Was this a navy lark? I’ve heard fruitier language on Blue Peter

FOr anyone who doubts that Britain’s defence spending has hit critical new lows,

Warship ( c4) was an education. Watching the royal navy’s flagship Ocean limp along the med was like following a brave but ancient VW camper van wheezing down the m5 on a Bank Holiday.

engineers wrangled with leaky pipes that sprayed jets of water round the hold. The electrics fused. And in the midst of an 80mph storm, one of the main engineheads disintegrated, leaving the helicopter carrier adrift at sea for almost 36 hours.

The crew put a brave face on it, refusing to admit that anything was wrong. ‘HmS Ocean eats problems like this for breakfast,’ chortled captain robert Pedre, and to prove the point the cameras took us to the galley where cooks were preparing the morning’s bacon and eggs for 1,000 hungry mariners.

Words were chosen with such care that during the entire hour no one so much as said ‘darn and bother’ on microphone. i’ve heard fruitier language on Blue Peter.

The documentary team were quite rightly determined to find a more honest assessment, and they got it from one of their stars, 17-year- old apprentice engineer Keira Parry. The youngest person on ship, Keira isn’t even eligible to go to war till she’s 18: if hostilities break out, she will have to be evacuated to safety.

Keira was having the time of her life, bopping with excitement to be at sea for the first time. But even she could tell that Ocean wouldn’t pass an moT.

‘it’s falling apart, everything’s broken,’ she said candidly. ‘Obviously, not everything, but it’s like it is. it’s 20 years old, so what do you expect?’ To a 17-year-old, 20 is superannuated.

The top brass had better not punish Stoker Parry for her guilelessness. The captain must have given permission for her to talk to the TV crew — if he couldn’t foresee the perils of that, he was the naive one.

But the show failed to tackle the most pressing question of all: on a ship with just four women among the complement of 83 engineers, how do the officers prevent romances and jealous rivalries? And what do the wives and girlfriends of the lads feel about this situation?

Both the navy and channel 4 refuse to admit that amorous diffi- culties could occur. Like the idea that mechanical breakdowns could imperil our sailors’ lives and this country’s safety, such a thought is out of bounds. it’s simply unthinkable.

never mind Britannia, political correctness rules the waves.

For sheer candour on camera, Keira was matched by a Samburu warrior called Jacob who works as a safari guide in Kenya. He told Giles coren on Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby (BBc2) that he cannot understand why Western tourists fly thousands of miles to flog across the savannah in search of elephants and hippos.

The Samburu farmers tend herds of cows and goats that are much more beautiful and useful, Jacob said. Why not save yourself some trouble and watch them instead?

But if you’re not an African tribesman, there’s a magical appeal to the Giraffe manor in nairobi’s suburbs, where guests awake every morning to be greeted by long faces on long spotted necks, craning through the windows to be fed titbits.

This made for ten minutes of adorable TV.

After that, Giles and co-host monica Galetti were pretty much out of ideas, and so they padded out the rest of the show with filler.

How anyone can make a boring wildlife programme beats me, but they somehow managed.