He's the author of the controversial poem V, the acclaimed TV verse docu-drama about Alzheimer's Disease; Black Daisies for the Bride (filmed at High Royds, with nurses and patients taking part) which won a Prix Italia prize; and plays such as The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus.

His work has appeared on stages all over the world, as well as in newspapers: The Independent published the whole of V. He's a Greek and Latin scholar who has written ten film poems for TV on a range of subjects, from the death threat against Salman Rushdie to the Gulf War.

Tony Harrison's poetry combines the classic pre-Christian world of myths and gods with the late 20th Century and the vernacular speech rhythms of his native Leeds.

His latest project, a £1.6m movie called Prometheus, is an example of this fusion of past and present. It's due to be screened in Bradford in the spring, when he will be the subject of Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show.

The last time I saw Tony Harrison we were sharing a platform at Jonathan Silver's memorial concert in Salts Mill. Almost 12 months later we met, a few days before he was due to give a reading there. During our three-hour conversation he paid tribute to his dead friend.

"After doing Square Rounds for the National Theatre, a very difficult work which didn't go right, I lost my creative confidence. But Jonathan got me doing Poetry or Bust for the mill. I wrote, directed and designed the play - all in two weeks. He gave me the sense that everything was possible. He was absolutely extraordinary. Impresarios and producers just don't have his ability to cut through red tape and get something achieved."

Perhaps a little of Silver's inspirational tenacity rubbed off on Harrison during the three years he put into writing and directing Prometheus, which is based on the original Greek myth about the Titan who stole fire from authoritarian Zeus and gave it to Man. The Bible story of Adam and Eve and the apple-tree of knowledge of good and evil parallels it.

Harrison, clearly on the side of enlightenment and knowledge, represents Prometheus in the shape of a 20ft statue covered in gold leaf. The statue was transported by low-loader round areas of Yorkshire where pits were closed, and through regions of Eastern Europe ravaged by World War II, the Nazi Holocaust, and Communism's industrialisation.

In the introduction to the film-script Harrison writes: The myth of Prometheus, who brought fire to Mankind, keeps entering history at significant moments...When men feel themselves in chains the myth of the Titan re-enters history. Out of hopelessness comes a new need for the chained martyr's undiminished hope, though every day Zeus's eagle tears the liver from his body...The meditative hearth now contains the Holocaust and the H-bomb.

In Harrison's film ancient conflicts are superimposed on modern events so that we feel a continuity between the mythic world of the Greeks and the historical civilisation which evolved, for better AND worse, from that world.

Making the movie entailed working with a regular cast of six plus a production crew of nine on location in 14 places, from Doncaster to Greece.

"It nearly killed me. There were times, after we'd been shooting in a steel works in Poland for example, when I just collapsed on to the bed in my scorched boots, goggles, and clothes," he said.

"At the end there were 36 hours of film to look at and edit down to two-and-a-quarter hours - it's the longest film I've ever made. I'd spend 12 hours a day going through the film. After one session I went back to where I was staying and just threw up."

You wouldn't expect an innovatory iconoclast like Harrison to work in a conventional mode.

"People like to have a detailed script, but I don't. I feel I have done enough in the theatre and on film to be trusted - there's got to be some advantage to getting older.

"I had some long sequences outlined. The rest I made up as we were driving through Eastern Europe and Greece. I'd see a sign and we'd stop, I'd tell the actors what I wanted, and then I'd write the words.

"There was quite a complicated sequence in Dresden, where 25,000 people died in a fire-storm in the war. We found a lot of scorched images of Prometheus in the architecture. Some of that sequence was done in voice-over after we finished filming," he said.

The film is not a conventional story told in a conventional way; but nor is it an arty art-house movie obsessed with its own technique at the expense of the viewer's comprehension.

All of Harrison's work is shaped by his political and artistic values and his desire to communicate them with all the power of his wit, humour and intelligence to ordinary people. He doesn't subscribe to the notion of writing down to people.

"All my life I've had the same thing: 'Oh, these aren't normal poems!', 'Oh, it's not normal to use poetry for making movies!' Years later everybody is reading the poems!

"You know there's a need for poetry; increasingly for me there's a need. If we no longer find consolation in religion, what else have we to express our deepest mysteries, hopes, disappointments, than art? I take it very seriously."

Just for the record, however, he's not the least bit interested in the vacancy for Poet Laureate.

A self-confessed republican, he thinks the job should pass into history - along with the hereditary peerage, organised religion and the whole panoply of monarchy.

Jim Greenhalf

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.