A poignant, moving study of love, friendship and impending death

Try not to panic, but by New year’s Day on Sunday we’re nearly into the mid- 2 0 2 0 s . . . practically a quarter of the way through the century.

How has that happened? Why is time speeding up? Isn’t there a handbrake?

For Tully and Noodles (Tony Curran and Martin Compston), it seems no time at all since they were schoolmates, clubbing to the sounds of Frankie Goes To Hollywood and New Order in the 1980s.

But the years have caught up with them, in the poignant drama Mayflies (BBC1), a two-parter adapted from Andrew O’Hagan’s novel. Tully has terminal cancer and an equally deadly sense of gallows humour.

Asking his girlfriend Anna (Ashley Jensen) to marry him, he tells her: ‘I love you with all my heart. It’s the only one of my organs that still functions.’ Noodles has the job of arranging the wedding. But that’s not his only responsibility. Terrified of a messy, drawn- out death, Tully has also asked him to organise a one-way trip to a suicide clinic in Switzerland.

Though it’s never maudlin, this portrait of male friendship and the rapid evaporation of life is unflinchingly sad. Noodles can’t bear to see his charismatic best friend so afraid, and Tully isn’t coping well. He tries to refuse chemotherapy, and he takes out his frustration and fear on Anna.

Tully retreats into the past, pogoing around his sitting room to punk rock. ‘Nothing’s changed, pal!’ he yells — except the recreational drugs of his teens have been replaced by steroids and heavy-duty painkillers.

Noodles is an idealised character, a successful writer who owes his career to an inspirational English teacher. He gives lectures to rapt audiences and, thanks to his bestsellers, can afford to treat Tully and Anna to a lavish wedding day.

But there’s nothing idealised about the depiction of cancer. The flashbacks are not sentimental either — Noodles and Tully were part of a gang of five friends, already breaking apart by the time they left school.

One died, one grew up, one never really fitted in anyway. The teenage bonds that are meant to last a lifetime rarely survive very long. That single word Mayflies has many layers of meaning.

Termites, on the other hand, appear to be eternal. A bat-eared fox can eat a million of them in a year and barely make a dent in the population, because there are dozens of termite colonies in every square mile of the African savannah, narrator Chris Packham told us on Dogs In The Wild: Meet The Family (BBC1).

To detect the rustling footsteps of a termite, these foxes have ears bigger than their heads.

When Chris told us that, I’m ashamed to say I thought of Martin Clunes, whose departure from Portwenn is being commemorated tonight over on ITV, in Farewell Doc Martin.

Foxes stole the limelight in this beautifully- shot wildlife documentary from veteran filmmaker Gavin Maxwell. The Tibetan variety was teaching her three cubs, or kits, to hunt pica, a sort of rabbity hamster.

In London, a pair of juvenile red foxes were showing off their agility, leaping into wheelie bins to scatter the contents — while in the Sahara, the desert foxes were nearly impossible to spot.

We glimpsed wolves, too, and jackals, with this three- part series aiming to showcase all 37 species of wild dogs. They included dingoes scoffing turtle eggs on an Australian beach, and dholes, an Indian dog that looks similar to the dingo.

Dholes can consume a quarter of their own bodyweight in ten minutes, apparently. I suspect my mixed-breed pooch must be part dhole.