Animal Instincts

The new television service is bearing wonderful fruit. Last night I discovered a whole channel devoted to detectives (fictional, not that nasty true life stuff). The Alibi channel has Murder She Wrote, Taggart, Bergerac, Dalziel and Pascoe and Shoestring. What delights! I shall look forward to spending some quality time with these guys over the weekend.

Elsewhere on a channel called something like Thriller Zone, we came across Manimal. A relic from the 1980s that I’d heard of but never seen. “This should be right up your street” harrumphed the OH, before going in the other room to listen to sport on the radio. The premise of the show is (I quote) “a man who can change himself into any animal fights crime”.

To say it is ridiculous would be a huge understatement. From the bits I saw, this man (played by Simon McCorkendale, who I’d seen before in “Death on the Nile” and is a poor man’s Remington Steele) turned himself into a parrot so that he could eavesdrop on a conversation and a big cat so he could scare some villains. You didn’t see much of the big cat (presumably because of budgetary restrictions) hence my inability to say for sure whether it was a lion or tiger, but we did get several close-ups of the parrot looking thoughtful. The day was ultimately saved by an elephant, but it turned out that this was an actual elephant, rather than our man in disguise.