Alexander McQueen's rise from his rough East End upbringing to turn fashion on its ear with his anarcho-punk attitude and sensational catwalk shows with titles like Highland Rape and Widows of Culloden is the stuff of rag-trade mythology, and his suicide a year ago at the age of 40 has lent his story an aura of wastefulness and tragedy (Isabella Blow and Alexander McQueen, pictured above).

Nothing more freakish than the fashion business ever came out of Africa, and we peered into its innards on Friday evening in More4's McQueen and I. undemanding storytelling, and start planning series seven. And there are loads of adorably photogenic animals - lions and lion cubs, zebras and wildebeest grazing on the lawn, a cheetah which wanders in and out of the house, and last week a suspiciously well-fed rooikat. There's the Out of Africa factor, with its infinite landscapes and incandescent sunsets (Tompkinson as Redford? Pah). There's the 'you can change your life if you want to' angle, with the Trevanions upping sticks from the dreary UK to build a new life south of the Equator. Most of the colour is supplied by Anders Du Plessis (Deon Stewardson), a drunk, gambling-crazed Afrikaner whose infantile schemes to ward off the Afrispec threat only make matters worse.īut Wild at Heart seems to have tapped into several powerfully escapist themes. The various African characters are young and good-looking but dramatically trivial, while Christian Peeters (David Butler), the unscrupulous boss of the Afrispec mining company which is threatening to dig up Leopard's Den, exhibits all the delicately nuanced expression of an African burial mask.

His wife Alice (Dawn Steele) bears all this with pragmatic Scottish fortitude, but she's hardly a blazing comet of charisma streaking across the screen. This is baffling, because he's permanently grouchy, sullen and stressed-out, and even under blazing African skies he seems to tow a private black cloud around with him wherever he goes. How does it keep doing this? Evidently Stephen Tompkinson, playing Bristol vet Danny Trevanion who has transplanted himself to the Leopard's Den game reserve in South Africa, has a loyal legion of fans.

Tv wild at heart