Professor David Scheel, the presenter of a BBC2 documentary on Thursday, instantly brought to mind that American scientist in The Fast Show: bearded, bespectacled, softly spoken and willing to try an experiment just for the hell of it. A marine biologist in Alaska, Scheel has been studying octopuses (his own preferred plural, incidentally) for 25 years. But what, he whispered excitedly, ‘would I find out if I invited an octopus into my house?’
Well, one obvious answer we got from the starkly titled The Octopus in My House is that a TV film crew would be happy to show up and record what happened — which was essentially that he and his 16-year-old daughter Laurel spent a lot of time peering wonderingly into the animal’s tank.
Then again, there was plenty to wonder at. As Scheel pointed out more than once, all forms of intelligent life — birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, us — developed along the same evolutionary pathway.
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