SHEILA Hancock had no hesitation when a BBC production team suggested taking a poetic stroll through her life. “I do feel passionate about poetry,”

she says. “I’m a latecomer to it, but I now find it really enriches my life.”

She admits only becoming interested in poetry after her husband, actor John Thaw, died in 2002.

She tells how she found solace in poetry after his death. “People sent me poems, mostly about ‘he’s not really dead, he’s only in the other room’, which I just found sickening and untrue and daft,”

she says.

“But I did get lots and lots of poems, some that people had written themselves and some that had helped them, and I began slowly to read some myself.

“I started looking back at things like TS Eliot, which I’ve always found very, very difficult, understanding all the literary allusions.

“I did a poetry reading in a prison when I was at the RSC and I remember saying to Patrick Stewart, ‘I don’t understand a bloody word of this, what does it mean?

I’m sure it’s not going to mean a thing to these lifers’.

“But strangely enough, it had a hypnotic effect on these men – just the sound and the rhythm and the use of words. Poetry’s very potent, if it’s done properly.”

In My Life In Verse, 76-year-old Hancock travels to France and around the country, to places where poems have touched her throughout her life.

At the Provencal holiday home she shared with Thaw, to whom she was married for 28 years, she reads William Butler Yeats’ When You Are Old.

She turns to the camera and tells the viewer how, in Provence, soon after his death, she’d felt he would return, until she dreamt about him and finally came to accept that he was gone. “I had two choices, either to survive or go under,”

she says on screen.

It’s a very raw and very brave programme, but she didn’t find it difficult opening up on camera. “I wasn’t worried about it, I just said it. I’m inclined to shoot my mouth off, sometimes a bit too much, but I’m not very good at pretending or keeping things back. So once I’d decided I was going to do it, then I had to go for it full pelt.”

At Dancing Ledge in Dorset, she reads the Tennyson poem Break, Break, Break.

Tennyson had written the verses about a friend who died young, but the poem reminded Hancock of being a wartime evacuee and one enchanting night she had spent with a friend, swimming in the sea.

My Life In Verse is something of a family affair. Two of her grandchildren recite WH Davies’ Leisure to her in the garden of her 17th Century country bolthole in Wiltshire. And she joins her daughter Melanie, from her previous marriage to actor Alec Ross, at a Shakespearean sonnet workshop for inner city children run by Greenhouse and part-funded by the John Thaw Foundation.

She says it’s incredible to see the impact that poetry can have on young people’s lives.

“A lot of the kids are from very difficult backgrounds and it’s transformative.

When they do a performance, for the first time in their lives, these kids have got respect.”

OF all the poems she reads, her favourite is the disturbingly titled Try To Praise The Mutilated World, by Adam Zagajewski, which, she says helped New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11.

“It sums up my philosophy of life, if I have such a thing,” she says. “I do think the world is a pretty disturbing place, but it’s full of amazingly beautiful, touching things. Sometimes quite tiny, like a feather, or a blowing white curtain, something that can give you a reason for living.

“In my old age, I’m often thinking about the meaning of life and what’s the point of it all. You have all this nastiness going on at the moment, or you’re disillusioned by people’s behaviour, but you have to really cling on to the fact that that is not the whole of life, there are actually some amazing people. It’s a balance.

“It’s very easy these days to say that everything is awful, but it bloody well isn’t and I think that poem sums it up in the most amazing way.”

■ My Life In Verse begins on BBC2 on Friday at 9pm.