Unintelligent design

On Wednesday, BBC Four made an unexpectedly strong case that the human body is a bit rubbish. Our ill-designed spines, for example, guarantee that many of us will suffer from chronic back pain. Our joints wear out long before we do. Our skin even gets damaged by sunlight.

So what can be done about it? Obviously the answer is not much — but that didn’t prevent Can Science Make Me Perfect? With Alice Roberts from pretending to give it a go.

The premise was that Roberts would draw on other, less incompetently constructed life forms to create an improved version of herself — the way she’d be if evolution hadn’t cocked things up so badly. As befits someone whose name appears in programme titles, Roberts clearly relished her God-like role. Before long, she’d decided to give herself a chimpanzee’s shorter, stiffer spine and an emu’s shock-absorbing legs. Warming to her task (or possibly just getting carried away), she then opted for large revolving ears, eyes big enough to see in the dark and, to make childbirth easier, a kangaroo’s pouch.

Once again, Roberts proved an appealing presenter as well as a knowledgeable one and we certainly learned a lot about both human and non-human anatomy. For the more gloomy viewer, there were also plenty of reminders of how quickly nature loses interest in our welfare once we’re past child-rearing age.

But of course a TV show needs a sturdy spine of its own — and here that relied on the usual television tricks. At the beginning, Roberts was summoned to the Science Museum to feign surprise when she was given her human-makeover mission — and to feign even more when she was asked for a physical model of her perfected self to exhibit there in three months’ time.