A date with the natives

WE’RE heading into the mountains of Japan in this week’s SPY IN THE WILD (BBC1, 9pm). It’s blooming cold up there, brass monkey weather, but the local macaque population don’t look particularly bothered. For one thing, there’s a lovely volcanic spring for them to bathe in.

“The perfect spot to luxuriate,” David Tennant is able to report (not because he’s a Japanese macaque but because he’s the show’s narrator).

“And a new member has just joined their health club.”

Obviously this isn’t a health club in the literal sense – there isn’t an exorbitant £98 direct debit showing up on their bank statements every month – but a tightly knit unit with which you’d assume any newcomer would struggle to ingratiate himself.

Even so, “Spy Macaque is already making friends.” Yes,

Spy Macaque (when David says it, it actually sounds more like Spy McAck, which I think I prefer) is the latest of this programme’s fabulously freaky fake animals, each designed to blend in with whatever unit it’s been built to infiltrate.

First up tonight: fascinating footage of what the macaques get up to underwater. I would imagine they’ll be taking out an injunction.

Elsewhere, it’s slip-cast challenge week inTHE GREAT POTTERY THROW DOWN (More4, 9pm).

And I take it you know what that means, right? Me neither.

Well, all right, I do, but only because I’ve watched the preview. Slip-casting, I’ve discovered, is a process via which seemingly competent contestants on TV pottery competitions are driven stark raving bonkers.

Indeed, one of tonight’s competitors even ends up declaring: “I’d rather go through labour again,” although admittedly she’s not quite mad enough to mean Labour with a capital L.

More specifically, it’s where liquid clay (that’s what “slip” means) gets poured into plaster moulds. It’s a process normally only found in mass production (“everything from teapots to toilets”) but in this case judge Sue

Pryke, who unfortunately turns out to be a specialist, wants each contestant to make a pair of multicoloured decorative vases. A big one and a little one.

The key to this challenge, it seems, is to get your timing right. “If you leave your slip in the mould too long,” Sue explains, “your cast will be too thick.” (TV already has more than enough thick casts, right?)

“And if you pour it out too soon,” she warns, “it’ll still be all runny and it’ll gush out all over the floor, and me and that other judge, the bloke with the terrible hair, will laugh our little socks off.”

Well, that’s what she means.