The fourth of the five episodes was about dolphins and intelligence. Chris is still wearing the same T-shirt(s) – I wonder how many of that model-T he has.
The shape of the programme was the same as the others; start with a well-loved vertebrate (elephant, ostrich, bat (OK – partly loved in this case), dolphin and horse next week) and go back a very long way in time to some CGI of a squidgy marine organism and then trace the evolution from squidginess to the trait being examined (size, reproduction, feeding, intelligence and, to come, locomotion) via some fossils and shots of the present-day well-loved organism (and well-loved Mr Packham). It works well. The most interesting bits are always the crucial evolutionary steps along the way (and checking out Chris’s T-shirts in a wide variety of exotic locations).
In this episode the Tapir was a bit of a star and the vaguely Tapir-like ancestor which went back into the seas and (it’s a bit more complicated than this) evolved into dolphins was very good.
I’m looking forward to the final episode because the last of any series like this is always designed to send you away remembering how good the series has been and there is always the jeopardy that Chris might wear a range of different T-shirts in this programme. My guess is that the BBC is not highly-evolved enough to think that would be very funny.
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