Patrick Kavanagh became film critic for 'The Standard' when Benedict Kiely resigned the post and went to work for the 'Irish Independent'. Here Benedict Kiely recalls Patrick Kavanagh's time as film critic for 'The Standard'.

"...A critic should have an attitude, a bias. There is no writer more liable to deceive, and perhaps none more biased, than one who gives the impression of being impartial..."

At the time of Kavanagh's move Dublin was very much a hub of literary life where writers and poets gathered in local hosteleries to discuss and analyse what is literary and what is not.

As Brendan Kennelly commented in his Thomas Davies lecture on Kavanagh:

"Kavanagh satirises these events, people and ideas, we would expect him to satirise: Dublin's pretentious poetasters, its bumptious 'intellectuals'; its complacent middle class, its viscious sentimentality and its insincere good nature."
(RTÉ Guide, Oct 4, 1974, Vol.11, No.40, p.13)

This is the side of Patrick Kavanagh's life that Tom McGurk examined in the programme 'The Jungle of Pembroke Road'.

Patrick Kavanagh came to live in Dublin when he was in his thirties, in 1939, and lived there until his death in 1967.

The image accompanying this clip is from the RTÉ Stills 'Cashman Collection'. © RTÉ Stills Library 0509/086
Patrick Kavanagh (third from left) and others at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) early 1940s.

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