Can David Attenborough really save us from Antmageddon?

Unnerving little blighters, ants . . . marching in columns out of their nests on a spring morning, they look as though they are goose- stepping like Soviet soldiers on parade in red Square.

if the zoom lenses used to film the documentary Attenborough And The Empire Of The Ants ( BBC2) had been fitted with microphones, we might have heard them singing Stalinist anthems in rousing choruses.

Sir David was studying a supercolony of half a billion tiny communists in the Swiss Jura mountains, an ant society that has ditched its old monarchies and embraced international socialism.

Queens no longer rule these anthills: instead, they have become slaves to the workers, who force them to breed in underground egg factories.

All the old boundaries between nests have been swept aside. Like cities linked by a grid of motorways, thousands of anthills are now connected by trails through the spruce forests. The colonies trade in reserves of antiseptic tree resin, which fends off disease.

Sir David hailed all this as a giant leap for insect evolution. That’s the problem with scientists — they are so excited by their discoveries that they can’t see the looming disaster. if all the world’s trillions of six-legged socialists join forces, we’ll be facing Antmageddon. Luckily, we’ve got technology on our side, and this one- off documentary was laden with it.

infra-red cameras wriggled into the nests, watching the ants as they hibernated or laboured in the reproduction chambers.

The pictures had a sepia tinge, but their detail was exceptional: eggs resembled clusters of rugby balls, and the beads of honeydew that workers fed by mouth to the queens were glistening mirror balls.

Tiny lenses from mobile phones, arrayed in a Meccano contraption that the film crew nicknamed Frank, panned over the anthills and through the grass to give us an insect’s eye view.

But the most striking moments came during a hunt among wildflowers, when a posse of ants gave chase to a panicking female spider with a bundle of eggs clasped to her abdomen.

in crystalline slow-motion, we saw each hunter ant stretch wide its barbed jaws and hurl itself at the spider like a barbaric weapon. Once one hit home, more piled in, until the spider was torn apart.

Sir David described the kill as resembling ‘ a pride of lions taking down a buffalo’. But lions sleep after a hunt. The ants just kept killing. They were more like a swarm of medieval robots, on an endless frenzy of destruction. Antmageddon is going to be no fun at all.

When the ants take over, the last place on earth to hear about it will be the Yorkshire town where granville (David Jason) runs Arkwright’s corner shop in Still Open All Hours (BBC1).

This Christmas special bubble of nostalgia — charmingly outdated even when ronnie Barker was the stuttering shopkeeper and granville was a tousled lad in a tank-top — isn’t so much a sitcom as half an hour of small talk.

The assorted widows and divorcees of the street met, as they always do, around a kitchen table, to exchange gossip about any available middle-aged men.

granville’s son Leroy (James Baxter) was on the pull as ever, this time chatting up a local vegan lass waving a ‘meat is murder’ placard outside the shop.

One day it’ll be Leroy in the brown apron, battling the dyspeptic cash register and diddling customers out of pennies. But in the outside world, the ants will have control.