Pure penguin heaven, but what was the point of Lorraine Kelly?

Have you noticed how every documentary these days has to be billed ‘With Someone Famous’? It isn’t enough to give us a show about flower arranging: it must be called Brilliant Bouquets With Bear Grylls or Ross Kemp’s Perfect Posies.

So a new series set in Cape Town about the struggles of a wildlife hospital rescuing endangered seabirds, was naturally called

Penguin A&E With Lorraine Kelly (C5). There was a slight problem, though. Lorraine was barely there. We glimpsed her once at the start, when she knelt on the city’s famous Boulders beach, where humans and african penguins sunbathe side by side.

and we spotted her briefly at the end, when she stood nervously and watched while volunteers at the Sanccob centre coaxed the birds into cardboard crates, to be released after treatment.

The rest of the time, she was doing the voiceover . . . but nowhere to be seen in person. Why was she not in the operating theatre, when vets battled to remove a fishing hook from the gut of a bird called Bandit?

How come we didn’t see her with a patient clamped between her knees, coaxing a fish into its razor-sharp bill? Could it be that Lorraine, the most touchy- feely and soppy presenter on telly, didn’t actually like penguins very much?

Proper penguin fans, and I proudly count myself as one, have an inkling. a few years ago, the no-nonsense wildlife expert Michaela Strachan, who lives in Cape Town, also made a series about the work of Sanccob, which stands for the Southern african Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds — and she revealed that nursing these birds is dangerous, smelly work.

even when their nurses wear thick neoprene gloves, the penguins can break a finger or leave a deep gash. ‘ They’ve got beaks like pliers,’ Michaela told me.

and the stench of fish could take weeks to scrub out. Michaela admitted that when she turned up on the school run after a day on the penguin wards, other mothers would edge away from her.

That’s not cute, not fluffy and it’s definitely not Lorraine. No wonder the queen of breakfast Tv makeovers decided to stay out of the picture.

Sanccob doesn’t need celebrity endorsements. The sight of penguin chicks snuggling up to soft toys, so that they don’t become too attached to humans, is fascinating and adorable — as is the makeshift steam bath invented to help a penguin with a wheezy chest breathe more easily.

Penguin a&e made a perfectly good show. So what was the point of ‘With Lorraine Kelly’?

By the same law, the education

experiment at an Oxford comprehensive that paired pupils with OaP mentors couldn’t just be called Old School — it had to be Old School With The Hairy

Bikers (BBC2). This time, though, the presenters had their work cut out.

The youngsters were sceptical, the oldies were camera- shy, and if it hadn’t been for our bearded heroes, Dave Myers and Si King, we would have spent half the show staring at blank blackboards.

Luckily, the boys were the ideal choice for this experiment. Both had a difficult time in adolescence — Dave had to miss months of school to act as carer to his parents, while Si’s father died when he was eight.

They didn’t harp on hard times, but they weren’t afraid to confide in the children and build up a bond of trust. By the end of the first episode, we were only a month into the trial and it was hard to tell how much the youngsters were benefiting.

For the pensioners, though, this was plainly a mind- blowing experience. a 71-year-old former car factory worker called Dave couldn’t believe the standard of school equipment — gleaming buildings packed with computers, instead of leaky Nissen huts.

He was shocked by the respect that teachers showed to young ’uns, too: no clipped ears here.

and he was so impressed by his young charge, Wezley, that he called him ‘a good son to have’ on the first day.

Slow down, Dave — it’s a school, not an adoption agency.