Toxic tea, a lethal umbrella ... the KGB love a very British murder

No one can say that Russian assassins lack a dry sense of humour. When committing murder in London, they make sure to use the most British methods with a touch of lethal irony.

Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was killed in 1978 by an unknown agent armed with a KGB poison, who injected his victim with deadly ricin by stabbing him in the leg with an umbrella on Waterloo Bridge.

no doubt the murderer was wearing a suit and tie, with a bowler hat and a raincoat folded over his arm — in those days, still the uniform of the City commuter.

And when Russian defector Alexander ‘Sacha’ Litvinenko was silenced, allegedly on the orders of President Vladimir Putin, the murder weapon was a teapot.

As a Met copper pointed out on Hunting The KGB Killers (C4), the crime was as english as a game of Cluedo: it was Mr Red, in the hotel tea-room, with the radioactive Darjeeling.

This painstaking documentary uncovered a secret world that is usually glimpsed only in the novels of John Le Carré.

Litvinenko was a British citizen when he died, but he had been a Russian soldier and a spy most of his life, and served as a senior officer in the Kremlin’s FSB — the modern version of the KGB. He turned whistleblower after he was ordered to kill a prominent critic of the Putin regime, billionaire Boris Berezovsky.

Much of the fascination of this programme was the background detail: we know him only from his final photograph, a bald man dying in a hospital bed, but his widow painted a portrait of a reckless idealist.

Marina Litvinenko had an acute ear for the memorable quote. When her husband first confronted Putin, then head of the FSB, he told her this ruthless man had ‘a very soft handshake’.

Mainly the story was told by officers of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Unit, who tracked Sacha’s killers back to Russia by following the trail of radioactive Polonium 210 — a poison that can only be manufactured in an atomic research facility.

The detectives believe they were also poisoned in Moscow, with an acute tummy bug . . . administered once again in cups of tea.

These national stereotypes begin to look like a serious security weakness. If the Russians ever invade us, they’ll do it on a wet Bank Holiday when we’re all stuck in motorway traffic jams.

What the investigation didn’t tell us was if anyone else in London was contaminated by the Polonium 210, a poison so virulent that traces of radioactivity could still be detected on the hotel teapot after it had gone through a dishwasher repeatedly. Were there other, accidental victims? That should not remain part of a spy mystery.

Shabani the western lowland gorilla belongs to a different literary genre, the romantic novel. This silverback at Kyoto zoo attracts hundreds of human female admirers every day, who come to swoon at his rippling physique and handsome face.

Chris Packham studied Shabani’s mysterious sex appeal in Nature’s Weirdest Events (BBC2) and concluded it’s all in the eyes: unlike most gorillas, this hairy lothario has white irises, which give his gaze a smouldering look.

That answer was unconvincing: Chris has white irises too, and if Japanese women queue all day to blow kisses at him, he keeps very quiet about it.

This one- off episode was packed with amazing stories without a duff item.

The show is much better as an occasional treat than padded out as a series.