I feel lucky to have made it this far through life without too many horrific mental images, but episode one of Eamonn & Ruth’s 7 Year Itch (Channel 5) has doubled the number in just one night. The daytime-TV presenters have been married for seven years, and are exploring ways to deal with the apparent marriage flashpoint, for which the answer apparently is to go to a swingers’ party or see a “sex surrogate”. I haven’t thought about Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes’s sex life for some months – not since she accidentally tweeted a picture of a penis in a shoe. Now I can think of nothing else.
Langsford is as likable as always; it’s the images of Holmes I can’t shift: mounting a cross in a dominatrix’s sex dungeon; doing an “ooh, ouch” narration over some kind of butt plug; suggestively sucking up a strand of spaghetti at the swingers’ place, blindfolded. Every time I close my eyes, I can see him caressing a robotic sex doll’s lifelike hand. Perhaps worse is what is left to the imagination – Langsford and Holmes heading off into the woods for a bit of alfresco unpleasantness, hoping to rekindle sparks of passion, though that could just be the static off Holmes’s fleece.
It’s all a joke, of course (maybe). The couple’s “acting” was charmingly bad – worse even than the faux squabbling they do on This Morning – and while there were some interesting morsels (the BDSM dungeon owner reported that the numbers of men seeking a spanking went up during the Thatcher years), I’ve learned more from smuttier documentaries. But I loved the couple who liked to do it in the woods. “Sometimes I’m just walking along and the outside air and the privacy in the woods, and I just start feeling horny,” says Maurice, grinning. He “wiggles his bum a little bit” says his wife Hayley, making it sound like a nature documentary, and off they go into the bushes. They also like to do it in the car (500 times in 18 months!) and there was a reconstruction of the time the vigorous rocking of their Ford Focus attracted a passing jogger, who stopped for a look. “Hey ho, we aren’t hurting anybody,” says Hayley (they’re not into BDSM, then).
The three-part Tribes, Predators & Me (BBC2) concluded in Ethiopia, where it is said there are more hyenas than anywhere else. This is a predator, wildlife cameraman and presenter Gordon Buchanan points out, that is not revered, but reviled. He meets the Bodi tribe, who retaliate when hyenas kill their livestock, and in a gloriously ghoulish bit, he gets to know the hyenas who hang around a graveyard in Harar, eastern Ethiopia, and will dig up the bodies given the chance. Even so, says Buchanan, the city has “the most radical view of hyenas anywhere in the world … here people have lived alongside hyenas for centuries”.
The ending is a bit simplistic – Baradi, one of the Bodi elders, and his daughter, come to Harar to meet the hyenas Buchanan has tamed with bones and bits of meat. He wants to convince them that all hyenas need is a bit of understanding (and free food), and miraculously Baradi’s lifelong hatred of the beasts appears changed.
But it has been a fascinating series, looking at feared predators through the eyes of those who live closest to them (last week’s episode with the nomadic families in Mongolia who hunt with golden eagles was stunning). I winced slightly when Buchanan talked about the Bodis’ “nobility”, but he has been a respectful, gentle visitor.
He’s a much warmer companion than the brusque and dramatic Noel Fitzpatrick, otherwise known as The Supervet (Channel 4), although I think his bark is worse than his bite. It’s 8pm at his hi-tech veterinary surgery, and an emergency case has been brought in. Lulu, a lovely staffie, has been hit by a car. Fitzpatrick is not reassuring. The x-ray is “really bad”. Her pelvic fracture is “horrendous”. One side, he says, “is completely, catastrophically exploded”. He raises the spectre of euthanasia. Lulu’s family want to give her a chance, which entails putting in 13 giant pins to hold her pelvis together until it heals, followed by weeks of manually “expressing” her bladder several times a day.
A couple of months on, all the dogs – there’s also Florence, a giant schnauzer who’s had a knee replacement, and Muffin, a jack russell, whose back legs didn’t work – are doing well. Lulu has even done an autonomous wee! Zoe, her owner, reports this to Fitzpatrick with pride and excitement. “Be cautious,” he says, gravely. “I’m reluctant to jump up and down yet.” Out in the car park, Zoe is miffed, as you would be: “Bit disappointed he’s put a dampener on the wee situation.” Still, Fitzpatrick and his team are amazing.
