Love at the zoo? Not when Mrs Chameleon is 50 shades of grey

Every camera creates a celebrity. Amateur photographers know it: as soon as the long lens appears, complete strangers appear from nowhere, wannabe stars hoping to muscle into the shot.

This is even true for animals, as The Secret Life Of The Zoo (C4) demonstrates. It’s only three months since the last series ended, but the fame-hungry menagerie at Chester just can’t stay off the telly.

Charles the two - horned chameleon was enraptured by his own image. To pump up his testosterone before mating, keepers placed him in front of a mirror — and the iridescent reptile was thrilled by what he saw.

First, he turned a luminous green, his most macho hue. Then, he started striking poses with his forelegs raised and clawing at the air. If you could market a selfie app for chameleons, there’s a fortune to be made.

Unluckily for Charles, his date night didn’t go well: ruby, the zoo’s two-horned female, turned grey at the sight of him and started shaking violently. you don’t have to be a chameleon to know that’s a bad reaction.

It turned out ruby was already pregnant by an unknown male and had been ever since she arrived at Chester. ruby, evidently, is the kind

LOVEBIRDS OF THE NIGHT: World War II special forces veteran Richard, born in 1921, was looking for romance on First Dates (C4). ‘He’s what I’d call old-school,’ said his lady friend Ruth, 79. That’s to be expected: you can’t be new-fangled at 97. of celeb who winds up on the Jeremy Kyle show.

This documentary, filmed with dozens of hidden cameras in the pens, relies on its picture quality, which seems to have taken a leap forward with the new series.

Instead of grainy night-vision shots and rain-blurred outdoor footage, we saw more highdefinition images filmed with crystal clarity. The vampire crabs appeared to be monsters scuttling over boulders, until the camera pulled out to reveal they were the size of your thumb — and their babies were a fifth of an inch across.

The A-list celeb of the episode was Pulu, the 30-year-old Sumatran orangutan. He looked magnificent, his whole body covered in a curtain of orange dreadlocks. every look Pulu gave the camera reeked of alpha dominance. Already the father of a clan of nine, he’d now got both his mates pregnant at the same time.

If you think animals aren’t emotionally complex enough to feel self- satisfaction, Pulu proved different.

But the real emotional sophistication was shown by emma, one of the expectant mums, who calmly scooped up her newborn nephew and began suckling him after Subis, the other female ape, suffered a bad birth.

While Subis recovered, emma adopted the baby. Mother love is a superpower in more species than ours.

Mother love was the irresistible force in the second part of Stephen: The Murder That Changed A Nation (BBC1), which mapped how bereaved parents Doreen and Neville Lawrence pursued their quest for justice, from a private prosecution all the way to a national inquiry.

Dame Doreen’s implacable determination was a sight to behold. One policeman complained that she never smiled. He didn’t seem to understand she had stopped smiling that night in April 1993 when her son was killed.

Secret footage of the killers waving around a machete in their flat, acting out a fatal blow, never fails to chill. Neither could the scenes of the accused thugs, walking free from court and baiting the crowd.

Doreen and Neville spoke frankly for the first time about how the stress and grief made them both ill and caused their marriage to fracture. We saw heartbreaking shots of the couple at Stephen’s graveside in Jamaica. What an intense experience this documentary is.