He was court-martialled in 1945 over a scheme to sell stolen pay books, and sentenced to 16 months' imprisonment, served partly in Acre Prison.
"[4] In Drake Hall open prison he and fellow protesters were set to work – "Some wit allocated it" – demolishing a munitions factory.
[7] His early popularity was marked by the release of a loose adaptation of Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems, later broadcast on BBC Radio's Third Programme on 8 March 1959 with the poems, read by Logue himself, set to jazz by pianist Bill Le Sage and drummer Tony Kinsey and a band featuring Kenny Napper on bass, Ken Wray on trombone and Les Condon on trumpet.
His lines tended to be short, pithy and frequently political, as in Song of Autobiography: I, Christopher Logue, was baptised the year Many thousands of Englishmen, Fists clenched, their bellies empty, Walked day and night on the capital city.
[nb 1] He wrote the couplet that is sung at the beginning and end of the film A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), the screenplay for Savage Messiah (1972), a television version of Antigone (1962), and a short play for the TV series The Wednesday Play titled The End of Arthur's Marriage (1965), which was directed by Ken Loach.
The latter film was generally light-hearted, but dealt with the pre-occupation in modern British society with ownership of property and with the treatment of animals by humans.
[1] In Monday Begins on Saturday, a 1964 science fiction/fantasy novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Magnus Red'kin, a character in the novel, quotes a fragment of a Logue poem: You ask me: What is the greatest happiness on earth?