'Penguin A&E with Lorraine Kelly' Shows TV Has Finally Gone Full Partridge

Penguins are comfortably the world's most popular family of flightless bird, the emu having fallen dramatically off since the early 90s, pheasants appealing only to elites. Penguins, meanwhile, have lent their name, chocolatey taste and penchant for super-villainous crimes to an extremely popular McVitie's biscuit and a nemesis of Batman.

Our krill-guzzling friends also come with an excess of political baggage: from Pingu to March of the Penguins, they're held as paragons of monogamous vanilla heterosexuality and familial sacrifice. The latter sees them walking hundreds of miles in mating pairs to lay an egg while Morgan Freeman drones omnisciently on, delighting the Christian right as if they were little waddling promise rings.

Last night, Channel 5 tried to capitalise on what I can only describe as global penguin mania with their new series Penguin A&E with Lorraine Kelly. The show focused on the trials of the penguins of Cape Town. And what trials they are: dog bites, swallowed fish hooks, general starvation, crushing anxiety at the impossibly high violent crime rate, and a deep depression at the irreconcilable racial tension that apartheid has left in their city.

Natasha, the hero of this particular epic, is a gutsy, sleeves-rolled-up vet whose attitude, whether digging dead tissue out of a penguin's head or making a device out of a garden hose to remove a fishhook from a stomach, is never anything short of 100 percent can-do. Her delivery of the iconic TV veterinarian phrase "the next 24 hours will be crucial for him" while looking at a heap of anaesthetised feathers is compassionate yet battle-hardened. She is up there with the best reality TV doctors of the last 20 years – if she plays her cards right, she could be Trude Mostue big.

When Marvin loses consciousness in the pool she's right there, stabilising his breathing with however many milligrams of this and that, and delivering a well worded piece to camera about her concerns for his future. (Do I need to mention that Marvin is a penguin? Basically everyone mentioned apart from Natasha and Lorraine Kelly from here on in is a penguin, so if I mention that Marvin is back to eating whole raw fish and being sent to live in the sea, don't be alarmed; it's a cause for happiness because Marvin is an African penguin). It's textbook vet TV; some jeopardy, a little light gore and nothing too sadface, like late-stage cancer or rheumatoid arthritis.

Okay, so that's the Penguins, and the A&E, but how does Lorraine Kelly fit into all of this? Honestly, your guess is as good as mine. She's barely in the show. I'm guessing the C5 commissioning editor didn't think plain old Penguin A&E was going to cut it on Tuesday primetime, so they got on the blower to Lorraine's agent: "Does she want a free holiday to Cape Town? All we need is four 18-second VTs of her squatting near the sea and delivering some petrifying statistics about the human impact on the natural world, before wrapping up with a cheery goodbye and some relief that Marvin was back on whole raw fish and living in the sea. Huh? No, it's fine, Marvin's a penguin."

Having said that, it wouldn't take too far a leap of logic to suggest that the spectre of a certain incarcerated wobble-board enthusiast is at the forefront of the mind of any presenter who's thinking of sharing the screen with vets. Remember how much we all liked the pre-unpleasantness Rolf of Animal Hospital? How warmly he'd hug a young lady whose alpaca was to be put down, how tenderly he'd stroke a poorly pangolin, how he addressed the camera with watery eyes, rye smile and voice cracking from the endless days of life and death he saw in that place. No presenter wants to be accused of going Rolf nowadays, and certainly not Lorraine, who has amassed 32 good-natured, ageless years in primary-coloured blouses and the odd leotard, and won't be slinging them all in the cludgie for some sodding penguins. Best to keep a safe distance.

The show culminates in half a dozen boxes of penguins being pointed towards the sea and opened while some royalty-free music is played. Because it's TV, a redemptive narrative is engineered about an impasse that has been overcome when a timid little chap by the name of Peanut with a heavy chest infection led his friends to their new life in the wild. I rang an associate from university who read veterinary science. He confirmed two things: that African penguins rarely recover from that kind of condition, and that immature penguins look so similar you'd never know if it was actually the same one with the chest infection. My dewy tears turned to heaving sobs as I realised Peanut and the truth both died for our entertainment last night.

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