8:35am Thursday 17th September 2009
By Jim Greenhalf
The last time I saw Ian McMillan live he was at Salts Mill, entertaining an audience of business and tourist representatives.
He did a quick-fire routine, a comic poem that involved them chanting something back in a Yorkshire accent – when they weren’t laughing.
He’ll be doing his stuff once again in Saltaire tomorrow evening, having spent half the week travelling to London, Birmingham and Coventry.
Ian is the busy chap from Darfield in South Yorkshire who makes people laugh. His latest book, published next month, is a compilation called Yorkshire Humour, with cartoons by Tony Husband.
In the book, he says one of Yorkshire humour’s characteristics is that the language itself is funny.
“…enunciations like Eee (as in ‘Eee she were thin’ in the old gag) and ‘by’ and ‘now then’ and ‘flippin’ ummer’ make you smile. It’s a rough-hewn language; a language of opposition to the status quo…”
Ian has a gift of the gab that would not be out of place in old-time music hall variety. He’s well known as an adept poet-performer who also writes a weekly column for two newspapers.
But how many are aware that he is a presenter of The Verb on Radio 3, Yorkshire Television’s Investigative Poet, has his own band, the Ian McMillan Orchestra, and writes song cycles with composer Hugh Nankivell? He has more fingers in more pies than Desperate Dan.
He says: “If you work freelance, you always want to do as much as you can. My theory is that if you have 500 bosses, they can’t sack you all at once.
“I am coming up to 30 years as a freelance. I started in 1981 when I finished work at a tennis ball factory. Yorkshire Arts, when Michael Dawson was in charge, were offering writers up to £1,000 to leave their jobs and do something big with it.
“My wife was working as a teacher, so I left my job. I started doing a lot of writing workshops with the Workers’ Education Association in South Yorkshire; and then I went into schools.
“It takes a long while to get established. You always have to say ‘yes’.”
Ian’s life and times is the subject of his current publication, an autobiography in poems – some funny, some serious – entitled Talking Myself Home.
“I tried to write it in one continuous length, but I didn’t have the stamina. I can’t write novels. I am better at short things,” he says.
Talking Myself Home is a series of short poems. It’s a portrait of an unregarded place, Darfield, his home town. It’s a place briefly mentioned in the Domesday Book that’s trying to reinvent itself after the closure of the mining industry.
It’s also a wartime love story between Lieutenant Commander John McMillan, a Scottish sailor, and Olive Wood, a young Barnsley woman. A life lived with words at its core.
Like Adrian Mitchell, Roger McGough, Adrian Henri, Brian Patten, Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage and Carol Ann-Duffy, Ian McMillan has helped make poetry accessible and popular.
Ian is working on two new projects. With Hugh Nankivell, he’s writing a song cycle about the miners’ strike, to be performed by Opera North in March.
“And a small theatre in Durham has asked writers to do a new series of Mystery plays. So I thought I’d write about God’s day off, the seventh day. What did He do? He went to Barnsley,” he says.
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