Hive Alive
BBC2, 8pm
In a hasty decision to have more “days out” I recently visited an ant farm with my fiancée. The fascination with watching a worker ant carry a leaf along a piece of rope had a limit (of about five minutes), but I found their display of the inner workings of a beehive absolutely captivating. Did you know a honeybee toils its entire lifetime (with no sleep) to make just a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey? Chris Packham does and much more besides.
Talk To The Animals
BBC1, 8pm
My fiancée is an animal lover (hence the visit to Ant World) and has started feeding treats to a cat that regularly visits our garden. After a couple of nights another cat turned up and waited at the same spot on the patio. The only explanation is that they’d communicated with each other that this was the place to go when you’re hungry. They’re far from being the only species that does this (I mean communicate with each other, not come to our door for free food) as zoologist Lucy Cooke demonstrates in this two-part documentary. She travels to Africa and North America to show the social nature of mongooses, hippos, chimpanzees and the Panamanian tungara frog.
BBC2, 8pm
You’ll be learning something new every hour this week, let alone every day (now the World Cup is over the science bods are coming out to play). In Operation Cloud Lab a team of boffins take to the skies for a unique exploration of Earth’s atmosphere. Did you know the Earth generates 1.4 trillion tonnes of rainfall each day? And the majority of it doesn’t fall in Scotland.
Sky Atlantic, 9.35pm
Lightening the atmosphere is the return of two of the best comedies on television. The last time we saw Vice President Selina Meyer she was launching her campaign for the top job. With a team of incompetents behind her, there’s plenty of scope for comedy and Armando Iannucci’s razor-sharp script doesn’t disappoint.
Channel 4, 10pm
The laughs in The Mimic are of a softer, more heartfelt nature. Gifted impressionist Martin Hurdle (Terry Mynott) is a semi-tragic figure who narrates his own failings in the voices of Morgan Freeman and Terry Wogan, among others.