THE Full Monty star Robert Carlyle is set to play Lakeland poet Coleridge in a new film exploring the writer's drug addiction and alleged betrayal by Wordsworth, reports Jeremy Craddock.

The BBC will make the film, Pandemonium, to be shown in the cinema before being screened on television.

Emily Woof - daughter of Wordsworth Trust director Dr Robert Woof - is to play Dorothy Wordsworth, while Ian Hart, who played John Lennon in Backbeat, is considering playing Wordsworth.

The script is by former Coronation Street and Brookside writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, whose previous films include Welcome To Sarajevo and Butterfly Kiss, about a lesbian serial killer. The director will be Julien Temple, who made The Sex Pistols' film The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.

Mr Cottrell Boyce told the Gazette the film would explore revelations that Wordsworth was a government spy and was informing on Coleridge, a known radical of the time.

He said: ''Coleridge suffered from paranoia, which is why he took opium to which he became addicted. But of course he had reason to feel paranoid - he was being spied on by Wordsworth, whom he thought was his friend.

''One of the most potent forms of opium and the one to which Coleridge was partial was from Kendal. The Kendal Black Drop was incredibly dense and was the crack cocaine of its day, but of course little was known about hard drugs then.''

He added: ''Those people who like Wordsworth will be shocked by this; those who like Coleridge will like the story.''

BBC Films spokeswoman Fiona Williams said: ''This is one of the projects we announced at the Cannes Film Festival as being 'green-lighted' and set to go ahead.''

The Wordsworth spy theaory is supported in a new book The Hidden Wordsworth by Kenneth R. Johnston.

The film, which is due to be made next spring, opens in Somerset, where the two poets met, and then moves on to the Lake District. Specific locations in South Lakeland are not yet known.

Dr Robert Woof, director of the Wordsworth Trust at Grasmere, said: ''We would welcome any serious attempt to look at the relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth.''

Ian Stephens, of Cumbria Tourist Board, said any publicity for the area was good and, although Coleridge's drug use was an undisputable historical fact, he hoped the film would treat it sensitively.

Alison McAleer, of conservation group The Friends of the Lake District, declined to comment until more details were available.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was, with William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic movement. He collaborated with Wordsworth on The Lyrical Ballads, and is also remembered for other lyrical masterpieces such as Christabel and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan, the latter written after taking opium.

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