My predecessor as literary editor at the Birmingham Post, was the late Keith Brace.

When it came to readings at poetry festivals Keith had firm ideas, and always preferred the poems to be read clearly and simply without prose inserts, which he saw as interruptions in the flow of the verse.

Barbara Everett, the arranger of this week’s programme, which she calls “I Was There”, clearly thinks differently.

Not only is the poetry constantly interrupted with knowing inserts, some of the poems ( Keats’ Ode To Autumn, for example) are chopped about to make the verse fit in with Ms Everett’s deliberations. It was a bit like listening to a recital of English song and finding “It Was A Lover And His Lass” chopped at the first hey-nonny-no!

Ms Everett is a lecturer and so with her endless footnotes running throughout the evening, we didn’t get a recital but a lecture, which is not what the Shakespeare Poetry Festival is really about.

And in any case, if we were to have inclusions, then what was wrong with replacing Ms Everett’s opinionated reflections with prose extracts?

The concept of Eden, was spoken of at one point, thus if you need a clip of the “I Was There” type, is there anything more beautiful than Virginia Wolf’s Mrs Dalloway buying flowers for her party, or Thomas Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene moving tentatively through her affair with Sergeant Troy in Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd?

This is a programme I might well have enjoyed in my university days notebook in hand to set down the references, but not on an evening when I had turned up to hear poetry of being in a particular place and time read simply and well.

The readers were American actor Guy Paul, who read sensitively enough (and wisely stayed away from a Welsh accent when he came to Dylan Thomas) and Jemma Redgrave, who replaced Harriet Walter and occasionally replaced discretion with enthusiasm.

Keith Brace would not have enjoyed it.