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In Alexei Sayle's Merry-Go-Round (BBC2, 9.30pm), Sayle looks as though he is trying to fix himself in our imaginations by colour alone. He strolls around in a resplendent, sunshine-yellow suit, as if competing with Babar and his brilliant green. Sayle might approve of being compared to an elephant for the first joke in his programme is about wild life. He claims to have tuned into animal programmes on the box and to have admired, in particular, the way that a gazelle takes flight from its persecutors.
He is resolved to put this into practice. We watch him attempting to see off a group of thugs by taking decorous, little gazelle-like leaps. It is camp and silly and it made me laugh against my better judgment. But what I like most about Sayle is not his animal magic, it is his indulgence in word-play, something that ought...