It's weird to think that, back in the mid-1990s, Martin Clunes was effectively the distilled essence of lad. As Men Behaving Badly's Gary, he was beery and leery and perpetually teetering on the brink of staging a full-scale one-man On The Buses revival tour. But now? Now he couldn't be any more cuddly if you wrapped him up in a romper suit and shoved a dummy in his gob.
Slowly but surely, Clunes has transformed into ITV's Mr Animal. He's at it again on Friday, presenting Martin Clunes and a Lion Called Mugie, a gentle and heartfelt documentary that follows Clunes to Kenya, where he meets a number of rescued lions and chats to the conservationists who plan to release them into the wild. It's Clunes by numbers, basically – less authoritative than Attenborough, less bookish than Packham and less dementedly fixated on high-fiving strangers on boats than Robson Green.
But then, you probably knew that already. As soon as you see the name Martin Clunes in the title of one of these shows – which you always will, because the day Martin Clunes makes a nature documentary and doesn't put his name in the title is the day we all die – you're instantly reassured about what you're going to see. Broadly speaking, Martin Clunes and a Lion Called Mugie is no different to Martin Clunes: Man to Manta (Martin Clunes meets rescued manta rays), or Martin Clunes: The Lemurs of Madagascar (Martin Clunes meets some lemurs in Madagascar), or Martin Clunes: A Man and His Dogs (Martin Clunes meets some dogs, not all of which are technically his).
But with Clunes, this lack of variety is no bad thing. Although ITV's fad of arbitrarily matching celebrities with barely compatible areas of interest – most recently Caroline Quentin's National Parks (Caroline Quentin meets some national parks, none of which technically belong to her) – is growing tiresome, it's important to remember that Martin Clunes kickstarted the trend six years ago for a reason.
First, he's a leading face of the channel. Not only is his series Doc Martin a bizarrely enduring hit all the way around the world, to the extent that you can actually buy pots of official Doc Martin honey with Clunes's face stamped all over it, but it's rural and gentle and lovely enough to thematically fit with the type of documentary he makes. If he wanted to make a show exploring the various influences on leading industrial krautrock bass players, he'd probably run into much more resistance. But lightweight travelogues about animals? That's exactly his ballpark.
It helps that, onscreen at least, Clunes tends to find the perfect balance between enthusiasm and obnoxiousness. He's not an animal expert by any means – his only qualification is that he just quite likes some of them – but he can usually make up for this sparsity of knowledge by being warm and infectiously chirpy to everyone and everything. Better still, despite the mandatory title namecheck, Clunes seems to understand that he's only the sideshow. The real stars are the animals, exactly as they should be.
Most of all, though, people actually watch these documentaries. They're scenic and unchallenging and, while you might not actually learn very much from them, at least you know you're going to have a pleasant time. He's not the next Attenborough by any means, but don't expect Martin Clunes to stop making these shows any time soon.
