John Hegley's Hoipolloi Limerick!

Our Artistic Director Shon Dale-Jones just made a small but perfectly formed contribution to John Hegley's Radio 4 documentary There Was a Young Man From Limerick.

It's a lovely little show, featuring a latin limerick allegedly written by Thomas Aquinas, Wendy Cope's limerick version of TS Eliot's The Wastelands, "serious" limericks and lots of discussion of Edward Lear, the much-loved nonsense poet who popularised the limerick and whose work inspired Hoipolloi's show My Uncle Arly.

You can click here to launch BBC iPlayer and listen to the show anytime for the next seven days.

John Hegley introduced Shon in a typically quirky fashion, with this "limerick":

....Shon Dale-Jones
Who write and directs and who hones
Works for the stage
Which inform and engage
And his company Hoipolloi have used some of Edward lear's limericks in the creation of a biographical drama.

We'd like to thank John Hegley and BBC Radio 4 for inviting Shon onto the show.

I hope you get chance to listen on iPlayer this week if you didn't catch it first time round!

There Was a Young Man From Limerick

Tomorrow, Hoipolloi's Artistic Director, Shon Dale-Jones, will be featured on a Radio 4 documentary about limericks. The show has been put together by John Hegley, the renowned performance poet, who has ammassed a legion of fans over the years (inluding Shon!) with his uniquely comic and quirky performances.

John Hegley is famous for his humourous rhymes and feelgood performances. Recurring motifs of his writing include dogs, his hometown Luton and glasses. In one recent show, he invited everyone in the audience who was wearing glasses to join him on stage for a "glasses dance", and he regularly rants against the "deserters" who opt for contact lenses!

Shon has admired John's work for years and was delighted to be invited onto the show. The two of them met up recently to record some musings on their mutual love of limericks.

The limerick, of course, was popularised in the 1860s by Edward Lear, whose nonsense verse inspired Hoipolloi's show My Uncle Arly. Arly is about to go back out on tour - click here for my recent Blog post with all the tour details.

There Was a Young Man From Limerick will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 11.30am on Tuesday 24 February. You'll be able to listen again on iPlayer for a week after the show is broadcast.