On the box: TV review

Published on Friday 17 April 2009 17:48

HORSE PEOPLE WITH ALEXANDRA TOLSTOY BBC2 Tuesday, 9pm RAIN BBC4 Monday, 9pm MY LIFE AS AN ANIMAL BBC3 Thursday, 9pm

CLASS, the weather and an insane love of animals – that pretty much sums us up, doesn't it? TV generously provides for all these obsessions right now. Indeed, Horse People With Alexandra Tolstoy is a two-for-one special offer, being about horses (obviously) and posh people (I've never met an Alexandra who wasn't posh; come to think of it, keelies like me don't meet Alexandras, ever). If this series had been filmed in a constant downpour it could have completed the set, but somehow I don't think it rains in Zsa-Zsa's world (I'm guessing this is how she shortens her name because Alex doesn't seem sufficiently thoroughbred; too Clydesdale carthorse).

Horse People is more easily digestible than her distant relation Leo's work. It's in three parts with one to come, and in willing the final instalment to be as spiffing as the others, I feel like Raymond Brooks-Ward cheering Lucinda Prior-Palmer to a clear round in The Horse Of The Year Show. (Joke, courtesy of my class-warrior father: instead of taking the name Green when she married, why didn't this fine showjumper call herself Lucinda Priorly-Prior-Palmer?).

You might suspect I'm watching Tolstoy's equine odyssey with a chip firmly planted on my shoulder, but she's an engaging presenter, passionate about horses and if she existed inside a Thelwell cartoon or an especially soppy episode of Black Beauty before then she's been game for anything during these programmes. In the first, she ate horse intestine in Siberia. Last week in Spain, she masturbated a stallion.

Tolstoy was assisting at a stud farm in Andalucia. The stallion was tantalised with glimpses of a mare to get it in the mood. "Horsey porn, basically," said Alexandra, and it had the desired effect. "Ohmigod!" The size of the stallion's excitement was plain to see, and our girl accepted the offer of a hard hat with gratitude.

Each shot of sperm sells for ?900. For that you're almost guaranteed "strength, beauty and calmness of temperament – qualities carefully developed over 500 years of selective breeding". I think Alexandra was talking about horses, though it may have been Tolstoy gels.

The documentary Rain turned out to be much more exciting than it sounded, mainly because our rain is much more exciting than it used to be. There's more of it, and yet we arrogantly build houses on flood plains and think we can control the elements. Thrilling footage of three big floods this century showed exactly who's boss. The destruction of a Cornwall gift shop was likened to a "bereavement" and someone else described a "ballistic scene of utter carnage". These eyewitness accounts made you wonder what had happened to good old-fashioned British reserve.

Even better than the 21st-century devastation were the stories of 19th-century scientific pioneering. James Glaisher ascended seven miles in a funfair balloon, risking death to study the clouds. His hands turned black in the freezing temperatures and Glaisher had to use his teeth to activate the ripcord, but he returned with vital info on moisture.

George Symons recruited everyone from prisoners to admirals of the fleet to help with the rainfall research which dominated 40 years of his life, formed the basis of Symons's Monthly Meteorological Magazine (a right riveting read, I'll bet) and is still what we mean when we say "since records began". Yet he's an unsung hero without a headstone. One of his few devotees stood over the unmarked grave wearing such a mournful expression that I thought he was going to cry. Oh, by the way, rain doesn't fall like tears: raindrops are flat-bottomed. I know this now.

The opening sequence of My Life As An Animal featured two horses getting familiar with each other. Aha, I thought, I know what's going to happen next. Suddenly I was shouting in a plummy accent: "Quick, mounting in progress! Someone call Alexandra!" But this footage was a teaser for a future episode; the first was entirely concerned with pigs.

As the title suggests, humans are trying to live with different four-legged creatures. To see if they can, presumably. Or maybe it's to further careers in TV, assuming we accept them back into the human world when the experiment is over. First up were Richard Da Costa, an entrepreneur, and journalist Lynsey Horn. Pigs, apparently, are the fourth most intelligent species on Earth. That was news to me, although I've always known that journalists are the fifth most intelligent.

A travel reporter with Radio Five Live, Horn was dismayed to learn that she really would be living with the pigs. This was staggering. The rules were perfectly clear, and three times in the first two minutes, presenter Rebecca Wilcox had reminded us the humans would be "sleeping where they sleep, smelling like they smell".

Horn whinged about most piggy things including the processed food, a mix of wheat, maize, barley and peas. "Even prisoners eat better than this," she moaned (I would hope so). And when an over-friendly porker bit her on the ankle she jumped the fence, prompting this reality voiceover gem: "Lynsey has asked for some time to decide whether she's able to continue her life as a pig."

Horn did little to endear herself to the pigs but Da Costa was Dolittle. He got down in the dirt with them and learned how to squeal like a hog. He's also an actor, which probably helped, but he was plucky and funny and keen to learn about pig life. At the end he was genuinely sorry to say goodbye to his pen-mates, especially since they were bound for the abattoir. "The bond was really meaningful," he said. "And I'd like to think the pigs got something out of it as well."

My Life As An Animal is barking, bleating, oinking mad. I'm not sure it's advancing our understanding of animals, as the voiceover boasts, but the continuity announcer was spot-on when she promised: "Here's an idea you've not seen before." Every year in Tellyland, Alan Partidge's lunatic proposal for a show called Monkey Tennis edges closer to being green-lit for primetime.