Losing track (see above).
Managed profile
Not claimed by Roger McGough
Roger McGough has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.
RM
Roger McGough
b. 1938
Arts and letters
About
Born in Liverpool, Roger McGough, 88, worked as a teacher before forming the Scaffold with John Gorman and Mike McGear in the 1960s; they performed poetry, sketches and comic songs and had a No 1 hit with Lily the Pink. McGough hosts Radio 4’s Poetry Please and has published more than 100 poetry books for adults and children, including Collected Poems 1959-2024. He has four children and lives in London with his second wife.
9 answers
Last Sunday when all the family came round to celebrate my 88th birthday. (Or was it Saturday. Or the week before, perhaps?)
I’m embarrassed when I get people’s names wrong.
I’m irritated by critics and academics who dismiss poetry that is popular, comprehensible or humorous.
Unimpeachable, nonpareil, self‑effacing.
I had dreams of becoming the first scouse pope. Unfortunately, the girls got to me first.
A lady came up to me in Tesco last year and said, “Excuse me, but didn’t you used to be Roger McGough?”
A picnic on the beach at Seaforth during the war. Somehow I managed to wriggle through a barbed-wire fence and run across a minefield. My teenage aunt Kat bravely followed suit and rescued me.
That it will go on quite happily without me.
Every quotation above is reproduced from the source shown beside it and has not been edited. Roger McGough did not write these answers for FLAPSS. Request a correction or removal.