Monday night's TV

By Sian Brewis

Baby animals: they’re so cute, aren’t they? Ickle pandas, fluffy kittens, those little monkeys that cling adoringly to their mother’s back.

Except they’re not. Evil-looking parasite wasps, exploding caterpillars, sharks eating each other.

Extraordinary Animals in the Womb (C4, 9pm) was more Alien versus Predator than Animal Maternity Hospital.

Hurrah for that. I had been fearing a saccharine-sweet cutefest, like an hour-long look at a mum-to-be’s blurry ultrasound pictures.

Whizzy computer graphics have reconstructed the embryonic cycles of an Emperor penguin, a kangaroo, a shark and a parasitic wasp.

It’s not pretty. A featherless penguin with eyes like a Stephen King baddie sits cocooned in its egg, looking like it was plotting world domination.

A shark wolfs down its brothers for breakfast while a tiny red blob of a kangaroo crawls up its mother’s stomach to get to her pouch.

Worst of all, though, was the wasp larvae – laid into a caterpillar which they ate from the inside out, then used its rotting corpse as a shelter. Eeww. “This creature inspired the story from Alien,” runs the voiceover. You’re not kidding.

Its life cycle, apparently, made Charles Darwin lose his faith in God.

Fascinating as facts like this are, they are few and far between, with the rest little more than Biology 101.

I’m not quite sure of the point of the programme, other than to show off some computer graphics.

Mind you, life must be tough for wildlife documentary makers. Everywhere they go, David Attenborough’s been before.

And Channel 4 can’t quite keep the pleased-with-itself-for-thinking-this-up tone from the voiceover.

By the end, though, the little penguin was all fluffy, and the kangaroo was bouncing alongside its mum, so maybe there was something to go “aah” at after all.

* Spendaholics (BBC 3, 7pm) gives retail therapy addicts what they really, really want – an excuse.

Last night saw career woman turned stay at home mum Lorraine Gardiner running up £20,000 debts on catalogue shopping because she feels frustrated.

But in the world of Spendaholics, that’s OK. It’s not your fault. Big-scarved and very-slowly-spoken psychologist Ben Fry will come up with a reason.

It’s entertaining stuff, even only in a jaw-droppingly “how much???” kind of way.

Although I did feel slightly guilty that half the attraction was making the viewer feel superior.