CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews the weekend’s TV: What does Stephen Fry give his 30-ton pet dino? Lots of walkies!
Dinosaur With Stephen Fry ****
Guy Martin’s Great British Power Trip ***
Stephen Fry has discovered the ultimate designer pet — a 30-ton dinosaur that uses its tail as a tripod to sit up on its back legs and beg like a poodle.
Mind you, imagine the size of the treats you’d need to train your saurodoodle. And suppose it wanted to sleep on the end of your bed. That thing is the size of five elephants.
In fact, the beast was called a diplodocus and it lived 155 million years ago, before flowers and grass even began to evolve. Yet special effects made it seem as if Fry was really walking beside this monster.
The Natural History Museum does have a pet diplodocus, of course. It’s a replica fossil skeleton called Dippy. Being a bit of a bookworm, I’d rather have a bronte-saurus. I’d call it Emily.
Palaeontology is evolving almost as fast as television’s CGI technology. New dinosaur species are being discovered by scientists several times a month, and new TV series are recreating Jurassic life on Earth nearly as frequently.
Christopher Stevens: ‘Dinosaur With Stephen Fry (C5) is less ambitious but more informative’
After the spectacular Prehistoric Planet show narrated by Sir David Attenborough for Apple TV last year, Dinosaur With Stephen Fry (C5) is less ambitious but more informative.
Dino experts including Dr Dean Lomax and Dr Susie Maidment pop up in the Mesozoic Era, to explain the latest discoveries. As a child, I was taught that sauropods, the biggest animals ever to walk the planet, were so heavy that they had to live in swamps so that their colossal bulk could be supported by water.
But fossil analysis has proved they were actually light enough to stand up on two legs, stretching their long necks to reach the topmost leaves. Since they needed to eat three-quarters of a ton of veg a day, this trick came in useful.
Their long tails were not only used for balance but for lashing with a crack like a bullwhip, perhaps as a mating signal but also for defence. And they needed to look after themselves, because predators called allosauruses would rush at them, slashing bites from their living flesh.
All this was recreated in front of the presenter’s eyes. The studio was set up so that, as he talked to the camera, he could watch himself on monitors with the dinosaurs all around him. ‘It’s only when you’re standing next to one that you get an idea of how huge these animals are,’ he declared.
He’s a happy soul, willing to have a go at anything, even shinning up an electricity pylon
Guy Martin was standing beside an even bigger extinct behemoth on his Great British Power Trip (C4).
Once, the power station at Eggborough in Yorkshire burned 200 tons of coal an hour, generating enough electricity to light up all of Sheffield and Leeds. Now it’s redundant — and Guy had the privilege of pressing the button that blew it up, felling the towering smokestack chimney and reducing the burner to a heap of twisted metal.
‘We’re knocking places like this down,’ he mused. ‘How are we going to keep the lights on, that’s the question?’
The real question was how he was going to fill the hour building up to the spectacular demolition. Some of it was decidedly dull: at one point, Guy was measuring the power load of appliances in his workshop. He found it costs 4p to boil his kettle. Fancy that.
But he’s a happy soul, willing to have a go at anything, even shinning up an electricity pylon. That looked scary, until we saw a 1950s National Grid information film, with men vaulting over the metal rigging like circus acrobats.
No harness, no helmets, no hi-viz . . . that’s the Jurassic era of health-and-safety.