While the Late Late steps lightly past, Bob Geldof rips into the legacy of the Rising

The Late Late Show (Friday, RTÉ 1) began last week with the arrival of a vintage car piled high with RTÉ presenters in period costumes, looking like the Keystone Cops or the Anthill Mob. A typical weekend then for The Late Late Show ("Oh no! We need guests! Send out the guest catcher in his jalopy!").

The costumes confirm what I've long suspected – that those kitschy RTÉ Guide covers, in which presenters dress as Santa elves or babies or 1950 housewives, are not staged tableaux but gritty realist documentary photos of "life in Montrose".

Liz Nolan, Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh, Marty Whelan, Marty Morrissey (“Martys” as Ryan Tubridy refers to them) and Sean O’Rourke variously dress as Irish revolutionaries, the Dublin proletariat, and, in Sean O’Rourke’s case, with his horn- rimmed spectacles, top hat and tweeds, a member of the RTÉ Executive Board.

Ryan Tubridy is not in a costume, except in the sense that “Ryan Tubridy” is a costume (I saw it once hanging in the costume department . . . perhaps I’ve said too much). This indicates a certain internal hierarchy. The less en-costumed the guests, the higher up the RTÉ pay grade they are.

So Marty Whelan, easily the most militant of RTÉ presenters, demonstrates his power by wearing the military uniform he probably dons for his radio show, while Marty Morrissey and Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh dress as the front and back ends of a pantomime war horse (they were actually dressed as members of the Citizen Army).

Interestingly, once lip service to 1916 festivities is paid, the show steers away from the subject entirely, safe in the knowledge that it is more than catered for elsewhere. Tubridy always seems most content when going against expectation. He interviews a beefy strongman (together they look like the number “10”), watches a model cook food, discusses herbal cures with a dapper gent, and hears testimony from an alcoholic architect. It’s a pretty good representation of what it means to be Irish today.

The most striking bit of the episode is a moving interview with Lyndsey Robinson about being homeless and living in a hotel with her daughter, with Tubridy pointedly observing the irony of dealing with such things during the centenary of the Rising. “Why are we talking to two people in 2016 about something like this?”

RTÉ has done very well with its 1916 coverage. Joe Duffy's forensic breakdown and docu-dramatisation of the fate of the 40 children killed during the Rising, Children of the Revolution (Sunday, RTÉ 1) is masterful, moving and deeply felt.

Meanwhile, Fanatic Heart: Geldof on Yeats (Thursday, RTÉ 1) is the sort of unrepentantly polemical portrait more commonly found in the BBC heartland of the ancient enemy (it's also to be broadcast on BBC4).

It’s a chance to watch a cranky old iconoclast follow in the footsteps of another cranky old iconoclast all the while buffered by celebrity chums reading poetry. They include Edna O’Brien, Colm Tóibín, Van Morrison, Dominic West, Stephen Fry, Sting, Noel Gallagher, Keith Chegwin, Rod Hull and Emu (there does seem to be varying degrees of relevance when it comes to Geldof’s choice of readers; I made only the last three up).

While the first episode sees Geldof delighted by Yeats’s quest to create a national literature, the second is largely devoted to the poet’s eccentric latter years of spiritual, sexual and political experimentation. Geldof has fun with this too, but the poet’s ambivalence about the Rising allows Geldof to give angry expression to his own less ambivalent views. The glorification of violence, he says, “stained my country for decades”.

Into the mystics

Geldof sees a through-line that runs from the Catholic mystics of the Rising to the repressive Ireland he grew up with in the 1970s and he sees Yeats as a counterforce in Irish cultural history. Usually such views are couched in conciliatory language and a very Irish capacity to have both our violent revolutionary cake and the democratic eating of it. Not so with Geldof. Even his co-conspirator, the historian Roy Foster, struggles with his characterisation of the leaders of the Rising as an “elite blinded by blood-dimmed revolutionary lust”.

“You say that,” says Foster. “I didn’t say it.”

Geldof has his reasons. “Dying is very easy,” he says. “I’ve been around it a lot . . . Staying alive is hard.”

Can't Touch This (Saturday, BBC 1) is probably what BBC management said when asked were they going to be covering 1916. Actually, I'm being facetious. They covered 1916 several times. And in the opening sequence of Can't Touch This a 62-year-old Irishman is catapulted across the studio, forced to walk a suspended beam while punch bags are flung at him, and is repeatedly dunked in water. Meanwhile, an Englishman laughs hysterically on the sidelines. (The working title was 800 Years of Oppression.)

Can't Touch This is actually a new light-entertainment game show in which participants of various ages and temperaments are dared to touch things. More specifically, they must negotiate giant cushioned obstacles in order to "touch" tokens representing a variety of prizes: coffee-machines, Bluetooth speakers, electronic scooters – all the technological, landfill-destined ephemera of the age.

Ashley Banjo is joined in a professional guffawing capacity by alliterative co-star Zoë Ball (they missed a trick by not concentrating exclusively on giant inflatable "ball" and "banjo" themed obstacles and calling the programme Ball and Banjo) and dry commentary is provided by a disembodied Sue Perkins who nicknames all of the participants and says things like: "[It's called] Can't Touch This not You Can Touch This Easily."

It’s strangely gripping. Halfway through, I become deeply invested in one lycra-clad man’s attempt to touch a token while running along a speeding treadmill. It’s thoroughly invigorating. This must be “sport”, I decide. And in covering it, I must be a “sports reporter”.

I go to the sports desk at The Irish Times to check if this might be true. Apparently the sight of wheezing people in colourful leotards being flung across the adult equivalent of a toddler ball pit is not "sport" but, and I quote, "evidence of end times". They're Pearsian in their certainty, those sports reporters.