First, Jeremy Paxman wrote that Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns produced little more than “sentimental doggerel”.

Doggerel, in case you’re wondering, means poetry which has little in the way of literary value.

Newsnight presenter Paxman made the accusation in the introduction to the new edition of The Chambers Dictionary – hence the choice of an obscure word – sparking the fury from Burns fans both here and in Scotland.

Then Northern Ireland’s own Willie Drennan provoked the ire of the Ulster-Scots community when his latest episode of A Dander With Drennan was accused of making light of The Killing Time.

This 300-year-old period in British history – where Presbyterian Covenanters were persecuted and, in some cases, tortured and killed – is undoubtedly significant.

But its resonance with today’s generation is questionable.

In contrast, for many people, myself included, Drennan is the public face of Ulster-Scots.

To see him singing at the site of a massacre isn’t entirely out of character.

Or, indeed, inappropriate given that, in a recent interview, Drennan said that the music and culture of Ulster Scots were forged against the background of conflict, and often intended as an antidote to it.

The style and tone of A Dander With Drennan are more suited to a light-hearted entertainment programme than a weighty historical documentary.

Judging it on historical grounds is unfair as it is primarily designed to entertain first and inform second.

If the accusation is one of making a poor television programme, then it’s a charge that could have been levelled at virtually everyone in the industry in Northern Ireland at one time or another.

What is interesting, however, is to see the Ulster-Scots Agency go as far as to tersely disassociate themselves from the much-criticised show.

It’s as if the organisation, whose main aim seems to be getting Ulster-Scots taken seriously as a language, are petrified of being held up to ridicule.

But changing the minds of those who don’t take the language seriously is a much greater task, and one that not even Jeremy Paxman, never mind Willie Drennan, is capable of.

n Read the Imitating Art blog at www.newsletter.co.uk.