Event 22, Town Hall 12 June 2011 There's nothing more guaranteed to dismiss the blues of a wet Sunday afternoon than listening to one of our finest comic poets giving forth.
Roger McGough is one of the three Merseybeat poets, along with the late Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, who visited the festival last year, who revolutionised and popularised British poetry in the 1960s.

On the poetic spectrum, Mr McGough is closer to Pam Ayres than T S Eliot, but there are deeper truths lurking among the hilarious Liverpudlian humour.
Who has not been irritated by the woman in the "quiet" carriage on the train carrying on loud conversations on her mobile phone despite the notices prohibiting it?
Mr McGough was, but instead of getting angry, he wrote her a poem. She was so delighted, he alleges, that, there and then, she phoned round all her friends to tell them.
Then there was the poem about a childhood incident in which he remembered during World War Two, climbing through barbed wire to get onto a beach near his home which was mined to fetch a red ball.
As the poem, Another Time Another Place, reveals, he was not chasing a red ball but the family dog who was killed by one of the mines.
Then there is his irritation at that poem, often read at funerals, urging mourners not to stand at his grave and weep.
Mr McGough's reply reads: "I am not sleeping, I am dead."
The audience got their money's worth with Mr McGough reading 31 of his poems - most of them brilliantly funny and all containing little nuggets of truth.
He then agreed to answer questions, but the audience seemed awed into silence, so he went out to sign copies of his new collection, That Awkward Age

Lewis Cowen