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People always say it’s a bad idea – meeting your heroes. They’re likely to disappoint; shattering the idolised image you have built up of them over the years. So I was a bit nervous about meeting Roger McGough CBE in the flesh. It’s not like shaking his hand at a book signing or a literature festival – interviewing him might be a risky business. What if the “nice man of poetry” turned out to be a cantankerous swine in real life?

After all, I can remember Roger’s name written sideways on the spines of the children’s books on my bedroom shelf when I was growing up. These days, his adult poetry still enjoys pride of place on my bookcase – up there on the prime eye-level shelf, between my much-loved Betjemans and my carefully-guarded Hemingways. But from the moment I sit down with Roger in a quiet studio deep inside BBC Bristol’s Whiteladies Road base, I realise I needn’t have worried.

With that familiar grin – those smiling eyes – it feels like sitting down with a favourite uncle.

If you’d like to adopt him as your favourite uncle, too, you’ll get the opportunity next month.

The 71-year-old is to present a live broadcast of BBC Radio Four’s Poetry Please from the Bristol Old Vic, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the show. Roger, who has presented the long-running series since 2002, says he clearly remembers the first time he heard one of his own poems requested on the programme.

“I can remember turning the radio on in the early days of the show, and hearing somebody request one of mine – I think it was Let Me Die A Youngman’s Death. I was really excited about the idea of my work appearing on Poetry Please, because I was a regular listener.

“Then when I was offered the job of presenting the series in 2002, it was another real honour for me. At first I questioned whether I was good enough to do the show justice, but in the end I decided it was an opportunity I couldn’t miss. More than anything, it was a chance for me to learn more about poetry,” he adds, his brow angling thoughtfully beneath his glasses.

“Although I’d been writing my own poetry for years, I found my knowledge of other people’s work extended mostly to contemporary poets. I thought presenting the show would be a way for me to get to know the work of some of the older poets, and it’s certainly worked. Over the years I’ve got to know lots of poems that I otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity to connect with.”

Roger says he finds it impossible to choose a particular favourite. “There’s so many, and it changes all the time,” he says. “It’s amazing how passionate people still are about poetry. When they send in their requests, it’s not like requesting a piece of music on a phone-in show – the chosen poem often has a deeply special personal meaning in the listener’s life.

“And I think the popularity of poetry itself comes and goes a bit. In the good times, when folk are busy spending their money, they’re not really interested in poetry. But at times of economic hardship, like today, people tend to become more introspective and poems begin to take on more meaning again.”

Roger made his name in the “Liverpool Poets” movement of the Sixties, before going on to have chart hits as a member of The Scaffold – with numbers like Lily The Pink finding a unique place in the soundtrack of the era.

So for Roger, reading poems from the likes of Brian Patten and Adrian Henri is a way of remembering old friends. “When I hear a poem by somebody like Adrian or Brian, or even of course one of my own, for me it becomes very much a personal thing – it brings back memories of a particular time, or place, or person.

“But it’s interesting when we feature poetry from previous generations – works by Shakespeare or Yeats, for example – and you still feel a real connection to the words. That’s often why the best poetry endures – everyone can feel a personal response to it.”

Roger has written a new poem to mark the anniversary – which he will read at the Old Vic broadcast on October 11. “It’s called To Poetry Please,” he explains. “It’s what’s technically known as a cento poem. That is, it uses lines from other poems, and puts them all together to make a new one. So I’ve chosen lines from some of the show’s most commonly requested poets – everyone from Auden to Carol Ann Duffy. I’m hoping it will go down well.”