There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so

THE CRITICS TELEVISION

ANIMALS are clearly different from us. They don't ride bicycles, for a start. They don't wear glasses, or bras. They don't stay up until 3am smoking dope or doing the washing-up. They worry about their children for a year, max. They don't usually swim unless they have to. They don't speak much English, they're probably all dyslexic, they never write letters to newspapers, they don't recognise national boundaries, and their idea of a cocktail party would involve roosters. But that doesn't mean they wander about like automatons without a thought in their heads, as some believe - it's cruelly arrogant to assume animals to be insentient until proven otherwise. As one participant in Do Vampire Bats Have Friends? (C4) pointed out, you can't tell humans are thinking just by looking at them, either.

It all comes down to a matter of "consciousness", apparently. If you've got it, you have a running commentary going through your head all day, you have an abstract idea of yourself in the world (not always an advantage, I find), and you're aware of your own mortality. If you haven't got all that, you're fair game for life on a battery farm. Yet we don't pretend that human babies, though pre-verbal, self-centred, guilt-free, and amateurs at using tools, are incapable of feeling pain. And we'd all look pretty automaton-like if viewed with a coolly objective eye - we even leave the house at the same time every day. Those of us who leave the house.

The vampire bats in question are so ugly and, according to their human investigators, smell so strongly of ammonia, one would hope they had been spared consciousness. But they turn out to form fond allegiances anyway, based on the sharing of food, proving that they're kind and possibly rather emotional. Then there was a cute parrot who could answer questions about numbers, colours and shapes, but preferred to say "Go back!" in a pleading tone, meaning he wished to return to his cage. The trainer said, "Just one more test and then we'll break for lunch." Now, I can believe parrots can count, but do they really understand the concept of lunch?

Then there were animals who use tools, which more and more of them seem to do these days. It was mentioned that octopuses behave so intelligently that the Government has declared them susceptible to pain (unlike other fish, who are assumed to be as indifferent to it as they are to Government pro- nouncements). All I could think of was how recently women were denied rights on the grounds of being lesser mortals, born to suffer. I'm self-conscious enough already, but if liberty depends on a big vocab- ulary, hand me the dictionary.

That Dr Susan Blackmore's a real party-pooper, always turning up to debunk some pleasing theory about the supernatural. She's the type who feels it necessary to explain magic tricks, or to tell you whodunnit before you've even bought your popcorn. In Entertaining Angels Unawares (ITV), there she was again, eagerly pouring scorn on evidence of angels. One poor guy was about to hang himself when a baby appeared inside a sphere and smiled at him. A Vietnam vet was hit by lightning while talking on the phone in Charleston and, during a brief death lasting half an hour, saw heaven and plenty of angels. He now spends his days working in a hospice, "dying with people". One boy woke to find an angel with hairy armpits sitting on the end of his bed and, not surprisingly, never forgot it. An 85-year-old woman got help with her shopping from a female angel, and a lift home with a male one. And a woman with cancer was cured by an encounter with a man with eyes "so blue they were, like, just deep rich blue". Angels turn out to be as handy around the house as in emergencies. Everyone should have one.

There was also a GP, Dr Hans Moolenburgh, who was instructed by some unseen force to ask all his patients if they'd seen an angel. He duly confronted 400 people who'd come to him about their flu and bunions, and wrote up his findings in a book. He thinks children are in particularly close touch with angels. "They are so near heaven - they've just come from heaven - so I think that many, many children still are in contact with angels and think that it's so normal they don't talk about it." This seemed a little far-fetched. If any of the children I know were in touch with angels, they'd talk about it. Repeatedly.

The show moved on from angels to cosmic consciousness, and biologist Rupert Sheldrake's courageous idea that stars might be thinking about stuff: "Since they're vastly more complex than we are, and have vastly more complex electromagnetic patterns (which we think of as associated with our own mental activity), why shouldn't we consider the possibility that stars or solar systems are conscious?" Here Susan Blackmore perked up, expressing the belief that everything around us may be conscious. "Consciousness is a really deep mystery," she asserted happily. She's a bit of a mystery herself. Though not an interesting one.

The usual Christmas peek at royalty came in the form of Britannia (BBC1), in which the Royal Yacht was scrubbed, painted and polished in preparation for the arrival of the gently quipping Queen. She makes little jokes to put people at their ease. They're not funny and nobody's at ease, but never mind - at least she wasn't writing angry letters. Prince Philip spoke of his affection for the ship: "I suppose Britannia was rather special ... we were involved from the very beginning in organising the design and furnishing and equipping and hanging the pictures and everything else." And it shows. The Queen has been dragged kicking and screaming into the Nineties by Di. Her more natural environment is the Fifties, and this low point in interior design is lovingly preserved in Britannia (at taxpayers' expense), right down to the sycamore veneer, rounded walls and Bakelite knobs. What isn't timeless is hideous and, I'm afraid, perfectly matched by the Queen's drab grey suit or her sad yellow dress.

The action centred around a state banquet held on board, off the coast of South Africa, at which Nelson Mandela was the guest of honour. He struggled almost as much with his napkins as he did making conversation with the Queen. Napkins on Britannia are big enough to sail off in, should the ship go down. For his pains, he was presented with a signed photo after the do. Behind the scenes, the all-male crew volunteered to do the laundry or the dishes, took part in quizzes and somehow got through 244 tins of Brasso, 250 pairs of gym shoes, 270 litres of white paint and 2,200 loo- rolls. They also decoded royal messages in the Communications Office. Royal personages have a language all their own. The question is, do they have consciousness?