Move over meerkats! The tubby mongoose is telly's cutest star: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS on last night's TV

Published: 18:14 EST, 16 July 2014 | Updated: 18:14 EST, 16 July 2014

Talk To The Animals (BBC One) ****

The Mimic (Channel 4) **

They’re the bane of every actor and the torment of cinema-goers worldwide. One mobile phone can wreck the show for an entire audience, whether it’s opera at Glyndebourne or just the school play.

A-list actor Kevin Spacey earned a round of applause last month in a production of Clarence Darrow at the Old Vic, when he snapped at a spectator whose phone kept trilling: ‘If you don’t answer that, I will!’

Texting and tweeting is just as bad — it might be silent, but the phone’s screen blazes like a beacon in the dark auditorium.

Don’t blame the phone addicts, though. It’s not their fault — it’s evolution. As Lucy Cooke revealed in Talk To The Animals (BBC One), some animals are just so sociable they are compelled to provide a running commentary on everything they do.

Banded mongooses, for instance, keep up a constant chatter of Facebook-style updates as they forage for food on the African savannah.

Lucy Cooke could be the new Sir David Attenborough - she has his enthusiasm for wildlife

Lucy Cooke could be the new Sir David Attenborough - she has his enthusiasm for wildlife

Mongooses are impossibly cute, like meerkats with a spare tyre: the stripey body of a well-fed tabby cat, with the head and tail of an otter.

As this slightly episodic but fascinating documentary revealed, they love to talk, and pack surprising detail into every squeak.

Lucy has been tipped to take over the next generation of wildlife shows from Sir David Attenbororough at Broadcasting House. She shares his wide-eyed delight at the animal kingdom . . . though she has admitted when she met him at a book signing, she was so overcome with emotion at seeing her childhood hero that she burst into tears and had to be led away by Sir David’s security.

He is famously at ease with wild animals: the 1979 sequence of him romping with a family of mountain gorillas might be the most famous piece of television ever screened.

RANT OF THE NIGHT

 A London cabbie called Mike on The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway (BBC Two) revealed taxi drivers refer to the roads running through Soho as ‘the dirty dozen’.

But Crossrail roadworks have shut these routes — ‘Cabbies are foaming at the mouth,’ raged Mike. What’s new?

His successor is developing that relaxed presence on camera.

Lucy went tiptoeing through the bush, chasing mongooses with a microphone.

‘I got quite good at making their brrp-brrp noise,’ she confessed when I interviewed her recently.

Using electronic analysis, she discovered their noises, which sound like toots on a child’s kazoo, work just like our ‘Tweets’. Each squeak consists of two syllables within half a second: the first part is the animal’s code sign or name, and the second is its status — ‘I am eating’ or ‘I am on the move’.

Unlike the irritating trill of a phone, the squeaks are relaxing and reassuring to humans too. ‘In the hottest part of the day,’ Lucy told me, ‘they all went for a siesta in the shade. I sat with them . . . and they carried on making the brrp-brrp noise. I would love to have a recording of that and play it as I go to sleep. There is something totally comforting and calming about it.’

Terry Mynott is back for a second series of the The Mimic but the series is too sad to be funny

Terry Mynott is back for a second series of the The Mimic but the series is too sad to be funny

Someone should send a recording of mongooses to cheer up poor Terry Mynott, who is back for a second series of his glum sitcom, The Mimic (Channel 4).

Terry plays Martin, an ordinary chap with a gift for impersonations, and crippling stage fright. The humour is meant to be gentle, but his life is so miserable that it feels inappropriate to laugh at all. He’s unemployed, single and skint, his son has depression and his ex has just died from cancer.

If you want to spend half an hour feeling sorry for a nice but ineffectual bloke, The Mimic is ideal. If you’re looking for a laugh, it’s hopeless.

His impersonations are spot on — he can conjure Terry Wogan or Game Of Thrones character Tyrion Lannister as if he was channelling their spirits.

But after Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s brilliant double act in The Trip To Italy, on BBC2 earlier this year, it’s not enough to be good at voices. We expect genius: surreal dialogue, ruthless impressions and perfect facial mimicry, too.

Our standards have been pushed impossibly high, and writer Matt Morgan’s script is nowhere near strong enough to satisfy us.

All is not lost for Terry, though. Apparently his David Attenborough impersonation is so good that the wildlife unit uses him for dummy voiceovers — the ideal man to front a six-part series on mongooses.

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