Cats vs Dogs: Which is Best? TV review: This clawless look at canines and moggies isn't the best in show

Usually when I watch a bit of telly I like to learn something. Call me Reithian, if you like (and I've had worse. Much, much worse), but I like my viewing to be a judicious admixture of what is called, in more modern media, "click bait" as well as the equivalent of a broadsheet read. Education and entertainment, then.

So my problem with Cats and Dogs: Which Is Best? wasn't in fact the daftness of the title – I am all in favour of what Peter Snow calls "just a bit of fun" – nor the slightly insipid presenters (Chris Packham and Liz Bonnin going for the 2016 Bafta for blandness), but the fact that what they were telling me what I already knew. You too, I should think. After all, we all know, don't we, that cats can see better than dogs, but that dogs' sense of smell is truly astonishing by any standards in the animal kingdom.

Surely we also all know that dogs are more loyal than cats, and miss their owners more than notoriously independent/self-centred felines. And we are also pretty conversant with the idea that dogs can recognise more words and commands than cats. Cats difficult to train? You don't say, Liz.

So for most of the show I was sat there like a bored Labrador, waiting for someone to throw me a bone. I've watched enough programmes about cats and dogs – you might almost say it has been raining them over the years – to know that lots of doggy habits are derived from their past as wolves, pack hunting and all that. I also know that cats have much in common with their ancestors too, and that, being nocturnal hunters, they naturally acquired better eyesight, though the mystery of them cruelly toying with their prey is unresolved. What was more surprising was the number of academic and research institutions devoted to studying the ways of creatures that we are all very familiar with, and to no great advantage to man or beast.

Thus there is some kind of "dog university" in Vienna, in the US state of Virginia, where they try and train a husky to count, even though it is freely admitted that the notion of a dog with true cognitive mathematical powers is an absurdity. At the University of Lincoln there is a team trying to get cats to add up, their experiments frustrated by the cats quite understandably getting distracted and strolling off from the whole farce. Not unlike how this viewer felt watching this.

open image in gallery

A bit cheeky maybe, but I have spent a good deal of time recently revisiting Dad's Army, so I thought I ought to mention it. This activity has of course been prompted by the release of the new Dad's Army movie. But, having not watched any of the original series for quite some time – I found I had got into a state where I could recite the scripts along with the actors, always a bad sign – I was struck by how uncosy and spiky a lot of the dialogue and action can be. None more so, indeed, than in the episode where the class-infected rivalry between Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson erupts into open hatred.

Quite a difficult watch, actually, for something that is usually thought of as so rose-tinted.

It's almost Reithian, in fact.