fact, the British landscape is a theatre of enormous
argument and conflict.
And just as often the best art strips away feel good fantasies...
..and gives us a stiff reality check.
Joanne Coates is a farm labourer in the North Yorkshire Dales.
She's also an award-winning photographer,
and in 2024 was appointed by Parliament
as the official election artist.
My role as an artist is to share
the stories that we really don't
think of when we look at a beautiful landscape.
The Dales, especially, are kind of
seen as this really picturesque idyll, kind of chocolate box place.
But actually there's this tension and friction here, and I think
the countryside is seen as this theme park,
you know, somewhere to kind of come and get away from it all.
But for most people who live here now, this version of the countryside
just isn't reality.
Joanne's work introduces notes of disquiet
into the picture postcard landscape.
In my work, I guess there's this quiet rage that I have.
I really want to provide this anti-idyll, this different version
of the countryside that's usually seen through a middle class lens.
Through her art, Joanne explores the issues facing many born
and raised in rural areas.
Today, there's a huge surge of second homes or Airbnbs,
and what is affordable
to someone, maybe from a city, isn't affordable to someone from here.
At the same time, there's a real lack of social housing, and people
want more housing to be built, but the people who don't want them
to be built are usually the people who've moved here
and who want to keep the status quo of that beautiful version
of the countryside.
I worked with Anita, and Anita was from up the road from Middleham,
and she lived in social housing most of her life, and access
to that has kind of slowly become more difficult.
So she's had to move away.
What Anita was talking about was having that real lack of hope
that she could have a future here again.
So people are going to feel kind of forced out of where they're from.
It's a really difficult situation,
and I think you're seeing it in Cornwall, in north Wales,
in the Highlands.
I guess if you come here on holiday, you probably don't want
there to be anything because it's, like, lovely and empty.
But the less people there are in a village,
you see the school close, the post office close,
and it slowly, slowly, slowly,
it disintegrates and there's nothing left.
My fear is the countryside is not going to be a place where people
can live and work.
I think that the image of it is
ultimately all about power, wealth...
..status and control.
And what does that mean for the future of this place?
CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS
Romanticism can be a dangerous deception, but sometimes
it's impossible not to be seduced.
This is almost preposterously beautiful,
with a kind of light of God shining directly on the loch.
This is the kind of extraordinary, sort of fever dream gorgeous version
of the Scottish Highlands, which draws endless movie producers
and swooning poets to it.
And, you know, you look down there and you think, you know,
scenery doesn't get more beautiful than this.
It's a fantasy geography, really.
And the way it lives in the popular imagination is a kind of dream.
The Scottish Highlands were once a neglected landscape
on the distant fringes of the British Isles.
But all that changed in the 19th century, when the Romantic
imagination turned the Highlands into a place of escape
and wild adventure.
This became a land of enchantment that entranced millions,
including Queen Victoria,
who created her own Highland fantasy at Balmoral.
Inaugurating a fashion for transforming moors and glens
into a gigantic playground for the wealthy.
But that Romantic vision of the Highlands hid a painful history
which, starting in the middle of the 18th century,
saw hundreds of thousands of crofters forced from the land
through a combination of poverty and eviction by landowners intent
on monetising their property by replacing people
with more profitable sheep.
So this is a landscape of grief and anger and tragedy.
But what Britain and the rest of the world sees is tartan joy
and the sound of bagpipes.
TRADITIONAL MUSIC PLAYS
NEWSREEL: It's Friday, another day
in a whistle-stop tour, an experiment in political theatre,
which has taken the Highlands of Scotland by storm.
That vision of tartan joy and bagpipes was to be shattered
by a radical theatre group.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Feasgar math.
Welcome to The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black, Black Oil.
In 1973, a ground-breaking show
travelled to the isolated communities
of the Scottish Highlands.
Tonight, we are going to be telling a story that has a beginning,
a middle, but as yet, no end.
The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black, Black Oil gave the audience
a raucous and satirical romp through their history.
# Will not budge one inch! #
But the aim of its socialist playwright, John McGrath, could not
have been more serious.
BOTH: # Oh, it's awfully, frightfully nice
# Shooting stags, my dear, and grice
# And if the locals should complain
# Well, we can clear them off again
# We cleared the straths We cleared the paths... #
The intention was no less than a political awakening,
telling the people a tragic story of how not only their land
had been appropriated, but their traditions, too.
Oh, yes, she has a great interest in Highland culture.
# Oh, how I wish that I could... #
Some bits were like poison darts, really.
You know, that broad comedy parodying
the English toffs who suddenly fasten a kilt on,
and then they delude themselves that they're really leading
the Scottish life.
And I love that!
# But although we think you're quaint
# Don't forget to pay your rent
# And if you should want your land
# We'll cut off your grasping hand! #
It's fantastic. And the sketch
kind of builds up to this ferocity.
# You're a low and servile race
# We cleared the straths We cleared the paths
# We cleared the bens
BOTH: # We need no more
# We'll show you we're the ruling class. #
It's a brilliant piece of theatre.
Very, very funny and deeply sinister at the same time.
It becomes kind of a reminder of immense battles and catastrophes
in Scottish history at the hands of the English,
but also at the hands of Lowlanders as well.
And you saw the audience, more importantly,
they were moved by what they were hearing.
The power of the play came from the fact
that it was the opposite of high theatre, and travelled
to the very places where the history it told had happened.
The company was called 7:84, after the statistic that 7%
of the people in Britain owned 84% of the wealth.
Their humble show became an unexpected sensation, playing
to over 30,000 people in over 100 communities
across the Highlands and Islands.
One of their stops was the village of Dornie, where they played
in this community hall that stands modestly across the loch
from the dream vision of the Highlands
that 7:84 was busy tearing down.
MUSIC PLAYS
Among the cast was renowned Scottish actor and folk
legend Dolina MacLennan.
It was very emotional.
It was an emotional trip for me every night,
and feeling the people's reaction.
And that's still with me and brings
tears to my eyes quite often.
WOMAN SINGS IN GAELIC
I mean, it was...it was huge. Yes.
People expected us, and were excited at us coming.
The word went round.
People from the cities travelled to the village halls
because they had heard...
Oh, really. ..that the difference of feeling
that you got in a village hall, that you couldn't get
in a...in a big theatre.
Obviously you tapped into something.
They were obviously hungry, in a way
they were waiting for something like this.
That's exactly it.
It seemed they were waiting for something.
# As the rain on the hillside comes in from the sea
# All the blessings of life... #
It was community spirit that was exemplified
in Dornie Hall that night.
My parents were there. My sisters were there.
We knew everybody, or most people, there.
Over the course of the evening,
Ian and the rest of the audience saw a version of their history
that chimed with their own folk memories.
As a family, we'd suffered hugely from a lot of the things
in The Cheviot, The Stag. The Highland Clearances,
my father worked on an estate, and I was an engineer
at the very start of the oil, and the play did raise the hackles
of people because it made people more aware of what had happened
and how things haven't really changed.
# Oil, oil underneath the sea
# I am the Lord of the oil said he
# And my friends in the banks and the trusts all agree
# I am the Lord of the oil, tee-hee #
Of course, it finishes with the oil and what it was going
to do for Scotland.
Hell of a lot of American money, honey.
We didn't see very much of it, of course.
It all went south and sold to multinationals with the connivance
of the Scottish people and Westminster.
# Take your oil rig by the score
# Drill a little well, just a little offshore
# Take that oil in from the sea And take these profits home to me
# I'll bring work that's hard... #
I think that was the most powerful part of the play.
# 17, 18, 19, 20,
# You get nothing I'll get plenty
# 21, 22, 23, 24 billion billion dollars more
# 25, 26, 27, 28
# Watch my cash accumulate
# 27, 28, 29, 30
# You play dumb, I'll play dirty
# I'll go home when I see fit
# All I'll leave is a heap of shit
# You dumb fools! Look at you!
# You'll find out in a year or two!
HE LAUGHS WEAKLY
I think the audience were totally shocked by that,
and the fact that everybody thought, well, wait a minute,
this is so true.
Just a little fooling around.
The reaction of the audience was intense,
I think is the word. Yeah.
You can actually see the faces of the people changing from smiles
to, you know, absolutely horror.
Absolute horror.
At the end, there was just a feeling amongst people
we should be doing something about this.
In the wake of the play, the Scottish National Party echoed
some of its themes in a campaign promising to take back control
of Scotland's resources, and achieved a breakthrough result
at the 1974 general election.
Well, now let's go to Scotland, where Winifred Ewing
is successful in Moray and Nairn.
We are here with a specific mandate.
Scotland's raw deal is behind our success.
Battle lines were being drawn about who should decide the fate
of Scotland's land and resources.
And that's a question that still reverberates to this day.
It's inconceivable that it didn't have this massive sense of Scots
thinking about how Scots wanted to live their life.
Great art and great culture really should -
absolutely, as this absolutely does -
open questions, open reflections, open debates, um, you know, excite
the sympathies and the passions.
It had an enormous impact, well beyond the kind of handmade quality
of a troupe of strolling players.
I'm still amazed when people come up to me and say, you don't know me,
but you changed my life.
And so many people still talk about the impression it made on them
50 years later.
EXPLOSION
SIREN WAILS
No land in the UK has been as riven with conflict as Northern Ireland.
And when people are dying, what use is art?
At the height of the Troubles, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney
experienced the devastation first-hand.
I mean, here at the minute,
you're sitting in your house and literally the windows rattle
every day, every night, with explosions from one side of the town
or the other.
You're living where men are killed blandly by the army,
brutally by bombs.
And what do you do?
You're sitting, putting marks on paper,
the same as you...the same as you were doing before this started.
Heaney's despondency came from his personal acquaintance
with the intractable divisions fuelling the conflict.
His farming family was Catholic and nationalist in a land where power
lay with Protestants and unionists.
He understood the sense of oppression felt by his community,
as British troops patrolled the fields and lanes near the family
farm in County Derry.
But Heaney's instinct was always to seek common ground.
And as he struggled to find his poetic voice against the backdrop
of the Troubles, he found inspiration in the landscape
that was at the heart of the conflict.
The countryside where he grew up had always been fertile ground
for Heaney's poetic imagination.
Words for me seemed to have more nervous energy
when they are touching the place that I know that I live with.
For Heaney, the power of the landscape lay not
in its superficial beauty, but in the memories it stored
beneath the surface.
We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening -
Everywhere the eye concedes to Encroaching horizon
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting Between the sights of the sun.
This is Seamus Heaney's world, really.
Bogland.
He was living in the middle of contested territory in a conflict
about land that goes way back, you know, to the 16th century
and even before that.
But there's something about this space that is elemental,
that has kind of nothing to do with those, you know, awful human
ambitions and hatreds and quarrels somehow.
Heaney was fascinated by how the unique chemical properties
of the bog act as nature's great preserver, embalming organic
matter for millennia, turning this landscape into the memory bank
of the nation.
They've taken the skeleton Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up An astounding crate full of air.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition By millions of years.
And there's a sense of
which prehistoric time is actually captured...
GROUND SQUELCHES
..literally, under all these layers of bog, of peat.
And Heaney,
yeah, looks down at something that exists in enormous spans of time,
with which you, you know, then have a direct kind of communion.
Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip Seems camped on before.
The bog holes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
In the bogland that makes up vast tracts of the Irish landscape,
Heaney found a place of connection with the deep past, which offered
the possibility to imagine an island transcending the tribal divisions
of the unforgiving present.
You have this kind of powerful emotional and psychological
connection with generation after generation after generation,
you know, the human chain.
It's an eternal landscape.
It's contemptuous of the kind of screaming and shouting
and...and bombing and gunning down that's going on in the streets,
and, you know, above ground.
By the late '60s, Heaney was one of the most acclaimed poets
of his generation, and as the violence escalated, he came
under pressure to lend the power of his poetry
to the Republican cause.
So he enters and sits down Opposite and goes for me head on.
"When, for fuck's sake, are you going to write
"Something for us?" "If I do write something,
"Whatever it is, I'll be writing for myself."
And that was that.
For a time, Heaney found himself trapped between his desire
for creative freedom and his sense of obligation to engage directly
with the rising body count.
He began to search for what he called "images and symbols adequate
"to our predicament."
The first thing that seized me really were the photographs.
And in particular, one photograph of a head of a man known
as the Tollund Man.
Heaney came across these images in a book about ancient bodies
over 2,000 years old, victims of sacrificial violence,
discovered in the 1950s in the bogs of Denmark.
The Tollund Man is one of the most perfectly preserved humans
in all of existence, really, because inside the peat bog, skin
is preserved, hair is preserved, internal organs are preserved,
so you can actually see his stubble, his closed eyelids.
The man looks as though he's still alive, but he's asleep.
The rope, of course, makes it clear
that something awful has happened to this man,
and he's been ritually killed.
There's a religious sacrifice.
So he describes the photographs as opening a gate for him,
and he feels an instant kind of extraordinary communion, really,
between his own world of Bogland and this perfectly preserved body.
And it suddenly changes the way he can make connections
between the Troubles, which are absolutely escalated by religious
fury and hatred, and the violence which had happened
to the Tollund Man.
So it set him off.
And he writes one of the great poems of the 20th century, and it begins
with the apparition of the body itself.
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat brown head,
The mild pods of his eyelids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
And then there's a huge switch, in that
he's been sacrificed to a kind of pagan goddess.
And there's a sense in which the peat bog is a goddess
that actually opens for the body to be kind of received.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body.
The middle of the poem is getting closer to Northern Ireland,
and he switches to something that is very much part
of that 20th century horror,
and that was the story of four young men who were killed
during the Troubles of the 1920s, who were dragged by a train
past the Heaney family's own farm backyard.
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Telltale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
And then, there's an extraordinary last quatrain in the whole poem.
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
The fact that he used the words "parishes" brings you right
into the middle of Ulster.
"I will feel lost, unhappy and at home."
So he'd been labouring to find some way of talking about the Troubles
in his poems
that wasn't crassly literal,
and this was it.
This kind of absolutely wired together connection
of this remote past,
um, and what's going on now is, is just perfectly nailed
at that point.
So it's a beautiful, upsetting, profound, extraordinary vision
of humanity, what humans could do to each other.
This poem, with its quiet focus on the human cost of violence
across the arc of history, drew fire from critics in Northern Ireland
for seeming to sidestep the immediate circumstances
of the Troubles.
But at a time when the din of shouting...
..rebuild the barricades...
..cursing and mutual hatred was deafening...
..show the world where Ulster stands!
..Heaney's steadfast commitment to his own creative vision,
and his belief, over the long decades of conflict,
that we have more in common than what divides us, provided
hope to millions.
And his poetry remains a beacon of our common humanity today.
Right now, what the world, you know, feeds on is exactly
what Seamus Heaney didn't do.
In other words, being installed in mutually warring tribal camps
and degrading your enemy.
It's either my way of thinking or nothing.
So the poetry is a fantastic antidote
to that kind of mutual screaming.
And what poetry and what great art can do, in such
murderously polarised times,
sounds so little and footnote-ish and decorative and ephemeral,
and it is all none of those things.
It's a mighty force.
The mighty force of he and his poetry won him
the Nobel Prize for Literature, and secured his place in the hearts
of the Irish people.
REPORTER: It was a welcome
that is generally reserved for sporting heroes.
Ireland's newest Nobel Laureate,
and the voice of his people in good times...
And Heaney's words provided inspiration
during the long, drawn out peace process
which culminated in the Good Friday Agreement
in 1998.
..once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
Heaney has always been
an inspiration to another artist, U2's Bono...
..who played his own crucial role in securing the path to peace.
I used to give his poetry away to people as a sort of activist.
When I went to a meeting, you know, across the world,
all over Africa.
I gave the Pope Seamus Heaney's verse.
Two popes!
So, Bono, say a bit about what you think Seamus
might have contributed to the ending of the...the horror?
Whether he, you know, his poetry made a difference?
He's...he's trying to get you away from the obvious topsoil.
He's just saying dig deeper into who you are,
dig deeper into the place.
You know, just look to deeper roots than the ones that people
were fighting over.
The excavation, the archaeology of the human spirit
that we associate with Seamus Heaney
brought him to a more interesting place,
which is the sacred to be found in the ordinary. Yeah.
When you think about what...the end of the brutality of the Troubles,
it is the kind of glory of ordinariness
being restored to Ireland.
And the peacemakers. Their process.
There's...there's no romance.
Peacemakers in general win with stamina
and the stale sandwiches,
and grandiose people, like myself,
we dramatise these things, but they're so mundane.
Yeah, you're right,
but you're selling yourself short actually as well
because actually there is the theatre.
I mean, you did the gig in Belfast that surely made a difference.
In the way poetry can make a difference,
you and music made a difference, at that moment.
The leaders of the Ulster Unionist Party
and the SDLP joined U2 onstage
at a pop concert this evening to promote
a yes vote in Friday's referendum on the peace agreement.
There was a fear that it wasn't going to pass, so it was suggested
to me that maybe U2 could play a role in this.
We had been very vocal about the paramilitaries on both sides,
and that sort of outrage which rock and roll bands
are good at endeared us with two communities. Yeah.
We were already a bit jaded about, you know, what our manager used
to call "Rock against bad things, is it, Bono?"
And so I'd be like, "OK, I know we've got to do this
"and we've got to be smart about it."
And the idea was, I said, we'll do it
if we get John Hume and David Trimble out on the stage.
Out of the past and into the future on this stage.
But I said, "You can't speak."
And to ask politicians not to speak isn't...
Well, it's just impossible because that's what they do.
But it worked because these two men had to shake hands publicly.
And by just the graphic art of the picture,
that shot went everywhere.
And, I mean, it was a close call, but I think the concert helped.
We were told that it helped, and we shouldn't be surprised
by that, because culture is always upstream of politics.
You know, that's the shape of ideas.
That's why culture matters.
That's why Seamus Heaney matters.
"The end of art is peace
"Could be the motto of this frail device..."
Amidst the horror of a deadly war, the landscape offered Heaney
the chance to connect with the long arc of history
and find common ground.
For another artist,
nature also offered the chance of finding peace...
..but in very different circumstances.
MUSIC: It's A Sin by Pet Shop Boys
The 1980s was London's hedonistic heyday, making it a magnet
for all those wanting to blaze their own trail in the world.
At its heart was artist and experimental film-maker
Derek Jarman, the enfant terrible of the London art scene.
Jarman thrived on the energy of the city...
..and lived his life at the heart of London's queer culture,
making films that celebrated homoerotic desire
in a way the country wasn't quite ready for.
We're told that the film
is as much about the artist Derek Jarman as it is about Caravaggio,
in which case I must report that Mr Jarman seems fond
of photographing bums of the male variety.
I'm demanding my money back.
Jarman's provocative work was a constant exercise
in kicking down boundaries and challenging convention.
As long as the music's loud enough,
we won't hear the world falling apart.
REPORTER: Its prime target is a human white blood cell.
Usually the lynchpin of the body's immune defence system,
this cell is crippled.
But in 1986, Jarman's own world fell apart when he received
a life-changing diagnosis.
So many friends dead or dying since autumn.
All the brightest and the best trampled to death.
Surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life
in just 12 months.
And all this as we made love, not war.
Against all the odds, this is one of the most beautiful moving places
I think I've ever been in.
It's a garden, but a very unlikely garden.
It's a garden on the edge of the sea.
There's kind of bristling salt marsh out there,
and a nuclear power station.
And Derek Jarman created this garden when he knew he wasn't long
for the world, when he'd been diagnosed with Aids.
All his friends are dying in London, and he's thinking about something
that will live after them.
There are poppies everywhere and poppies we think of as, you know,
um, life after death, in a way.
They're kind of memorial flowers.
And here they're not red, they're yellow, they're golden.
And this garden in this unlikely place is full of joy.
It's full of kind of joie de vivre, even though he's dying.
A few months before his diagnosis, Jarman had purchased
this small fisherman's cottage in Dungeness, on the Kent coast.
And for the rest of his life, this unpromising patch of shingle
in the shadow of a nuclear power station would become the focus
of his creative energy.
Gardening is what I should always have done.
I shouldn't have become involved in cinema.
That's for fools.
Gardening is central because, I mean, gardening, you know,
one is entering into another time,
into eternals and returns and cycles.
Those are the resurrectional cycles in my life -
planting the mullein seed and watching it come up.
In his absolutely fantastic book,
and it's one of the great books about nature, called Modern Nature,
up there with Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge and the best
writers on nature,
he writes that he'd always loved gardening as a little boy
in his parents' house.
So he created, against all the odds, this extraordinary place.
There are these kind of salty, violent winds that ripped out
his irises, did horrible damage to his roses and you just feel
the unforgiving work as he dug inside these shingles.
He woke up to the destruction
when yet another storm came crashing
past the cottage, and he carried on doing it.
He wanted those last years of his life to be this, you know,
things that bloom and blossom and give light and happiness.
And he created something gorgeous.
Here, Jarman tapped into one of the deepest wellsprings
of traditional British life - gardening.
But his garden was not simply a therapeutic escape.
REPORTER: Already, the homosexual community is finding itself
the target of hatred and discrimination.
Even a bishop said that he found it difficult to shake hands
with an Aids sufferer.
A private member's bill...
His garden was a work of art, which, in a time of paranoia and hostility
towards the gay community, distilled his vision of how the world
should be - not divided, but a place of acceptance and inclusivity.
And what I really love about this place is that it is not
a classic English garden.
Derek collected driftwood.
This garden is...is full of bits of rusting iron, old anchor chains.
There's even the power station
in gorgeous kind of harmony with the most beautiful flowers.
He kind of knew that
they kind of collided together.
They made a kind of mess together.
And Derek Jarman was all about the happiness of mess.
So what we have here is the meeting place of humanity.
He did not want to do a garden with fences, with hedges.
You know, this is someone for whom there are no barriers.
He said the boundary is the horizon.
And that, that, I think, is kind of profoundly,
you know, profoundly moving.
As his flowers bloomed,
Jarman faded.
But he found what he described as extraordinary peacefulness.
He connected to one of our most powerful yearnings -
to find in nature consolation for our mortality.
The sun comes up at the front of the house,
and it goes down at the back,
and I see the sun all day, if it's there.
And... And I can see the sea.
The great thing about the sea
is it changes every colour you could imagine.
I've seen the sea pink and brown
and aquamarine and black.
And I sit and watch this.
And somehow you have to sit there and watch this happening.
Jarman really, I think, was thought of, rightly, you know,
as a genius for inspirational comedy, for the dystopian wildness
of punk breakdown in Britain.
And he's wonderful at that.
But it's when he comes here, he opens himself to illumination.
He calms down, he's attentive,
he's quiet, he knows time is running short
and, therefore, he wants to kind of not let go of the things
that are really profound and important.
And it leads him to connect the place, in a visionary way,
with the great beyond, wherever the beyond it is that he's going.
So the haven Jarman created
in this unfenced, unassuming patch of land,
and the flowers he planted still battling against the wind,
remain as a defiant cultural statement, asking us to stop
and think about what kind of world we want to live in.
I look around towards the end of a long life, and you can't help
thinking this is an epoch above all of distraction,
where the difference between the profound and the trivial
is being lost.
The kind of idiot roar of the culture wars,
the drone and the white noise
which makes it obligatory to stand in one camp
or the other, and the two camps are at each other's throats
when culture actually does the opposite.
Part of the power and the indispensability of culture
is that it's for everybody.
It's more likely to be a place where we can recognise
what we have in common.
Which is not to say it's kind of warm and cuddly.
The greatest works of art very often are the opposite, but they do give
us a recognition of what we have in common as fallible human beings.
So people need to think of art and culture not as an add on to life,
but actually as the difference between cultural life and death.
I deeply think that it's there that we'll get the best shot
of the endurance of humanity. At least...
..I sure hope so.