They F*ck You Up: Ted Lasso Highlights One of Britain's Favorite—and Most Depressing—Poets
Annette Badland shows off her deep history on stage and screen in an important poetic recitation on the series' penultimate episode.
I work a full-time job, freelance on the side, and am a parent to our 9-month-old daughter. As much as I wish PopPoetry were my full-time job, it’s just one of several. I don’t receive advance screeners of shows or albums, and I don’t have assistants who scour the media landscape for poetry. Watching an entire movie from start to finish feels like a feat of superhuman logistics.
The decisions that inform what gets covered on this Substack are a mixture of my own personal research, happenstance, and the result of whatever I happen to be watching or can make time to watch. If you read my posts regularly, in a sense, you’re watching what I’m watching. I often wish my coverage could be even more democratic or objective. But in other ways, I hope that following along as I experience the media landscape as a poet proves to be interesting and unique.
As you’ve noticed, “what I’m watching” has been Ted Lasso more than once.
The show has been a staple of my TV viewing even when I have zero time for television. If nothing else, my fiancé and I made time to watch Lasso every week while its final season was airing. We popped popcorn. It was a bona fide thing.
As bizarre and unsettling as the details of Jason Sudeikis’ personal life have become in recent history, we still watched. Even as the episodes bloated to 60+ minutes and began to focus more on the cast of delightful characters than the titular Ted, we watched. In times when it was very mediocre (Season 2, Episode 9: “Beard After Hours”), we watched. In times when it was excellent (Season 3, Episode 6: “A Night in Amsterdam/Sunflowers”) we watched.
This show was going to be a part of my life regardless of my preferred writing topics and personal interests. Its tenacity and zeitgeisty-ness continue to astound me. So imagine my glee when poetry fell out of these characters’ mouths to boot, and on several occasions. I got to experience the rare delight of live “a-ha!” moment one more time the other night when the penultimate episode of the series aired on Apple TV+.
The writers of this show created something that was ultimately bigger and better than Jason Sudeikis, which is just what a good coach wants in a team he leads.
Man Hands on Misery to Man
The poem that Mae recites in Season 3 Episode 11, “Mom City,” is Philip Larkin’s inimitable “This Be The Verse,” which originally appeared in his much-beloved book, High Windows (1974).
Larkin is well-known to readers of English-language poetry but particularly well-known to British readers (and recently, to readers of PopPoetry). Larkin turned down the post of Poet Laureate in 1984, just a year before his death. Metal, right? Known for his supposed pessimism and gloomy British, no-nonsense outlook, Larkin, to my mind, is best remembered as a poet who believed in the world in front of his eyes and not in much else. But the world in front of his eyes contained human beings, the most magical and bewildering creatures so far discovered.
“This Be The Verse” is Larkin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” and he knew it. The poem is perhaps Larkin’s best known, and is frequently anthologized. But no better encapsulation of his brilliance and his belief exists than his gutting “Aubade.” The latter poem encapsulates his theory of humanity broadly: death is terrifying and comes for us all, and if there’s salvation, it’s here on earth in each other.
This little theory is complicated by the proclamations of “This Be The Verse,” which is that parents damage their children who go on to damage their own children, and so on:
This Be The Verse PHILIP LARKIN They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
I tend to think of the title’s meaning as a kind of “This be the verse,” as in, this is all there is to say. The final word on humanity is that misery is a cycle perpetuated from parent to child. The title is truly inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem,” which contains the phrase “This be the verse of you [en]’grave for me,” after which point a tombstone inscription follows. Larkin was so dead-certain (pun intended) that this was all there is to say about humanity that he’d go so far as to engrave it on his metaphorical tombstone.
But I’ve always perceived a wink in this poem: “Get out as early as you can” (What, die? End your life?) and “don’t have any kids yourself” (Sure, but generations have failed at this advice, often understood as humanity’s singular goal) can also be understood as tongue-in-cheek bits of advice. We can’t help the fact of our existence or our imperative to procreate, so we’re just going to have to accept that parents do damage to their children even as they attempt to raise and care for them.
Damn.
However, an acceptance of this fact ends up serving as a healing balm for one Theodore Lasso.
They Were Fucked Up in Their Turn
I adore the way that Mae recites the poem to Ted in her pub. Played by veteran actor Annette Badland, Mae is a fan favorite who steals every scene she appears in. She speaks tremendous life into the poem’s lines, so much so that at first it appears as if Ted takes the first line or two as Mae’s own personal wisdom.
Badland’s half-century on stage and screen is palpable as she recites “This Be The Verse.” Her reading of the poem hints at a deep understanding of its meaning. In her voice, the poem feels as fresh and revelatory as it must have when it was first written in 1971. Badland takes the shock of the poem’s first four words in stride, and her voice mellows as the verse deepens into something much more haunting and poignant.
It’s an incredibly successful reading. As Mae recites the poem, we see a reaction shot of Ted as well as shot of his mother, Dottie (Becky Ann Baker). We are to understand that parental damage is unavoidable, and though the poem doesn’t expressly encourage it, forgiveness looms as the only possible solution.
The poem does a lot of heavy lifting with regard to the “main” storyline of “Is Ted OK?” After Mae quotes the poem, Ted goes home and drops the “shoving down emotions and proceeding as if everything’s fine” act and confronts his mother, telling her that her own assurance that everything was fine after his father’s suicide is partially to blame for his emotional damage.
The question of whether or not Ted is going to “be OK” always felt central to the show, even as he insisted in the series finale that it was “never about [him].” Without spoiling the ending, it seems that this moment of confronting his mother—facilitated ostensibly by Ted’s understanding of the Larkin poem—is the extent of his on-screen emotional growth.
But it’s a big step in the right direction. Ted seems to refuse to allow his emotional trauma to “deepen,” as Larkin says, the sum total of humanity’s misery, or his son’s misery, “like a coastal shelf.” Poetry makes nothing happen, as W. H. Auden wrote, but it’s “a way of happening, a mouth.” Leonard Bernstein said that “art never stopped a war.” But what are does do is affect people, and even change them. These changed people, in turn, sometimes have the power to stop wars, if only their own personal battles.
Programming Note
I’m heading off on a month-long trip overseas for work, so for the next few weeks, I’ll be unlocking special subscriber-only posts from the archive for readers to dip into while I’m away from my desk.
Friday Postscripts and Writing Prompts will come out as I’m able. I’m grateful for your recognition, as always, of the humanity behind the screen. Life is busy and dynamic, and this one-woman show will be back with brand-new posts on July 19.
I need your help: if you’d like to see a poem or poet who pops up in popular culture covered at PopPoetry, leave a comment or DM me. Not sure where we’ve been? Check out the PopPoetry archive to search for your favorite poems, poets, shows, films, and songs.
