In a nod to the centenary of the Easter Rising, BBC 4 broadcast a celebration of W.B. Yeats, who wrote about that event with a profound ambivalence. Bob Geldof on W.B. Yeats: A Fanatic Heart was thorough, informative and respectful – and passionate.

For Geldof, Yeats represented a different Ireland to the narrow-minded, censorious, rigidly Catholic country of his own childhood. Yeats was a revolutionary, but his was a revolution of myth, magic and folk tale. “He never killed a living soul,” said Geldof, although he did wonder in later life whether his patriotic play Cathleen ni Houlihan (“appalling,” said Geldof) had sent men out to be shot.

Geldof followed the young poet’s trail around Ireland and England. His father, a well-off Dublin barrister and a Protestant, threw his career aside to train as an artist in London. The young Willie went to his mother’s family in Sligo, where he learned Irish folklore from the servants and the local children.