TELEVISION / The dung thing: Kevin Jackson reviews Walk on the Wildside

After the appalling orgies of sadism, carnality, blasphemy and sensationalism which pollute our airwaves (on a good night, anyway), how soothing to turn to one of those wonderful nature programmes we British do so well, like BBC 2's new series Walk on the Wildside. For once, the whole family could settle down to a wholesome half- hour of watching extreme close- ups of coprophagy, projectile vomiting, guano-shooting, mass urination and hot rodent sex.

Subtitled 'Waste Not, Want Not', this study of the curious uses to which the animal kingdom puts its own pollutants was all, to be sure, in the best possible taste; so much so that the show's producer / presenter Simon King was driven back to the nursery to find euphemisms for all the excremental action. One African tree- critter 'wees on its hands'; offended hippos will 'flick their poo in your face', and regard it as 'a big job well done', while the organ of defecation was generally termed the 'bottom'. A few minutes of this baby-talk and it started to seem odd that King was not referring to the great tit (the offspring of which produce rather neat little faecal sacs, far more agreeable than your average soiled nappy) as a Big Bubby, or asking us to consider the ample pats that steam out of moo-cows. Constant weader fwoed up.

On the plus side were the feats of photography, which would have seemed near-miraculous in their difficulty were such coups not the routine achievement of the Corporation's wildlife units, but here appeared merely awesome. The two most extraordinary sequences showed a fieldfare dive-bombing a surly raven with the stuff that T S Eliot once called 'liquid siftings', and an elegantly composed image of a hungry fox reflected in the eye of an eider duck - a shot which have must have taken so many hours of silent waiting to capture that your bladder ached in sympathy for the poor cameraman.

King presented his little gallery of lavatorial believe-it-or-nots in chirpy, mildly moralising style; he is the kind of cheerful, well- scrubbed young fellow that a cartoonist would probably theriomorphise into a raccoon or a marmoset. Animals, he pointed out, can use their waste matter as food, weaponry, message systems, a place to live or even, in the case of mice, contraceptives - when the mouse population starts to become too dense, a signal coded in urine prevents young females from reaching sexual maturity. By contrast, the most creative use we can manage is processing the stuff into breeze-blocks to make the kind of buildings that are about as easy on the eye as a pile of Dobermann output.

Emetic as some of its images were, this disquisition on dung was certainly more uplifting than the wildlife on show in First Tuesday (ITV), which examined the police's new policy of using video recordings to ward off allegations of bullyings and frame-ups. It was marginally less depressing if you tried to imagine Simon King presenting it: 'See how the Tattooed Common Law Husband defends its territorial rights by pouring paraffin over its mate . . .'