Animal Attraction: Femme Fatales (five)

Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC2)

CILLA Black never warned contestants about this on Blind Date - males forced to trek 70 kilometres on a date, a rat-like marsupial dying from too much sex and a mating ritual that can find you breeding with your own daughter.

This scenario may remind you of an episode of EastEnders but it's real life in the battle of the sexes in the natural world.

I knew the female praying mantis killed her mate, but seeing footage of him being eaten alive brought it home. She began munching on his brain but he carried on mating regardless. He literally lost his head over a female.

Still, as the narrator pointed out, the female had not only mated successfully but also had a good meal in the bargain.

Wildlife can be cruel, as Animal Attraction demonstrated with a procession of females who only use males for breeding. No-one would dare call them the weaker sex after seeing this.

In the North Pole, male polar bears follow a pungent trail of urine left by the female (don't try this at home), travelling as much as 70 kilometres to find her, fighting off rival suitors en route.

There was also mention of some bit of him breaking during violent mating which, quite frankly, I didn't want to know about. At least the male polar bear is left alive.

A rat-like Australian marsupial called the antechinus suffers from clumps of hair falling out, open sores, parasites and intestinal ulcers because of a hormonal explosion. The rough sex that passes for mating kills him eventually. As the pair can stay locked together for up to 12 hours, it's quite a way to go. There is good news - dying prevents him living for a second season and mating with his daughter.

It was Stephen Fry's turn to investigate his family history in a moving and informative edition of Who Do You Think You Are? This was due partly to Fry being a curious, erudite guide and also to his family not being what you expected.

He said as much at the start. People think of him as quintessentially English - "ancestors made of tweed" as he put it - whereas he comes from a Jewish European family. So his search took him from Bury St Edmunds to Slovakia via the Jewish quarter in Vienna.

Branches of his family tree led to emotional stories of relatives who died in concentration camps, or spent their life in and out of the workhouse, or in the case of "naughty uncle Ernest", spent time in prison.

As we've come to expect from the series, Fry was moved to tears on several occasions. Understandably, as the horror of relatives sent to concentration camps was brought home by a plaque bearing their name on their old home and finding names - and their fates - listed in records of those who died in the camps.