Evolution explained

pagious/ There were pictures here and there/ So it wasn't hard to bear/

The day I read a book! Telly anthropologist Desmond Morris knows all

about putting pictures in here and there to hold the layman's flagging

attention: indeed, his new series The Human Animal (BBC1) opened its

first instalment with a long (and close) shot of a handsome young couple

walking bare-scud through a crowded shopping mall, all their belongings

on public view.

Morris's voiceover waxed rhapsodic about stuff like ''What is the

secret of this lavish, unprecedented success?'' (of human beings, that

is, and that's a begged question if ever I heard one), going on to point

out interesting things you never knew before like ''the breasts of the

female remain swollen throughout her life'' (close-up); humans are the

only primates with rounded, fleshy buttocks (close-up); and ''unlike all

other primates, the Naked Ape has only a few tufts of hair about its

body'' (close-up of man's armpit . . . and if you believe me when I say

that, you'll believe The Human Animal is a serious attempt to educate

the public).

What's more interesting to me than Morris's vapid conclusions (which

can be summed up as basically, we're all much the same and not so far

from the apes . . . only different, sort of) is the question of the

lavish, unprecedented success of Desmond Morris. You might think that

someone who has written a book (Manwatching) about human gestures and

body language would have more sense than to disguise his baldness by

adopting the Robert Robinson/Bobby Charlton style of combing it up from

the oxters and sticking it down with Araldite, but despite that

apparently fatal error of taste he's become the BBC's second-favourite

Scientist On The Telly after David Attenborough.

How? By telling you what you already know (it's hard to fake a smile .

. . making the wrong gesture in the wrong culture can get you a sore

face . . . we're all descended from monkeys, y'know . . .), making it

sound clever, and throwing in a spot of titillation every now and then,

that's how. Later in the current series we are promised a film of a

couple in the act of love, including footage shot from a place that only

a gynaecologist ever normally sees.

All in the best possible taste, and very educational, we're sure. Good

TV-science programmes leave you feeling slightly better informed for the

five minutes or so before you forget everything you've just heard, but

The Human Animal leaves you feeling, if anything, slightly more dumb for

having watched it. But that's the evolutionary difference between you

and me and Desmond Morris: he's swanning around the world in a safari

suit, and we're at home watching the telly. Who's daft?

Talking of daft, I should have known it was a mistake to watch David

Frost's new mawkathon Good Fortune! (BBC1) while sitting by an open

window on a sultry summer Sunday; my jaw was so immovably dropped at the

sight and sound of it that I had to spend the rest of the evening

picking midges out of my teeth. ''Hello, good, evening, and welcome to

Good Fortune!'' our host greeted us. ''My role is a cross between

Sherlock Holmes and Santa Claus . . . for some people in the audience

and at home it's going to be Christmas in July.''

Let me explain: Good Fortune! is essentially Cilla Black's Surprise!

Surprise! with money instead of people, and without even Cilla's

notoriously liberal boundaries of good taste. Frostie's researchers

track down unclaimed money -- bequests, Premium Bonds wins, pension

rights -- find the people it belongs to, and bring the two together in

as undignified a manner as possible. Thus we had the story of an elderly

recluse called Dorothea Allen, who left estate of #2m a couple of years

ago -- ''but to whom? Are you one of her family? Could you pretend to be

one of her family?'' If you felt you could, there was a telephone

hotline for you to say so; You Are David Frost And I Claim My #2m.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, there was a nice old lady called

Phyllis Terry whose great wish was to resettle in Canada. ''Now,

Phyllis, I believe your mother passed away some years ago?'' (Brave nod,

sniffles.) ''Well, she left you #5000!'' (Seriously overcome.) ''And do

you remember your son Brian in Canada who lost touch with you 20 years

ago? He's here tonight!'' (Utter hysteria, and no wonder.)

Good Fortune!, like British justice, has to be seen to be disbelieved.

As has Small Talk (BBC1), a bizarre comedy gameshow, presented by

Ronnie Corbett, in which nine children have been asked questions

designed to elicit cute, amusing, or pathetic replies (''According to

the Bible, who were the first two people in the world?'' -- ''Jesus

Christ and the Romans'') and three adults try to guess which children

gave which answers.

The comedy comes mostly from jokes about Ronnie Corbett's similar

height to that of the children, which just shows how long an old pro can

keep one gag going. I remember him in a happier phase of his career,

with Ronnie Barker, singing a mean-Scotsman parody of Westering Home

that went something like this:

Westering home on the Blue Train to Ayr,

Cash in ma pooches and plenty to spare,

Wearing a schoolcap and travelling half-fare,

I like ma height -- it suits me!

But that was a long time and a few good scriptwriters ago, and Corbett

is nowadays reduced to a lesser comic stature. He should know better

than to work with children, anyway.

I've been a fan of Channel 4's Short Stories for as long it's been

running, which must be four or five years now; its quirky,

non-judgmental slant on the human comedy lets its subjects reveal their

own tales without being set up or unduly intruded upon. A new series

began this week with The Pitcher, all about Birmingham market trader

Mick Gill-Carson, ''the cheapest man in Britain''.

Watching him work his audience with a mixture of high-pressure

salesmanship, jokes, and affectionate insults, you got the feeling that

selling poor people cheap bras and personal stereos was merely a

sideline to being in street-theatre showbiz -- but that's only a measure

of how good at his trade he is. Although full of good moments, as when

Mick bought a consignment of surplus crucifixes (''worth at least #1.25

for scrap, that is'') and jocularly tried to pass them off as being made

from ''the original trees in the Garden of Gethsemane'', there was a

certain edge lacking in the programme, an unwillingness to probe the

dodgier side of what is after all a fairly raffish business.

I didn't mind being invited to like Mick -- I'd say he was more honest

than David Frost and Good Fortune!, anyway -- I just drew the line at

being asked to think he was some kind of poor man's friend. As for the

crucifixes, a vicar in the crowd picked him up on their alleged Holy

Land origin and Mick was humbly apologetic. He gave the vicar one of

them to put up in his own church.

I think I've finally identified why this devout couch potato is so

fond of American sitcoms: no matter what their ostensible setting, they

stay in the Great Indoors all the time, away from weather and midges and

stuff like that. Big Wave Dave's, which I picked up on for the first

time this week, comes from the Cheers! stable of writers and is

ostensibly set on the beaches of Miami, where three

midlife-crisis-suffering buddies have settled to run a surfing-goods

store and escape from the frenetic pace of professional life in Chicago.

Yet you never see the beach: just the inside of the shop, the local

bar, and domestic interiors. In one scene this week, Adam Arkin's wife

reproved him in the middle of the night with neglecting the healthy

outdoor advantages of their new location. She pointed to them from the

bedroom window, but you knew they weren't there. And Adam didn't care

whether they were or not; he's more into beer, buddies, and football on

TV. Way to go.