It had all been going so well. Tigers are just as likely to attack each other as make friends, but for Jae Jae and Melati, London Zoo's recently acquired Sumatran tigers, it had looked like love at first sight as they cosied up together in their new surroundings. But then along came the Duke of Edinburgh to open their new Tiger Territory and Jae Jae wasn't nearly so happy: he took a couple of swipes at Melati, threw himself against the netting and had to be put back in solitary for his own and everyone else's good. Which rather suggested to me that tigers might have a collective unconscious. Prince Philip has form with tigers, having bagged one in India just months before becoming the first president of the WWF in 1961. So asking the duke along might have felt to Jae Jae a bit like asking Harold Shipman to open an old people's home.
Unfortunately, feline Jungian analysis wasn't the focus of The Zoo (ITV1), which returned for a third series. Then again, it was hard to know exactly what the point of The Zoo was, other than as an hour-long advert for London and Whipsnade zoos. It was all quite jolly, I suppose. The keepers and vets seemed good-tempered and caring and the animals were unthreateningly anthropomorphised. It's just that there's only so much of Amy the Armadillo's contraception regime, Nicky the Chimpanzee's check-ups for congenital heart disease and Big Bertha the Burmese Python's blocked nose I can take before feeling that I'm up to my neck in treacly sentimentality.
Pet Rescue and Crufts feel edgy in comparison. Surely it wouldn't have been impossible to include some questioning of what a zoo is actually for in the 21st century in between the hippo's teeth-cleaning and the penguin's x-ray? What are the trade-offs between scientific research and public spectacle? And just how happy are the animals to be in captivity? A little of this would have gone a long way. But the photography was consistently excellent and if you like your animals close up and cute, then you may be back for more.
One man who knows he isn't particularly happy is doctor, TV presenter and all-round good egg Michael Mosley. He's prone to expect disaster at every turn, is constantly anxious and is often wide awake half the night worrying about something or other. Probably, if he's anything like me, about not being asleep. In Horizon: The Truth About Personality (BBC2), Mosley explored the latest research in genetics and neuroscience to see if he could find out why he is the way he is and whether he could do anything to make himself any happier.
It was an entertaining hour, though not an altogether successful one. There was some interesting material on the correlation between positivity and longevity, the changes in our DNA over a lifetime and the meditational and cognitive bias modification exercises that can alter mood perception, but no killer piece of conclusive evidence. In a science programme, it's not enough for Mosley to look through a few minutes of old family cine film from holidays in the early 1960s and conclude he had a happy childhood. Not least as he, in the same breath, described his father as largely absent. This isn't proof; it's unreliable memory.
Yet even if his childhood had been near idyllic, there was still no discussion or explanation about why Mosley's pessimism and neurosis set in. With no benchmarking, it was far harder to accept at face value the possibility that his newfound optimism at the end of the programme might be permanent. Regardless of whether he had been genetically modified. Even depressives have their prolonged moments when the world doesn't feel so bleak. But no amounts of cognitive behavioural therapy or medication have proved a guarantee against a return of depression. As someone prone to looking on the down side myself, I don't want to sound too negative. Mosley may be right. I hope he is. I'm just not entirely convinced.
If Mosley is a cricket fan, he'll find his new stress-free state severely tested as England v Australia (Sky Sports Ashes) takes centre stage over the next few weeks. I hope he deals with the predictable England wobbles better than me. Though after the Wimbledon coverage, it was good to see a sporting event broadcast as a sporting event. No Wags, only the very occasional crowd shot of a WG Grace lookalike and the focus almost entirely on the cricket. Even Ian Botham sounded excited to be there. Whatever next?
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