Mark Ford

speaker

404 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 31 Aug

Mark Ford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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Close Readings · Narrative Poems: ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ by Robert Burns and ‘Peter Grimes’ by George Crabbe · 13 May 2026 podcast

Yeah.

uh but we also get him he also makes an appearance later when he says when he's seeing lovely nanny he'd take off his blue breeches and give them to have a dance with her so that's that's the burns who is roystering but this is the burns who is being more the serious literatus so there we are we've had a warning um a warning note in a slightly more kind of augustan idiom that um no pleasure can last forever and indeed um

On his way there, the landscape is pretty dark.

Well, yes, as he rides, that's where drunken Charlie broke his neck.

That's right.

That's where the hunters found the murdered Bairn.

That's right.

And Mungo's mother.

Mungo's mother hanged herself there above the well.

And so the omens are all quite bad.

I suppose...

What degree of irony or kind of mockery is going on in this, and how seriously could we take it?

It is difficult to judge the tone or register.

It is a party piece, we should say.

If you go on YouTube, you can hear any number of different people doing tamashanta, often wearing tamashantas themselves, and everyone gets a kick out of it.

It delivers deep, deep pleasure, this poem, and many people know it off by heart.

And it must be partly because of the way that the story is interleaved with levels of humor or kind of weirdness or kind of, which are quite addictive, that people really get kind of hooked on his tetrameters, his rhyming tetrameters.

I mean, both poems we're looking at are kind of rhymed, aren't they?

So they have an aural, this in particular has an aural quality, which has proved very, very appealing to any number of performers.

And the ones I read, you could never quite tell whether they were sending it up or not sending it up.

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