On the box: Frozen Planet | Spooks | The Slap

IT’S 18 years since Sir David Attenborough’s Life In The Freezer but one stunning image has stayed with me: that of a penguin narrowly escaping becoming lunch for a psychotic porpoise.

As it hirpled back on to the ice, white front spattered with blood, barnet askew, Pingu looked like young George Osborne in full Bullingdon Club attire after a town vs gown altercation with local yobs (though, of course, back in 1993, George was not yet known to the wider world and may still have been calling himself Gideon).

Frozen Planet returned Sir David to minus 70C temperatures for a look at life, and the obligatory sex and death, at both poles. He’s never been north before but some of the opener felt quite familiar, though that’s probably down to previous Attenboroughs being so brilliantly vivid and this palpable truth: there are only so many ways to skin a penguin.

Everyone remembers the killer whale vacuuming up a beachful of seals in Life On Earth; here a gang of them toyed with Sammy on its lonesome on a crumbling floe before dragging the exhausted animal to the depths.

Improved filming techniques enable Sir David to describe the killings in ever-finer detail. Great, if that’s what rocks your floe. Is it just me or does this series feature more death than earlier ones?

Maybe satellite channel fang-fests of gorillas being eaten by crocs which are flattened by heffalumps which are killed by lions before a python swallows everything whole have caused the BBC’s Natural History Unit to up the gore score. But it could be just me, for I’ve always been jessie-ish about depictions of the animal kingdom’s natural order.

Incredible footage all the same. In an ungodly Roger Dean snowscape (none more ungodly, as all prog-rock fans know), I followed those wolves right up to the point when they were about to confer on the probable weakling in the herd of bison after it had made the fatal mistake of wandering from the woods. And, like all Attenboroughs these days, this one comes with grim predictions, re climate change. (They didn’t always, something which brought the great man rare criticism).

Shortly before the last ever Spooks, I was surprised to pass a news-stand and see Harry and Ruth staring out at me from the cover of a magazine devoted to soap operas. Spooks isn’t a soap, I bristled, as any child of the Cold War would, and especially one whose bullet-firing Secret Sam attaché case never left his side, back in the day. But when I thought about it, the endgame for ten series of will-they-won’t-they? – a classic unfulfilled romance complicated by classic British reserve, further complicated by its protagonists being spies and as Ruth put it, “You and I, we’re made of secrets” – was one every soap would have killed for.

The final episode also featured another attaché case, Russian-issue, and an in-flight bomb threat, target: London, but who gave a toss about that? Ruth urged Harry to leave M15 with her but you just knew they’d never make it to their cottage by the sea with the green door. She was stabbed through the heart by the lad who wasn’t, after all, Harry’s son. Well, Harry couldn’t be the one to die. Like Casualty’s Charlie, who he vaguely resembles, he’s fated to be back at his post on Monday no matter what, for ever. As he faded to negative in the closing shot – the most rudimentary of special-effects dating from 1960s Bacofoil-suited sci-fi, but still chilling – this was supposed to be the last we’ll see of him, but I wouldn’t be so sure.

The novel on which The Slap is based divided my wife’s baby group, but everyone kept reading for its lurid depiction of the fall-out from a ghastly barbecue in the Melbourne suburbs where an obnoxious boy is thumped by an adult, and after the first episode of the TV version I’m hooked.