VIEW FROM THE BOX SEAT

Bar a few noteworthy exceptions, there’s little to keep you glued to the TV this winter

There’s a lovely photograph of English conservationist and author Gerald Durrell and his American wife, Lee, hovering around on the Internet. Taken in 1987, it shows Durrell, lion-faced, in a white suit with black tie, trying to dislodge something from between his teeth with his tongue. Lee, somewhat younger, looks on adoringly, while a sharpfaced barn owl sits on Durrell’s shoulder, between them.

As a boy, Durrell lived in a house on Corfu with his mum, two brothers and a sister, his father having died in India when the children were young. His mother, Louisa, brought them to the Mediterranean island in search of a sunnier, cheaper life, and Durrell wrote about the trials and tribulations of that life in My Family and Other Animals.

Described last year in The Guardian as “the Harry Potter of its day”, the book has been turned by the BBC into a television series called The Durrells (BBC First, Dstv channel 119). Charming, whimsical and full of peculiar English eccentricities, it is one of the more enjoyable items on the rather scratchy menu of late wintertime viewing on television at the moment.

This, of course, assumes that as a viewer you aren’t partial to the goings-on of the Kardashians, have no pretensions to becoming the next Bear Grylls, and find yourself gobsmacked when encountering a programme about the seriously vertically challenged called — wait for it — Little Women.

Let me say, in addition, that this programme is noteworthy for being completely devoid of irony or self-consciousness. A quick, 10-minute watch reveals that the little folk can be just as bitchy, preoccupied and self-obsessed as any other self-respecting reality show wannabe in the great empty