How to wow your harem ... Big Daddy belly-flops and blubber!
Ladies, if you share your telly sofa with a chap whose tum is better padded than the velour cushions, take a long, admiring look. The way his shirt strains to meet his waistband . . . the way his shoulders wobble when he laughs ... the way his thighs touch when his knees are a yard apart ... he cultivates it all for you.
Millions of years of evolution have embedded an instinct for blubber into the male of the species. Well, it works for the grey seal at least, as a beautifully filmed segment on Wild Britain (C5) revealed.
This wildlife documentary series, drawing on the talents of many of the same cameramen who film sir david attenborough’s global spectaculars, shows us the fascinating animals hidden in our own island landscape.
We watched vast flocks of wading birds called knots on the Norfolk coast, surging through the air like a swarm of gyrating insects. Guillemots thronged the cliffs on anglesey, shielding their chicks from predatory black backed gulls.
But the real drama was happening on seal beach, where a piebald male was guarding his harem in a running battle with the local young bucks.
any human Lothario carrying that much flab would be labelled obese. The only TV show he’d star in would be something medical, probably crammed with warnings about diabetes. But in the seal world, he was Big daddy.
His signature move was a bellyflop, setting the whole beach a-tremble. it made the girl seals go weak at the flippers.
When rivals rushed him, sinking their teeth into his neck rolls, he shook them off and sent them reeling. He flattened his biggest challenger into the sand by lying on his head.
all this heavyweight seal wrestling was bad news for Big daddy’s littlest pups, who were in danger of being crushed to death if they strayed from their mother’s sides.
Narrator Hugh Bonneville made the most of the jeopardy, going into each ad break on a cliffhanger: would Big daddy’s reign survive the next coup? Could a tiny pup with vanilla fur avoid getting squished?
Most viewers would have stayed tuned, even without the artificial tension. Wildlife footage this good is always compelling TV. Hugh did flounder with the tiger beetles, which live in dunes and dig burrows for their larvae in the sand. The young had maggotty bodies with armour-plated heads, covered in bristles.
‘a face only a mother could love,’ murmured the downton abbey actor, like Lord Grantham struggling for something polite to say at a dinner party.
He would have been at even more of a loss if he’d met Chase, a Chinese Crested lapdog on The World’s Ugliest Pets (iTV).
Chase was a sweet-natured little mutt, but to describe him as pig-ugly would be doing a terrible disservice to porkers everywhere.
He had no teeth, so his tongue lolled like ham sliding out of a sandwich. Cataracts had turned his eyes different colours, and he walked sideways on tiptoes, like a crab.
almost all the ugly pets presenter Caroline Quentin met were hairless, from the sphinx cats to Rhea the bald love bird.
‘Usually,’ admitted Caroline, ‘when i’m this close to a bird with no feathers, i’m about to eat it.’
There wasn’t much point to this show, other than the opportunity to marvel at some less-than-lovely animals that somehow won our hearts.
Chase came third in the ‘world’s ugliest’ contest in California — if Caroline had really wanted to win, she should have taken Big daddy.
HOCUS POCUS OF THE NIGHT: Aged 65, astrologer Russell Grant finally learned to swim on 100 Years Younger In 21 Days (ITV). But as a February child — his star sign is Aquarius, the water symbol — surely swimming should come to him naturally.