I expected to dislike Walk on the Wild Side (BBC1, Saturday), fearing sub-Johnny Morris, anthropomorphic, animals-say-the-darndest-things whimsy. Instead it turned out to be funny, inventive and even acerbic. The notion is that comedians take genuine footage of animals from natural-history programmes, and voice-over short routines matched to the creatures’ movements, often with surreal effect. It’s hit and miss, but the hits compensate for the misses. The meerkat, for example, boasting to other meerkats about his success as an actor (they might have seen him, he says grandly, in the ‘compare the meerkat’ commercials, as his bored audience falls over). Sharks on the ocean floor sing Queen hits, and I loved the family of elephants being taken as a special treat to the ‘all-you-can-eat grass buffet’. ‘What’s for dessert, Dad?’ ‘Grass.’
There was a poignant marmot who thinks he’s seen his friend Alan, and keeps calling for him; the comic effect heightened by the fact that, from the front, the marmot looked amazingly like Timothy Spall, who had the principal role in the final episode of The Street (BBC1, Monday).
This is a show as different from Walk on the Wild Side as it could possibly be, since like all editions of The Street it was an hour of almost undiluted misery — if happiness does somehow creep under the door, it is thrown out by the scruff of its neck. In the penultimate episode, a wretched alcoholic discovers that he has a son, the result of a one-night stand with Maxine Peake (the show gets some fine actors). The lad has Down’s Syndrome, but their bonding brings real joy to both. Ha! The alkie lives in that Manchester street where nothing goes right for anyone.
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