It’s simples! For a super wildlife film, give a camera to a meerkat

Everybody loves a meerkat. Like a spaniel crossed with a squirrel, that thinks it’s a kitten, this adorably inquisitive creature has been a natural telly star ever since a delightful wildlife documentary on bbC1 in the early Nineties called Meerkats United.

but over the years we’ve seen them from every angle — from studies of their family dynamics in david Attenborough’s Africa, to breeding programmes in captivity on The Secret Life of The Zoo. Surely Tv has nothing new to tell us about meerkats?

Naturalist Gordon buchanan found a revolutionary way to reveal their habits and personalities, in Animals With Cameras (bbC1). Clipping minuscule video devices around the necks of two young animals, nicknamed eve and Fat boy, in a wild meerkat colony that is used to humans, he was able to show us exactly how they see the world.

That was entertaining enough when meerkat Fat boy got into a dust-up with a teenage cousin and rolled around in the Kalahari sand — while sensible eve went digging for grubs to feed her hungry nieces and nephews.

but it became extraordinary when eve dived into her burrow — and the camera switched to night enough to withstand attention from its furry camera crew.

Four-year- old Kim bang, an orphaned chimpanzee in Cameroon, delivered a wonderful tree-top sequence in the opening episode — but not before she had trashed one camera harness after another.

The clever chimp even worked out how to switch the camera off. She’ll be joining the broadcasters’ union next.

All this innovation costs money — a resource plainly absent from the detective documentary Wartime Crime (yesterday channel). by the look of it, the budget barely ran to a pack of biscuits.

Three or four re- enactment clips, just a couple of seconds long, were repeated endlessly, in this story of sex maniacs on the prowl in World War II berlin and London. A woman in a Forties hat threw her hand over her face, a policeman under a bare light bulb picked up the phone.

It’s a pity, because the first investigation in particular was a shocking tale. on the S-bahn, berlin’s suburban railway, an employee stalked lone female passengers and murdered them horribly. He was hunted down by commissioner Wilhelm Ludtke, an anti-Nazi who faced exile to the russian front if he didn’t solve the case.

His secret weapon? Policemen in drag. This was a great tale, rather wasted.