The People's Poet

The world can seem a bleak place but Pam Ayres still finds plenty in life to laugh about and loves to share the joke

- Catherine Larner

Whether it’s a pub lunch served on a slate, the ordeal of finding a parking space, the horrors of airplane toilets or her husband’s snoring, there’s seemingly nothing that Pam Ayres can’t express in rhyme and have her audience in fits of laughter.

“They may be the small things in life,” she says, “the unimportant things, but I try to write about things that people identify with, and I think they are quite important if they make you laugh.”

Pam has been making us laugh – and cry – for almost 45 years. She first came to attention in 1975 on TV talent show Opportunity Knocks, and has never strayed far from the nation’s consciousness since then.

Her poems have been used for school speech and drama competitions, weddings and funerals, and who hasn’t, while sitting in the dentist’s chair, joined with Pam in wistfully declaiming Oh I wish I’d looked after me teeth?

“I’ve only got to mention it and there’s a great cheer goes up,” she says. “It’s not even that good, it just plugs into what a lot of people feel, I think.”