Are iguanas that live off their own bones the cure for obesity?
ADMIT it, this time last year you couldn’t tell a marine iguana from the French politician Marine Le Pen. One is an amphibious reptile, one’s a Frog... what’s the difference?
But now Madame Le Pen could be the next President de la Republique — and the iguana is the most talked-about animal on telly. Last autumn, Sir David Attenborough’s Planet earth II showcased astounding footage of racer snakes hunting baby iguanas in packs, as the cute-but-ugly little lizards emerged from eggs in the sand and scuttled for the safety of the shoreline.
Naturalist Liz Bonnin is wowing us again with iguana facts, in Galapagos (BBC1), a three-part documentary from the volcanic archipelago 1,000 miles off the Pacific coast of South America.
Charles Darwin, who first dreamed up his theory of evolution on the Galapagos, detested marine iguanas. He called them ‘hideous-looking imps of darkness’.
But tubby old Darwin didn’t realise that these creatures might harbour the secret of ultimate weight loss and the answer to the Western world’s obesity crisis.
In times of famine, they not only burn fat — they actually shrink, by digesting their own bones. No other vertebrate can do that. Imagine the fortune to be made by a low- calorie iguana- based supplement, that promises to help you shed inches round your hips... not by trimming flab but by dissolving your pelvis.
Galapagos is a uniquely odd place, and this show reflected it with a collection of truly bizarre reports. Liz was helicoptered to the rim of an active volcano and sent half a mile below the sea’s surface to vacuum up starfish — and treated it all with a professional calm.
In fact, as she confessed to me when I interviewed her earlier this month, filming this series was the most extreme experience of her career and sometimes terrifying.
‘Galapagos was challenging,’ she said. ‘ I was wishing I’d done more scuba dives first — I’m not that proficient and I need to get better.’
Most presenters would have used that to turn the focus of the show on to themselves. But although Liz didn’t try to hide her excitement — ‘That experience has officially trumped anything I’ve done in my entire life,’ she gasped, emerging from an eight ton mini-sub — she refused to let her attention wander from the strictly scientific.
The deep-water exploration was hypnotic. Liz told me she spent seven hours down there, and it felt like a few minutes.
The whole of the first programme could have been devoted to this adventure alone. But if we’d waited too long to see the iguanas, they might have evaporated altogether.
The wait for bank robber Cliff (Alun Armstrong) and his idiot sons to tunnel into an underground vault on Prime Suspect 1973 (ITV) has been interminable. each week, we’ve sat in the grimy cafe cellar next door and watched them chipping through concrete at the rate of three inches per ad break.
In the final moments of this week’s instalment, they finally broke through... and immediately blew the bank up, by taking a blowtorch to an oxyacetelene cylinder. If they’d done that in the first place, we’d have reached the safety deposit boxes four weeks ago.
Heroine Jane Tennison’s detective lover, DI Bradfield (Sam Reid) was caught in the blast. His survival chances don’t look good — an actor this wooden will either be incinerated or blown to splinters.
Most probably, there is nothing left of him now. He’s just varnished...