What to watch
Horizon: Dippy and the Whale
BBC TWO, 9.00PM
The centrepiece of the Natural History Museum’s grand entrance hall since 1979, Dippy the diplodocus is now being replaced by a 136-year-old skeleton of a blue whale. The decision is symbolic as well as aesthetic: criticised as a little conservative and navel-gazing, the institution has decided to make a statement about conservation and looking to the future by championing a creature first driven to the brink of extinction and then saved by the actions of humanity.
David Attenborough narrates this enlightening overview of the logistical nightmare of restoring, constructing and then hanging the skeleton of Earth’s largest mammal from a ceiling, which also throws in a disturbing but heartening portrait of changing attitudes to the natural world (the whale in question, beached in Ireland in 1881, had its oil and flesh sold on before the bones were then flogged for a tidy profit). Raising the whale edifice centimetre by painstaking centimetre, using what amounts to advanced hand-cranks, doesn’t come without its dangers as one ear-splitting crack, mid-lift, makes clear. But with the whale due to be unveiled this evening, it’s no spoiler to say that this ends on an optimistic note. Gabriel Tate engineer Danielle George examining television’s surveys of natural disasters both documented (Pompeii) and disputed (Atlantis). How have documentary makers responded to the raging debates and new discoveries throwing new light on such events? It’s another oftenamusing survey of both the shifting sands of scientific theory and the changing tastes of TV viewers over the past five decades.