IN 1987, Channel 4 defied a growing national moral panic about TV’s four-letter words by broadcasting a film of Tony Harrison performing his epic poem, V.

Upon visiting his parents’ grave on Beeston Hill, Harrison discovers it has been vandalised. The ensuing narrative is fiercely confrontational, detailing an imagined exchange between author and perpetrator in a bout of civic-minded mudslinging against the backdrop of Elland Road: its diamond floodlights the only glints in a decade of decline.

And as if to prove Harrison right, the night of the following 35-minute broadcast of November 4th 1987 saw Leeds United suffer the then-ritual ignominy of losing on the plastic pitch at Oldham Ath-bloody-letic.

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