Impassioned, vivid, engaging ... Packham on his life with autism

Chris Packham has described the timing of his documentary, Asperger’s And Me (BBc2), as coming ‘between two disasters’. he didn’t precisely specify what these were but, from the context, he seemed to be referring to the fate of his beloved poodles, itchy and scratchy.

itchy died earlier this year, a loss so traumatic that chris wasn’t able to refer to it directly — instead, he talked about his feelings of devastating grief during his teens after the death of a pet kestrel.

scratchy is still trotting through the New Forest at his master’s heel as they explore the woods near the remote home where chris, 56, lives alone. But, in the programme’s closing minutes, we learned that the dog, who is 14, has liver disease.

chris, diagnosed with autism in his 40s, was certain his intense attachment to his pets stemmed from his version of the condition, known as asperger’s syndrome.

he believes it makes it difficult for him to form human relationships, yet it breeds his overwhelming attachments to animals.

But one of the problems with autism is it can be blamed for almost any personality trait. it’s so baggy and flexible, there’s a danger that the word ‘ autistic’ could become meaningless.

my 21-year-old son, for instance, has autism. he’s at the profound end of the spectrum, something called kanner’s syndrome — and he’s completely blasé about the death of pets. When his much-loved cat Peggy died last year, David accepted her loss without a blink.

he has emotions, very strong ones. But grief doesn’t appear to be one of them. That is part of the mystery of autism.

many documentaries make the mistake of trying to explain autism in general terms. chris sidestepped that: he simply told us what it was like for him. Words frequently failed him, sometimes because he seemed terrified to be talking about his deeper feelings.

But his insistence that all autistic individuals were autistic in their own way supplied the perfect definition. it also made a nonsense of the idea that it could be ‘cured’, either with behavioural therapy or electrodes to the brain.

chris saw both in america, and they looked terrifying.

he ended with an impassioned plea for inclusion: autism might make him an oddball, he said, but it also enabled him to carve out a career as an ardent naturalist and quirky TV personality.

and as he discovered in california’s silicon Valley, without brilliant autistic programmers we might not have web tools such as Google, or even the internet itself.

his descriptions of childhood, both the loneliness and the obsession with nature, were engaging. many small boys collect tadpoles, but chris felt compelled to try eating his.

he described the flavour so vividly that we could almost taste them. These clear, well-catalogued memories were one more advantage of the asperger’s brain.

The return of Ben Fogle’s documentary series about people who abandon civilisation to live off- grid, New Lives In The Wild (c5), seemed shallow by comparison.

he spent three days trekking to Wilderness island off the north-west coast of australia, to meet Jim, 45, and kim, 28, in their coastal shack. They live on rainwater and whatever fish they can catch.

Both had survived major accidents before quitting civilisation but, beyond that, Ben seemed uninterested in what made them tick.

he didn’t want to know about the gulf in their ages or whether they planned to have a family. it seemed a long way to go, to learn so little.