Fordyce Maxwell: 'Grown men in odd outfits is as good a reason to switch off as Big Brother'

FUNNY old game, poetry. Few manage to write it well, but human nature being what it is that does not stop tens of thousands having the urge to try and if you'd like to pause, think back and blush, please do. Luckily, most of us realise our mistake and burn the evidence or play it for laughs as in the birthday greetings section of local newspapers.

One I remember – bad poetry sticks in the mind as well as, or more so, than the thoughtful and well crafted – was a happy birthday to a 60 year old along the lines of "Rust on your putter, mould on your balls, take it easy Willie, the nursing home calls."

Another, from the time when my day job in a parallel universe was writing The Scotsman Diary, was an entry for a competition based on Burns night which read: "Luath is the dog, that's named in the verse/And if I don't win the whisky, I'd like to kick his erse."

Then there was Dod, farm steward and star turn at village hall concerts with narrative poems ending, for example: "He got no thanks for playing Cupid/ Just a bat on the lug for being stupid."

A modest step from there to John Milton, who, as Ken Dodd might say, never played either a village hall or the Glasgow Empire to gauge public reaction to Paradise Lost – "With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout/Confusion worse confounded" – which I tried to plough through recently. For that (yes, failed again), blame Armando Iannucci and his part in the BBC's recent struggle to encourage interest in poetry.

Always keen to keep the brain cell ticking over beyond vegetable plots and sports results and with working knowledge of a few poets I had made several other attempts to go with the BBC before Armando came along. One attempt was Beowulf. I'd read the Seamus Heaney re-write of this saga and enjoyed it, but two minutes into the BBC semi-documentary the presenter uttered the magic words "with the help of a historical re-enactment society".

Call me Mr Picky, but grown men dressed in odd outfits, pretending to hit each other with swords and clubs while shouting loudly and falling over, is as good a reason to switch off the television as Big Brother or Graham Norton.

The next one I tried was Sir Gawain And The Green Knight with the same sort of gimmicks. Mr Picky again, but surely shorter poems with more appeal could have been tried? Something by Burns, Fergusson, even those old imperialists Tennyson and Kipling, or Wordsworth, Auden, Larkin, MacCaig, RS Thomas? But no, Milton was next and Armando Iannucci, drat him, made Paradise Lost seem readable when it plainly isn't, a book that, as Dr Johnson rightly said, once you put down is almost impossible to pick up again.

But, reluctant to quit – persistence or stupidity, you choose – I watched the programme on TS Eliot. There were no gimmicks, no historical re-enactments, just voices and the poetry and a new appreciation of what this lonely businessman was trying to do when he wrote The Waste Land. Now if only he could have written it as cheerfully as Wendy Cope or Roger McGough. Or Dod.