Birmingham is What I Think With - ACE226.2

Boys carrying a blue and white door along a waste-ground track. Cityscape – pylon, car dump, factories, goods yard, train, etc. Trees. View of gas holders, pylons, wasteland. Motorway. Car dump, city blocks. Roy Fisher standing beside the door. Fisher speaks his poem, Birmingham is What I Think With. VO continues over shots of men working with hammers and chisels on production line. Fisher continues. "This isn’t Paris…" Train. Fisher on canal boat talks about his attitude to fiction – it doesn’t interest him very much. Black and white photograph of children’s street party. Child looking out at camera through letter box. The street party photograph. Fisher walking along in residential area, boys playing in the street. His VO reciting "Touching the centre keeps everything around it fluid". Arrives at 74 Kentish Road, Handsworth. Fisher VO. "Big split pebbles, set in the path. Governed. Two to be on the safe side." Shots of stones intercut with shots of Fisher reciting. Fisher outside No.74: Tells the boy who answers that he had been born in this house, had noticed that they had put in a new front door, and wondered if he could have the old one. Retrieves the blue and white door from the back garden and carries it away, followed by a group of children. Jazz band with Fisher at the piano. Fisher talking about how, as a child, he "got excited by the really grimy bits", how he was taught to avoid Smethwick, and that "there was a sense of peril coming from anywhere below the railway track". Interior of foundry. Fisher VO pointing out that the "bad" parts of town were those from which Birmingham had derived its prosperity, but that they were referred to in those days almost as though they were the door to hell. Fisher VO "No dark in the body deep as this". Shot of Fisher carrying his door. Foundry. Fisher VO "This age has a cold blackness of hell in cities at night". Fisher VO continues over night shots of the city. Fisher reciting "There will be spastic, entrepreneurial voyages twitched out from wherever its shores may lie". Fisher playing piano. Fisher on canal boat; intercut with shots of derelict factories. He talks about Birmingham’s reason for existence having vanished, but thousand of people living in and are still reacting to the place. Fisher reciting "If you get systematic and follow power around, you arrive at a bedrock, out of a book".