TV Eye: A great night for a Fry-Up

Mark Carwardine and Stephen Fry go in search of endangered species. Photo / Supplied

How very British, how very self-deprecating, to name a TV series QI, meaning "quite interesting". It's a "comedy panel quiz show" hosted by the ubiquitous Stephen Fry which, in Britain, started out modestly on one of the BBC's smaller channels and has since moved to BBC One.

It's not hard to see its appeal in that country, with the combination of Fry and comedian Alan Davies, plus a revolving selection of guests. The first episode on Prime on Sunday night was, well, quite interesting. The theme was Fight or Flight, with Fry asking questions to which the panellists were expected to deliver interesting answers, if not necessarily the right ones. Why were Spitfires painted pink? What's the opposite of a flying fish? When lions fight bears, which animal wins?

The guests' efforts to deliver answers were generally nonsense, and Johnny Vegas' accent was so thick it was hard to hear what he was saying - the audience thought he was hilarious - but the answers were quite interesting and poet Pam Ayres won. The scoring system was a complete mystery but any TV which increases general knowledge has got to be a treat these days.

QI followed Last Chance To See, also hosted by Fry and his mate, conservationist Mark Carwardine. (Prime has dubbed this Fry Up night.) I am enjoying this series, which films them in locations around the world as they try to track down endangered species Carwardine first studied 25 years ago with the late writer Douglas Adams. It's an unsettling programme, on the one hand depressing, as you see the environmental damage created by humans in such a short period of time since then, balanced by the frail optimism of efforts to reverse the destruction.

The combination of Fry, the enthusiastic and eloquent bumbler, and Carwardine, the expert, works well. On Sunday, they were in Madagascar, the island where the idea for the original Last Chance To See project was born. This time, they were in search of nocturnal lemur the aye-aye, a process which forced Fry to go camping in the forest. "I haven't camped since I was 16," he moaned, "except in the homosexual sense."

"I wish I'd ordered two tents now," said Carwardine.

The sad thing about Madagascar, which we saw as they drove down the coast, was its barrenness, largely devoid of the lush jungles which used to cover the island. But they did see some amazing creatures in the wild, as well as two ugly but adorable aye-ayes in a tiny zoo. Fry fell in love with them.

There were some peculiar sights: a red fridge full of cold drinks in the desert; dancing white lemurs; a corridor of lone baobab trees which were once surrounded by forest; Fry cooing to a tiny mouse lemur, "Oh my darling."

Earlier he had said, after a night in the tent, that he really missed his wife.

His wife? He meant his Wi-fi.

When nearly all hope had been abandoned that they'd find aye-ayes in the wild, they did. This is a not a preplanned, set-up scenario - the search is real. Last Chance To See is visually enthralling and, yes, very interesting.

In a couple of weeks we'll see Fry and Carwardine in New Zealand, in an encounter with a kakapo, which you can describe only as completely misguided, on the part of the parrot. Painful for Carwardine but funny for us, the viewers.