Attenborough’s Life In Colour
McDonald And Dodds
Rating: 
During his seven decades at the Beeb, teaching us about the marvels of the animal kingdom, Sir David Attenborough must have heard some daft questions.
But there can’t have been many more stupid than the one I blurted in our phone interview last month, as he enthused about his latest documentary, Attenborough’s Life In Colour (BBC1). ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘aren’t elephants blue?’
He’d just been explaining that some smaller dinosaurs may have been brightly coloured, though not the really big ones: ‘Huge brontosaurs don’t need colour,’ he pointed out, ‘like elephants.’
What an interesting thought. Gigantic creatures, then and now, from the diplodocus to the sperm whale to the rhino, are all grey. And while my brain was processing this revelation, my mouth carried on independently. I asked about the non-blueness of the elephant.
David Attenborough examines the nature of camouflage and other reasons for animal markings in Attenborough’s Life In Colour
Part of Sir David’s immense personal charm is his patience. Instead of snorting with derision, he replied as though the question merited an answer: ‘Elephants don’t need colour. They invested in size.’
Still flapping on automatic, my mouth carried on: ‘I suppose,’ I wondered, ‘there is no advantage to an elephant in having beautiful plumage?’ Sir David laughed, possibly in desperation. ‘They do perfectly well as it is,’ he said.
In my defence, the first episode of this endlessly thought-provoking two-part show was crammed with facts to make anyone’s head spin. Tigers don’t know they are orange, for instance. Cats lack the receptor in their eyes that can differentiate between shades of red and green.
Crucially, deer don’t have that ability either. To them, predators and jungle foliage are all the same muddy hue. Camera filters showed us how orange fur becomes perfectly camouflaged, but that was the least of the technical tricks Sir David had on display.
Ultraviolet light lenses revealed how insects perceive flowers, and what fish see as they dodge sharks around the Great Barrier Reef.
Stranger still was the fiddler crab in Darwin, Australia. It registers a two-tone world via ‘polarised light’, making it exceptionally aware of movement. The male fiddler crab has one giant claw, like the arm of a digger, which it waves in courtship.
The screen gave us an approximation of crab-vision, in a sepia world of pale and dark browns.
Hungry gulls were highlighted against the sky like electric shadows — at the first distant twitch of a wing, the fiddlers fled for their burrows.
When Sir David started out, television was all greys. The first programme he wrote and produced, he told me, was about animals and camouflage. Because there were no colour sets, he called it The Pattern Of Animals.
That show was live and, sadly, it was not recorded. I did ask whether he’d make another series about colour in nature: ‘It has taken me 70 years to come back to the topic,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if I’m in for another 70.’ Ah well, ask a silly question . . .
Silly questions abounded in McDonald And Dodds (ITV), an all-star mystery so improbable it makes Midsomer Murders seem like a true-crime podcast.
Martin Kemp, Patsy Kensit, Cathy Tyson and Rupert Graves played four Eighties icons who went ballooning with their blackmailer, and contrived to jettison him over Bath.
Instead of arresting the lot of them, our detective duo (Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins) joined forces with a pedantic air accident investigator (Rob Brydon).
Condensed to 60 minutes, this froth would be mildly distracting and sometimes entertaining. But stretched across two hours, it became dull well before the end.