Television Review: QED

THE QUAGGA, an extinct animal which looks like a half-painted zebra, was described in QED (BBC1) as "one of Africa's most graceful animals" and a "gentle" creature. But how reliable are these descriptions? It didn't look notably graceful in the only surviving photograph of the animal, taken by one of England's 19th-century aristocratic animal collectors. And, while it is hard to be certain about the behavioural characteristics of any extinct animal, if it was anything like a zebra at all then it won't have been very gentle either. Approaching one of the animals involved in an experiment to resurrect the quagga, the project leader was wary: "If I knew you wouldn't bite me, I'd give you my whole arm, but I can't trust you any more," he said, which wasn't a very convincing affidavit for its amiable nature. In truth, both phrases are posthumous honorifics, the sort of attributes we sentimentally ascribe to the beasts we have extinguished in order to make ourselves feel even wickeder than we are. It's bad enough killing off stolid, undistinguished organisms, but to do away with a gentle, graceful animal is really beyond the pale.

And yet, QED implicitly conceded that it was lack of charisma which had doomed the quagga in the first place. Although it had been hunted fiercely in its South African habitat, there were many specimens in European zoos. It wouldn't have been difficult to breed some in captivity, but nobody bothered. They thought they were abundant in the wild, and besides, quaggas weren't really crowd-pleasing animals. After a while, somebody noticed that there were none left. Usually there are no second chances with such oversights, but it seemed possible that the quagga might be revived, distilled out of genes now dispersed in the plains zebra. That these genes had originated in the quagga had been demonstrated by analysing material from a sloppily stuffed quagga in the South Africa Museum, which yielded enough DNA to do a cross-check. Jurassic Park was mentioned here, but this isn't test- tube reconstruction. Quagga-ishness is going to be painstakingly concentrated by selective breeding of the most quagga-like zebras.

This raised a few questions which QED didn't answer: if the DNA is identical already, how do you know that you haven't ended up with a zebra in disguise? And how can the project organisers be so sure that the specimens in the wild won't eagerly start diluting themselves again? "They will only breed within their group," the voice-over assured us as the first batch were released into the Karoo, but, if that's true, then how the hell did the quagga genes get into the zebras in the first place? An even more pertinent question might be why the quagga went extinct when the zebra didn't - despite the fact that the latter makes a much more attractive rug than the former. I suspect that their extinction might be slightly more complicated than a tragic encounter between good (any wild animal) and evil (greedy, plundering Homo sapiens) but, if so, this wasn't going to be the place where you found out.

Another endangered species made a striking appearance on What Now? (BBC1), a daytime advice column in which a panel of celebrities try to resolve the dilemmas of viewers. The Anglican churchman is not having a particularly easy time in the wild at the moment - pressed on all sides by the encroachments of modern civilisation. Nor is it easy to come up with a new adaptive strategy. If you fall back on defensive aggression, like the African bishop at the General Synod last week, then you may make yourself dangerously conspicuous. If, on the other hand, you try to blend in, then people are bound to ask whether you constitute a separate species at all. The Reverend Victor Stock, one of the regular panellists on What Now?, seems to have adopted the low-profile approach. Yesterday morning, the chief conundrum was posed by Ian, a kilted bisexual who wanted to know whether he should settle down with a man or a woman. The vicar suggested that Ian come to terms with his homosexuality and work at having "a proper nesting relationship with a man". Perfectly good advice, for all I know, but if a vicar is going to appear on such a show, shouldn't he offer some brand of moral authority that would actually distinguish him from Fiona Fullerton?