Once upon a time in Siberia, a lady woolly mammoth is walking across the landscape. She is in her late 50s, but she’s had a good life – eight baby woolly mammoths, and another that sadly died, or was eaten. She stoops down to the water to drink. Although this is during the last ice age, it’s summer and the ground is boggy. She gets stuck. The more she struggles to get free, the more stuck she becomes. Predators – wolves, wolverines, cave lions perhaps – become aware of her predicament. They attack from behind. It’s an ignoble end for a noble animal.
It’s not the end of the story, though. Around 40,000 years later, in 2013, she returns, emerging tusks-first from the ice. She has been remarkably preserved in the permafrost – not just bones, but skin and flesh – meat that’s pink, fresh almost. Blood too, seeping out on to the ice. And maybe, just maybe … DNA.
She is whisked away to the freezing city of Yakutsk (woollies required), for Woolly Mammoth: The Autopsy (Channel 4, Sunday). It is more of a scrum than an autopsy: who knew there were so many mammoth experts in the world? This animal might have escaped the scavengers thousands of years ago by sinking into a peaty bog; now she’s out, they are all over her, human jackals and vultures and flies. Hungry for knowledge, they dig and drill, fighting over scraps of flesh, poo and blood, before the stench becomes too much and she has to be refrozen.
It is macabre and a bit disturbing. Also extraordinary and brilliant that an animal from 40,000 years ago is here, not a fossil but very much an animal, in the flesh. And it is extraordinary too what they can tell, from her teeth and tusks and the contents of her stomach, about her life and her babies, even that one of them didn’t make it. And, from the torn skin on her hindquarters and the marks on her bones, about how that life ended. CSI: Yakutsk, basically.
That’s not the end of the story, either. Because, among the experts, there are people more concerned with the future than the past. So a Korean biotech company has got some prime cuts of meat, which it is slicing up, very thin. Mmm, aged carpaccio of mammoth? No, it is searching for a complete genome, with a view to cloning. The Mammoth Returns. Not long ago that would have been pure science fiction, now it could – might – actually happen.
And there is an east-west mammoth race going on, too. Because, meanwhile, in Boston, a man called George Church is playing God (looking a bit like God too, as it happens) in a different way. He plans to insert mammoth DNA into an elephant genome, to add mammothy features such as hair and extra fat. Not a complete clone then, but a genetically modified “mammophant”, and he wants to make 100,000, which would roam the northern tundra. It might save it too, as it happens, and the planet, safeguarding the future by bringing back the past. It’s brilliant. There are no losers (think of the tourism opportunities). Certainly more exciting than reintroducing red kites to the Chilterns. And why stop at mammoths? Why not go the full Jurassic Park?
The past returns in Remember Me (BBC1, Sunday) too, even if we don’t yet understand what past or whose, how or why. Gwyneth Hughes’s three-part ghost story (made by Mammoth Screen, incidentally) is terrifying, right from the off. A dark bundle, a body, apparently dead, lies on the beach, washed by the waves. Then it moves. Or does it? Yes, and it rises up, along with the hairs on my forearms, and we are only a couple of minutes in.
That’s how it goes on. It is fabulous full-on spooksville under an ominous black Yorkshire sky (the tourist board might not be overjoyed, though it does look beautiful). Things go bump upstairs, old Tom falls downstairs, or pretends to, so he can go to the old people’s home, where there’s a mysterious death. There are photos that come to life, and ill-advised night-time entry to Tom’s creepy house, where the electricity has been cut off, though not apparently the water ... And who the hell lit the fire, and the candles?
Tom is played by Michael Palin in his first big TV drama role since GBH, in 1991. I don’t quite believe him as curmudgeonly old man. Which is probably less about the performance and more to do with association: yeah, but that’s Michael Palin, officially the world’s nicest man.
I’m still dead scared though. Hooked too. And I’m going to get that dripping tap in our bathroom sorted, quick, before it’s too late.
