Yes, I watched the football last night, where (depending on who you supported) a sporting version of heaven and hell was played out in Rome, but I wanted to catch up with the latest in the BBC’s poetry season. I’m not entirely sure why – I’ve never been big on poetry, never studied English Lit at school and never cared much for some of the more self-indulgent aspect of the medium – but I enjoyed Simon Schama’s profile of John Donne so much last night I wanted to see what arch-satirist Armando Iannucci could come up with in his appraisal of John Milton.

Related: Schama v Attenborough: Who won in the battle of the TV heavyweights?

The first thing to note is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen Armando so animated on the telly before. He explained that he tried to do a Phd on Milton’s masterpiece Paradise Lost while he was at Oxford, but he never managed to finish it.

That very obviously hasn’t dampened his passion for the poem and there were plenty of sequences of Armando pacing up and down excitedly, reading the this massively complex verse, highlighting why he loves it so much. He focused on words, on phrases and there was no denying his enthusiasm for the nuances. But I read something in the Radio Times that I really agreed with – watching Armando opine about these rhythmical, semantic and syntactical (is that a word?) details, it was like listening someone describe the favourite bits in his or her best ever prog rock song. It’s very difficult to get over a very personal point of view on something so esoteric and tricky (although I guess you could hardly call Paradise Lost esoteric… although some will), and perhaps there was to much of this focusing on the intricacies.

This was different, though, from Simon Schama’s profile of John Donne last night. That was a sweeping, dramatic profile of the man as well as his work, whereas this was more about the language of Paradise Lost. There were some lovely bits – Armando visited a school, where a class of 11-year-olds got stuck into Milton’s verse; his walkabout around London gave him a chance to unleash his surreal, very exacting humour; and a visit to Florence (the best bit of the show I thought) uncovered that Milton met Gallileo (that was a pretty amazing revelation).

So not as enjoyable as the John Donne show, but you can’t argue with Armando’s display of impassioned profiling. And I guess is what this season is all about – if one person who hadn’t previously read Milton picks up Paradise Lost tomorrow, then searches for a few more poetry books, then it’s job done.