For once po-faced Paul has a laugh — thanks to a man in a monkey suit

THANK heavens Paul O’Grady has stopped being so earnest for one moment. The man with the sharpest tongue on TV has gone all bleeding-heart on us in recent weeks, joining the Salvation Army and spending evenings on his knees, washing the feet of the homeless.

This weekend promises to get worse, when he flies to Athens on BBC1’s Sally Army And Me to hand out food parcels to rivers of migrants. O’Grady, let’s not forget, is the comedian who made his reputation as acid-tongued drag queen Lily Savage. Now he’s like Larry Grayson with a Mother Teresa complex.

But he wasn’t taking himself quite so seriously on Animal Orphans (ITV). This frothy documentary on conservation work in Indonesia, tracking endangered green turtles and visiting orang-utan and gibbon sanctuaries, opened with a silly sketch set in 2045, at a ‘Home for the Bewildered’.

An ancient O’Grady, his dentures falling out, snuggled up on a decrepit sofa next to his best mate, Archie the orang-utan — actually a bloke in a half-hearted monkey suit. While Archie picked fleas off him, Paul moaned about how Coronation Street was all sex and violence these days. And then they settled down to watch Animal Orphans.

An hour later they were tucked up in bed like Laurel and Hardy . . . except Archie was reading a smutty magazine filled with pictures of Page Three primates. As a respite from all Paul’s ponderous preachiness, it was quite welcome.

The main show opened at Englishwoman Sue Sheward’s orang-utan rehab centre in Sepilok, Borneo, where infant apes — often rescued from the pet trade — are taught the jungle skills they will need to survive in the wild.

It’s an immense challenge, because baby orang-utans rely so heavily on their mothers, and humans are such a poor substitute. The staff can’t even take off their facemasks, for fear of passing on infectious diseases.

But by sheer force of will, Sue (inspired by a visit to Gerald Durrell’s zoo) has been able to nurture a number of apes to maturity and resettle them in the rainforest.

That’s an incredible achievement, a testament to the power of one woman’s determination and love for animals. Her work has featured on TV before, on the Animal Planet channel last year, but it’s a shame that this mainstream documentary didn’t show us much more of Sue’s mission.

Instead, O’Grady wandered off to see turtles laying eggs in the sand, something that’s been shown countless times before.

In Guatemala, another dauntless pair of animal-lovers were also rescuing orphans and teaching them to survive in the wild. New Zealander Anna Bryant and her partner, vet Alejandro Morales, were working round the clock at a rescue centre in Guatemala, central America, in Natural World: Jungle Animal Hospital (BBC2).

Like Sue, they save many of their patients from the pet trade. Alejandro wept tears of anger as he described how baby macaws were snatched from nests by poachers and stuffed into plastic bags to be sold as pets in city markets. Inevitably, 80 per cent of the birds suffocate and die in transit.

Another of their charges was a one-month-old spider monkey whose parents had been killed so the baby could be cooped up in a city apartment. The owners had become fed up of it within a few days. Returning that domesticated monkey to the wild will take five years.

There was nothing soppy about this documentary, yet it was gut-wrenchingly sad — such as Alejandro’s struggle to make a rare potoo chick eat.

He was at his surgery at 6am on his day off, coaxing the bird, which is related to our nightjar.

‘I dreamed it was dead,’ he said. ‘It was quite a hideous dream.’ But for all his devoted care, the little bird did not survive.

Maybe Sue, Anna and Alejandro face an impossible task, saving the world one spider monkey and one orang-utan at a time. But it’s an inspiration to see them try.