cats
Marina Vaizey
A gorgeous white horse with flowing mane, poised and alert in a rocky landscape next to a watchful lion, is an extraordinary study of suppressed tension. A wistful North American moose, a herd animal living on its own on the Duke of Richmond’s estate; a monkey about to eat a crab apple – these are some of the subjects depicted by that artist of genius, the Liverpudlian George Stubbs (1724-1806). Just under 30 paintings, drawings and prints gathered from private and public collections worldwide tell a story well beyond the equine subjects for which Stubbs is best known.His father was a currier Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This slightly ludicrous programme is really a chance to see a charming range of dogs and cats, based on an assumption that by comparing cats and dogs we humans can decide which species is best. But best for what? As pets, domestic companions, survivors in the human jungle?Both species have survived indeed by attaching themselves in one way and another to various human societies, and even managing in certain societies to be worshipped as divine beings, Egypt being a prime example, while now some Asian countries see dogs as a food source. Well, they eat guinea pigs in South America; one country Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The clinically white buildings of the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Medicine, nickname Dick Vet, are just outside Edinburgh, with departments for wildlife, exotic animals, domestic pets and large animals, from horses to cattle. It was founded by William Dick, a human anatomist, in 1823. It is among the top 10 such schools in the world, and came to worldwide fame by cloning Dolly the sheep.This octet of short programmes looking at the life of the school over the past several years examines just what animal medicine can mean, and at a level of expertise that most of the human world would Read more ...
Graham Fuller
What happened to Harry Lime during the war that he slid into iniquity, or was he always a swine? What cracked in him so badly that he sold diluted penicillin that gave children meningitis? What rat-like instincts of survival prompted him to betray his Czech lover so that the Russians would evict her from Austria? And why did he summon the hapless Holly Martins from America to join his racket? Was it that he could rely on Holly to be dazzled and dominated by him, as he must have been 20 years before at school?These and other questions – comprising the mystery within the mystery – are left Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Peter Perrett (b. 1952) is best known as the singer and songwriter of The Only Ones, a group who originally flared to brilliant life between 1976 and 1981. Born to an English policeman-turned-builder and a mother whose immediate heritage lay amid the tragedy of Austria’s 20th-century Jewry, Perrett grew up in London. Already precociously bohemian, at 16 he ran away with his girlfriend, Xenoulla “Zena” Kakoulli. She would prove to be his lifelong soulmate and partner.By the mid-Seventies the pair were making a decent living, involved in London’s cannabis underworld, and Perrett put together Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The musical that defined an era is back on the West End, allowing a new generation to see what all the fuss was about 33 years ago when a non-narrative extravaganza as heavy on dance and scenic effects as it was light on plot launched itself in London and, soon after, the world. The terpsichorean ambition of Cats is holding up pretty well now, it must be said, thanks in large part to a new breed of triple-threat performer whose movement skills were harder to come by three decades ago.And if the second half of the TS Eliot-inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber/Trevor Nunn collaboration trails off into Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Cats have had a harder time adapting to humans than humans to cats, as this remarkable examination of contemporary feline habits points out. It is not always easy changing from wild animal to feline friend, as the programme put it. Nocturnal hunters now have a life in the daytime, but they are still solo rather than pack animals. While a dog will cling to his pack – his human family – the cat susses out the physical territory on its own, seeing how safe it is and where to hide if necessary.The hundred cats under observation in this three-part study – to come are hunters at night, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Changing perceptions” is the byline that Mitsubishi gives to its sponsorship of Channel 4’s documentary slot. Animal-lovers, a constituency that surely makes up a sizable part of evening viewers, will certainly have come away from Matt Rudge’s bizarrely entertaining film All Creatures Great and Stuffed with their perceptions changed.Against the background of more tradit animal shows like the BBC’s current Our Zoo, not to mention the innumerable lives, secret or otherwise, of cats and dogs that frolick their way periodically through the schedules, Rudge’s study of the astonishing growth of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Mid-week at 9pm has always struck me as the perfect televisual sweet spot. It’s not so close to the weekend that you’re likely to want to go out, but enough of the week is done that it seems right to put your feet up and relax with a glass of wine and some exciting new drama or challenging documentary. Or, if you’re Channel 4, an hour on the 'professional pets' that the internet has helped launch to viral fame.Of course, advertisers recognised the purchase power of 'cute' long before Grumpy Cat and her ilk were but a twinkle in YouTube’s eye; with the Andrex Puppy and Dulux mascot being only Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Britain, as Tamsin Greig’s soothing voiceover told us at the top of this hour, is a nation in love with its animals. Still, it’s unlikely that BBC Two is betting the house on this docu-soap, which will follow the lives of 10 students through their final year at the Royal Veterinary College and which is screening every night for the rest of this week. The cynic in me expects that the channel had a few too many episodes and not enough weeks before the next series of The Apprentice was due to begin.Which is a bit of a shame because, although Young Vets is hardly reinventing the genre - unless Read more ...
Simon Munk
A minus mark for this puzzle game for cannily, if cheesily, being named to hitch a ride on the wildly-popular MineCraft phenomenon. And another minus mark for its barely-a-concept-at-all of mashing together two massively enjoyable and enduring puzzle game series into one.MouseCraft takes the block shapes from Tetris - literally the exact same block shapes: the square one, the S-shaped one, the long-thin one, the L-shaped one – and adds them to a very slightly reworked version of Lemmings.Here, mice are sent scurrying across a laboratory maze by a fiendish cat scientist. The mice must get to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There is a saying that dogs have owners but cats have staff, and it's an axiom forcibly borne out by this new three-part series. The felines in question are Sumatran tiger cubs rather than primped and pampered household pets, but they're so rare, and so prone to the tigerish equivalent of infant mortality, that Australia Zoo's tiger expert Giles Clark decided to rear them at his family home.Like a first-time father, he was soon looking gaunt and haggard on three hours sleep a night, worn to a frazzle by leaping up to tend to the faintest mew or gurgle from the celebrity kittens. At first Read more ...