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With Great Pleasure

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Series bringing fresh insight into lives through literature, with guest presenters

Series bringing fresh insight into lives through literature, in which guest presenters pick readings from their favourite pieces of poetry and prose

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With Great Pleasure: Gervase Phinn

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

30/01/2012

Gervase Phinn

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The writer Gervase Phinn presents favourite readings, with Wilde, Heaney and Trollope.

Writer Gervase Phinn presents his selection of favourite literary extracts to a home crowd in Yorkshire, with Oscar Wilde, Seamus Heaney and Trollope among his chosen pieces.

The popular writer and educationalist Gervase Phinn presents his selection of favourite literary extracts to a home crowd in Yorkshire, with Oscar Wilde, Seamus Heaney and Trollope among his chosen pieces. Recorded at The Red Shed, Wakefield's Labour Club, he shares his indebtedness to his parents for encouraging a love of reading from an early age - whilst also acknowledging their sense of humour. There they were, living in a red brick semi in Rotherham, his father a steelworker - and they saw fit to name him Gervase. 

Gervase Phinn is a tremendous anecdotalist, with a profound love of children and their unique experience of an unfolding world. This is very much reflected in his choice of extracts - from Jim Hawkins in 'Treasure Island' to a telling evocation of an Edwardian schooling by Robert Roberts. Gervase warmly recalls key teachers and figures from his own childhood, honouring the importance of the work that teachers do today, many of them being - in his own words - 'fair rigwelted' by the constant changes. 

The readers are Jane Godber and Jonathan Keeble. 

Producer: Mark Smalley.

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