TV Natural World: Attenborough and the Empire of the Ants review – another fascinating insight into the insect world Our greatest naturalist gives the impression he would spend all day watching ants fight, if he could. Plus: Still Open All Hours catches the mood of the post-Christmas lull  Tim Dowling Fri 29 Dec ‘17 06.00 GMT The Jura mountains on the Swiss-French border give their name to the Jurassic period, thanks to the limestone strata first identified there. They are also home to a lot of ants, which may not sound that exciting at first; ants are everywhere. In Natural World: Attenborough and the Empire of the Ants (BBC2), Sir David Attenborough kneels in the snow over an ant mound, looking cold. The nest contains hibernating wood ants, waiting out the freezing Jurassic winter, kept warm by the slow decomposition of their spruce needle mound. At the first sign of spring, sentry ants pop out for a look around, but these specific wood ants are more famous for what they don’t do. Generally speaking, wood ants like a fight. The ants from a single colony are all related, thanks to their queen mum, and when they meet other wood ants from a neighbouring nest, they go to war, piercing rivals with their mandibles and squirting formic acid into the wounds to dissolve their enemy’s innards. It is a tremendously costly way of doing business, although the winners get to eat the losers. Attenborough’s ants don’t do that – they are on friendly terms with other nests, and are thus able to form super colonies half a billion ants strong, spread over more than a thousand mounds linked by 100km of trails. Which is not to say these wood ants abjure violence in all its forms. They are quite capable of hunting down a wolf spider, killing it and dragging it back to their nest. The super colony, says Attenborough, “makes hundreds of millions of kills every year”. They will take down caterpillars, beetles, even butterflies. It takes a lot of work to make fascinating television out of what is, essentially, a bunch of ants, but the narrative arc of their breeding habits is indeed extraordinary. Deep in their mounds the queens – up to a million per super colony – start laying. Their first eggs will produce the next breeding generation – a sort of royal household. These ants, males and females both, will sprout wings. After the larvae hatch, the worker ants head out to collect food, hunting more spiders or farming aphids, which excrete a sticky honeydew that ants love. Meanwhile, the identical, but decidedly less cooperative wood ants on the other side of the mountain are still busy killing each other. One gets the impression that if he could, Sir David would spend all day lying on the grass, watching ants fight. Maybe he did. Once the winged royal family hatch, they fly off and mate. The males die almost immediately afterward; the females shed their wings and become queens. At this point, regular wood-ant queens pursue a high risk strategy, infiltrating a field ant colony and keeping a low profile, but the super colony affords plenty of opportunity for queens to start a new life elsewhere, or just stay at home. The ability to film ants going about their business in extreme close-up requires specialist equipment – a one-off contraption called Frankencam – or Frank for short. Frank has come a long way since Attenborough first encountered it 12 years ago, but it is basically still a long mechanical arm with a tiny camera at one end, employing a miniature lens exactly like the one in your phone. As ever, the back end of the programme was a tribute to those tireless operators who endure bad weather, extreme tedium and ants in their pants in order to get these difficult shots. Hats off.  Leroy (James Baxter) and Granville (David Jason). Photograph: BBC/Gary Moyes Open All Hours, starring Ronnie Barker and David Jason, ran for 26 episodes between 1973 and 1985. Still Open All Hours (BBC2), a sequel which kicked off with a 2013 Boxing Day special, has now topped this: the latest series will bring it to 27 episodes. In the updated version, Jason’s Granville – spookily channelling Dame Maggie Smith – has inherited his uncle’s shop, although the ghost of the old man still manifests itself as a greedy and uncooperative cash register. This revisit is no doubt intended as a seasonal dose of fuzzy nostalgia, but over several series, the show has developed an airless, claustrophobic quality, even a faintly sinister atmosphere. The plot, such as it is, involves dreams of escape. Mr Newbold wants to be free of the attentions of Mrs Featherstone, and Madge plans to take Mavis to a hotel for Christmas. But these modest ambitions are cruelly thwarted; everything is restored to its default setting of quiet despair. A joke about unopenable Christmas crackers seems positively self-defeating. And everyone has to go to that terrible, terrible shop, because it is Still Open. For my money, this show perfectly catches the mood of the post-Christmas lull, but I imagine small children would find it scary. Topics Television Last night's TV David Attenborough reviews Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp Share on Messenger most viewed tv & radio music film stage books games art & design classical back to top  jobs dating become a supporter make a contribution guardian labs about us work for us advertise with us contact us ask for help terms & conditions privacy policy cookie policy securedrop digital newspaper archive complaints & corrections all topics all contributors modern slavery act facebook twitter subscribe © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
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