Saturday-night line-ups are no strangers to controversy, but Radio 4 is generally the exception. Until last week, that is: yesterday’s programme to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech generated huge heat on social media in advance of broadcast.

Some was no doubt as a result of the ill-judged way in which it was initially promoted, which did not make it clear that the actor Ian McDiarmid’s performance of the whole speech would be broken up with analysis from a range of commentators. But even with that quick clarification issued by Amol Rajan, the BBC’s media editor who presented the programme, it set advance alarm bells ringing.

The BBC should absolutely be considering the historical context of Powell’s speech, its contemporary impact, and its relevance today. But does that require a theatrical rendition of the whole speech, even if it’s broken up? Or does this imbue what was effectively a racist rant, albeit a historically significant one, the status of an intellectual endeavour deserving close textual analysis? These questions are instilled with added pertinence given the sensitive context: living Britons experienced real pain as a consequence, and our political discourse on immigration and race has recently too often veered into the toxic.

Rajan at several points made the case we needed to hear a rendition of the full speech in order to properly understand its inflammatory nature. But he failed to justify what was essentially a historical re-enactment, with him introducing long chunks of the 3,000-word speech in the present tense, as if the listener was there in the room.

Ultimately, the programme was not quite sure what it wanted to be. At points, it felt like it was trying to be a masterclass in populism. But in this, it felt too limited by its detailed textual analysis of a single speech. I remained unconvinced by the idea that we could not understand the techniques of populists, and how they deploy racist discourse, without hearing Powell’s speech performed by an actor.

But equally it did not fully succeed in properly contextualising Powell’s incendiary address. The large number of contributors that featured in the analysis sections gave it a soundbite-like quality, with insufficient depth of analysis. Most seriously, its format did not lend itself to proper challenge of some of the glib anecdotes Powell wheeled out but never substantiated. We had to wait three-quarters of the way through the programme, and a clip of David Frost’s 1969 forensic examination of Powell, for that. Simon Heffer, Powell’s biographer, was given a platform to argue Powell’s speech was not racist and that he was an honest and truthful man (in doubt given Powell could not produce any evidence to back up his incendiary anecdotes), with little direct challenge.

To his credit, there is no room for interpretation in Rajan’s conclusion: the listener is left in no doubt of his view that Powell was a racist. But it was a shame the journey there was not as enlightening as it could have been.