Falcons, red squirrels and frisky snakes, Yorkshire’s a true marvel

Channel 5, notorious for its micro-celebrity circus Big Brother and bottom-scraping shows about drug addicts on benefits and bankruptcy bailiffs, has suddenly mellowed.

Its daytime schedules are still built around the aussie soaps neighbours and home and away, but in the evenings you are as likely to find yourself looking at an aristocrat’s country home as an urban sink estate.

alan Titchmarsh has been extolling the glories of the national Trust, aired in a prime-time slot that C5 execs usually reserve for CCTV compilations with names like Drunken hen nights Gone Bad or extreme 999 Taser Squad.

an hour of truly spectacular wildlife footage proved a delightful surprise as a new series began of Yorkshire: A Year In The Wild (C5).

This was a visual poem, an elegy to the landscape of the dales and moors, with exceptional lenswork that showed us peregrine falcons hunting, red squirrels foraging and queen bees emerging from a frosty hibernation.

Two male adders engaged in a dance-off, a sort of Snakely Come Dancing, to earn the right to mate with a female who was three times their size.

a brood of ravens spilled out of a cliffside nest, loudly demanding to be fed. a roe deer bounced over a barbed wire fence to reach the juicy tree bark in the woods beyond.

Because this wasn’t on the Beeb, it was not David attenborough describing the scenes, but actor Sean Bean, whose earthy Yorkshire growl carries echoes of his role as a warlord in the blood- drenched fantasy series Game Of Thrones.

When flurries of snow fell in april and covered the nesting lapwings, Sean snarled: ‘Winter returns!’

For a moment this wasn’t Wensleydale, but Westeros — and the lapwings were in danger of being roasted by dragons or trampled by armies of the undead.

Clearly, Channel 5 has some way to go before it perfects the art of the soothing nature documentary.

But Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, the writers and stars of Inside No 9 ( BBC2), have certainly perfected the art of the dark short story. Their half-hour comic dramas are as seamlessly crafted as the best of Roald Dahl’s Tales Of The Unexpected.

This final episode in the series guest-starred Felicity Kendal as a blind bonkbuster novelist and Morgana Robinson as an alcoholic attention- seeker, trapped in an art gallery.

The main exhibit was comedian Peter Kay, who was impaled on two blades protruding from a rocking chair.

It was a gory coup de grace to a collection of stories that weren’t so much disturbing as deranged. Best of the lot was the office party at a karaoke club, where most of the plot was acted out in the lyrics of cheesy pop songs. It was breath-takingly clever.

The duo were sometimes too self- consciously artful, particularly in a tale set in a Cambridge don’s study where cryptic crossword clues were used to gradually revealed a murder plot.

and they need to curb their urge to cram jokes into every crevice: this time, Pemberton was a health & safety inspector called Kenneth Williams, which meant a lot of ‘ooh, matron’ and ‘infamy, infamy’.

The humour worked better when it was as twisted as the narrative. Studying his own reflection in a pool of Peter Kay’s blood, Shearsmith’s pretentious college lecturer mused: ‘This could be part of the art installation.’

Then he gave the corpse a kick, to make sure it was dead.

Viciously funny stuff, if you’ve the stomach for it.