If you’re anything like me, you find it difficult to carve out 24 minutes of leisure time to do much of anything, but, if you like the poetry of Philip Larkin, I recommend making the time to see this old footage and hear him read “Church Going,” “Toads Revisited,” and other poems. There are some wonderfully awkward moments of the poet being filmed by the television crew. He seems like Eliot’s insect “pinned and wriggling on the wall.” The end of the program has him walking alone along a misty canal, and it’s almost heartbreaking to see along with his voice over, in which he reads “Wants.”

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flag-staff—
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes away from death—
Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs.