LIMMY'S SHOW BBC2, 10pm NATURE'S GREAT EVENTS BBC1, 9pm Where to begin with the many enjoyable comic revelations proffered by Limmy's Show ? This righteous blast of informed front-line rant'n'rage came from one of Glasgow's less genteel areas, the type where the glue and the smack hold sway.
Let's start by answering the most obvious question: Limmy is Brian "Limmy" Limond, a muscular stand-up presence on stage and internet (check out limmy.com). As his one-off TV collection of street-wise comedy sketches soon funnily established, Limmy is kinda like Rab C Nesbitt's Glaswegian underclass nephew. That's if Rab C Nesbitt had a Glaswegian underclass nephew from one of the city's less genteel areas who'd stayed aff the glue and the smack, instead going to university and gaining a degree.
While there, Rab C's young conceptual relative also acquired an outraged anarcho-lefty standpoint as to why so many members of the Glaswegian underclass get waylaid by the glue and the smack, as well as winding up felled by their own inchoate anger and sense of hopelessness.
This summary might make Limmy seem like some sort of hectoring, bleeding-heart do-gooder ponce. Limmy does, indeed, go in for much hectoring, but he's an equal opportunity, no-punches-pulled hectorer: he chibs no-goodniks for their own stupidity, too. Wasters, wallopers, nutjobs, jakies, skanks: they all cop it from Limmy. Witness the case of one of his self-sabotaging characters, Jacqueline McCafferty, a former heroin addict fae Priesthill who'd rid herself of the monkey on her back, but failed to address the chip on her shoulder.
Poor daft Jacqueline: her misdirected anger, squandered on the bloke answering the phone in the taxi office, meant she scuppered her own planned night out: a rerr terr in Cessnock. Limmy: he generally leaves his subjects with a sore face, mostly from smiling rather than slapping - but don't argue with him.
For Limmy in TV host mode is a charismatic, accomplished and engaging dude. But forceful, mind. When you've been button-holed by Limmy, your outer garments will bear the imprints of his urgent grasp for days, ya rocket.
Most laugh-out-loud bit? John Paul, the internet-literate Glasgow ned who conducted a reign of terror in his local park, subsequently revisiting it via a social networking website.
There was also much to savour in Limmy's well-worked-out diatribes against linguistic inexactitude as it blights all our lives in common everyday usage: on road signs, when thoughtlessly spouted by waiters and bar staff and so on. A full series of Limmy soon, please.
In Nature's Great Events , we swam underwater with grizzly bears in rushing late-summertime Alaskan creeks packed with spawning Pacific salmon seeking to make their way upstream. The sharp-clawed bears hungrily put a stop to all such finny progress.
As enthralling slow-motion footage and time-lapse photography informed us, the salmon had it tough across other fronts, too. Their annual frenzied breeding imperative winds up sustaining 200 species - plants, insects, birds, mammals.
The programme's arresting up-close ursine footage came courtesy of deft and super-patient Jeff Turner, a mild-mannered north-west-American backwoodsman whose soft-spoken manner seemed to put his large and deadly subjects at their ease.
Do bears poop in the woods? Yes - and such was Jeff Turner's ability to blend in that one did so on a section of riverbank not far away from his laptop. That's being a naturalist.
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