Mark Baggley: English

Transcript

I was allowed to do one O Level at school which was English Language and I did have an exceptionally good English teacher although I would never have said that in a million years cos she was very unfriendly. She was very middle class, very well spoken, very what you probably would call now, pearl and twin set kind of element. But she used to bring education to life a bit, certainly the English language to life and I’ve always love reading, I guess, with not being able to run around, reading’s always been something I enjoyed doing. And she got three poets to come in, so we had Adrian Henry, Roger McGough. And I remember one of them came in and he had a bag with like tentacles all over it and it had been made by one of his friends who worked on Doctor Who and we were fascinated by that. And at about, I’d be about 14 I think, Michael Parkinson brought a book out, written about George Best. And it was the first time somebody had written a book that was sort of warts and all really, quite a lot of adult themes in the book and I told my mum and dad I wanted it for Christmas or whatever. I didn’t know at the time, they went and asked her and said, 'Look Mark wants this, what do you think? And she said, 'Yeah, if he wants to read it, let him read it, he can read anything'. So I really admire her for that and I mean obviously I’d read everything through school, I’d gone through Enid Blyton stuff to Dennis Wheatley, everything I could get my hand on, I’d read. Although I don’t actually remember reading a lot at school, strangely. I think it was probably more weekends and summer holidays that I read, rather than during school time cos obviously we had to read stuff at school.

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