Simon King's first memory is of an animal – an ostrich – trotting ahead of his mother's car. "I was sitting on my mother's lap, and she was saying 'bloody ostrich!', because it wasn't getting out of the road." He has come a long way since then, but he has never stopped at wildlife with rapt fascination.

Michael McCarthy celebrates the 25th anniversary of large blue's reappearance

What's funny about the perilous state of the press? Quite a lot, actually

Within earshot of the M25, a giant dome is being built to house thousands of insects and birds. Michael McCarthy reports

Here's a nagging thought I'd never encountered before. What do you do if you're a beluga whale and you get an itchy back? There you are, stuck in mid-ocean with the nearest scratchy rock hundreds of nautical miles away, and there's not a lot of point in asking your neighbour to help you out because flippers don't have a very high coefficient of friction anyway. The answer, it turns out, is that you have to wait until the Arctic ice melts and you can roll around in the shingle of a fresh water estuary. We saw a group of belugas doing just that in Nature's Great Events and David Attenborough assured us that they were having a whale of a time. They "whistle with pleasure," he said, which made me wonder where the Natural History Unit had found a fluent speaker of Belugese. It's true that they looked to be enjoying themselves, but can we be sure that they aren't saying, "Bloody hell it's crowded... I know I say this every time but I'm definitely going to a quieter estuary next year"?

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, BBC1<br/>Boys and Girls Alone, Channel 4<br/>La Boh&egrave;me Backstage, Sky Arts

Museum failure shows our lack of a grand narrative

UKTV has put painstaking effort into rebranding its channels. Ian Burrell finds out why

David Attenborough is one of our best-loved broadcasters, and Deborah Ross is one of his greatest fans. She&rsquo;s watched all of his landmark series, and she loved every one. You&rsquo;d have thought they&rsquo;d get on like a house on fire ... wouldn&rsquo;t you?

If comedy is supposedly going to err towards the risk-averse in the post-Brand/post-Ross BBC era: then cometh the hour, cometh Michael McIntyre.

Are they really the answer to every hungover student's prayers? Esther Walker reports

More than half of all amphibian species in Europe could become extinct by 2050 because of a combination of habitat loss, infectious diseases and the effects of climate change, scientists have found.

Mike Wozniak asks his audience not to heckle him with 118 118 jibes, though it's hard to resist, as it's a useful shorthand for his moustachioed appearance. Having established the visual, the vocal sounds like a cross between Murray Walker and David Attenborough, nasal and breathy, and Wozniak's delivery and joke structure have something of Stewart Lee about them, relying on repetition and occasional laborious detail to state the obvious but from a sideways point of view.

Children have lost touch with the natural world and are unable to identify common animals and plants, according to a survey.