Life & Rhymes, review: a refreshing reminder of how vibrant spoken word can be

Benjamin Zephaniah presents Life & Rhymes - Sky
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With sinking heart, I tuned in to the TV Baftas resigned to The Masked Singer winning best entertainment programme. Instead, in one of the surprises of the evening, it went to Life & Rhymes (Sky Arts). Reader, I had never heard of it. But anything that stands in the way of Katherine Jenkins dressed as a giant octopus is fine by me.

Life & Rhymes also beat entertainment stalwarts Strictly Come Dancing and Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, both of which attract millions more viewers. Strictly was deserving, having staged a faultless series despite all the Covid protocols. But juries do like to prioritise innovation over old favourites, and Life & Rhymes is refreshingly new.

It’s presented from the bandstand at London’s Battersea Park, which is decked out in fairy lights. That alone makes it feel pleasantly different – a change from the endless parade of pandemic shows in which contributors sit in near-empty studios. The small audience is socially-distanced, but that looks less weird at outdoor tables than it does in an auditorium. Prof Benjamin Zephaniah is the expansive host, introducing a set of poets who each perform one of their own compositions.

The mix was well-chosen: some serious, some funny. The selection of poets was notably diverse, in terms of colour if not gender (one woman here to four men). It kicked off with Harry Baker, a mathematician and poet who delivered a love poem about prime numbers. Fury WD gave an impressive performance of 3 Minutes to Live, holding up a timer and finishing up on the dot of those three minutes. There were poems about the Windrush scandal from the rapper 2 Badda, and the supposed difficulty of pronouncing non-English names (“OK, but supercalifragilisticexpialidocious doesn’t seem to stumble at your lips”) from Lams, the only woman in the line-up.

It ended with a performer called Gecko getting out his guitar for a witty song about a character from a painting in the Louvre, desperate to be noticed but roundly ignored because everyone goggles at the Mona Lisa instead. All in all, a fun half-hour, and a reminder of how vibrant the spoken word can be.