The missus has walked out . . . so I’ve replaced her with an octopus
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS LAST NIGHT’S TV The Octopus In My House HHHHH Monster Ships HHHII
ANY chap would do the same. When David Scheel’s wife moved out of their home in Anchorage, Alaska, and took most of the living room furniture in the divorce deal, he used the extra space for his hobby.
Some would build a model railway, or spread out half a million Lego bricks to build the Millennium Falcon, or bring their cassettes down from the loft to be carefully alphabetised — all good, manly pastimes. Professor Scheel installed an octopus tank.
After all, he reasoned on The Octopus In My House (BBC2), his 16-year-old daughter Laurel wanted a dog. Dogs are affectionate, and so are octopuses, so eightlegged Heidi supplied the perfect compromise.
The newly single Prof was clearly so delighted to be able to indulge his eccentricities that it would be churlish to question his sanity. And who wouldn’t go slightly bonkers in Anchorage — a town that looks like the American Dream swallowed up by an ice age, where wild moose trample over suburban gardens to munch shrubbery in snowdrifts.
Once Heidi had been dragged up the icebound front path in a plastic crate and plopped into an aquarium about the size of a people-mover, she promptly burrowed under a rock and hid (that’s why the Prof called her Heidi). But as she gained confidence, Heidi began to show us just why David, the professor of marine biology at Alaska Pacific University, is so enraptured by these animals. It was utterly fascinating.
Like a psychedelic lightshow, she was constantly changing colours, not just to merge into her background, but to express her emotions. One moment she looked like an eight-tentacled panda, the next a floating milk-white ghost, before dividing herself down the middle in a russet-and-cream colour scheme like a Seventies sofa.
And it wasn’t just her camouflage that changed. Her texture did, too. Heidi could lie as smooth and flat as a puddle on the bottom of her tank, or bunch up into a bundle of bumps. David and Laurel were able to watch her behaviours for hours instead of spending only a few minutes observing underwater with a scuba tank, as most naturalists do. Perhaps this wasn’t such a lunatic idea after all.
Laurel was definitely the clever mollusc’s favourite. She’d happily wrap her tentacles round the girl’s arm for 30 minutes, tasting and exploring her skin while getting her suckers tickled.
And if you’re sceptical, and don’t believe that octopuses can recognise people and even feel affection for individuals, then you’ve never watched one fast asleep and dreaming.
The way Heidi twitched, rippled and glowed in her sleep had undeniable parallels to a dog dozing in its basket, with legs wriggling and ears flickering.
The Prof was right. Who needs a pooch when you’ve got an octopus?
An equally bizarre, though man-made, sea creature was on display in Monster Ships (Yesterday channel) as the One Columba bulk freighter laden with 14,000 shipping containers ploughed the oceans. Wide-angle lenses struggled to do justice to the sheer scale of the 360 metre (1,181ft) whopper.
We watched as this neon pink leviathan headed into Hamburg, skimming under a bridge so low the captain could have reached up and touched the underside.
If you like your documentaries heavily freighted with statistics, this delivered them by the ton. We even learned the length of the booms used to load the decks (139 metres, or 456ft, if you wondered).
Just the sort of programme a bloke might want to watch after his missus has left him with one armchair and a TV set.