Monkey business

NO, not another in Five’s seemingly endless supply of documentaries about people with disfigurements (that’s tomorrow night in The Man With Someone Else’s Face), but a relative of the recent Wolf Man.

Karin Sachs has, for the past ten years, formed intimate relationships with baboons.

From what we see in the documentary Baboon Woman, she prefers them to humans.

I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Canadian boyfriend John, who doesn’t get much of a look in with the baboon troops and orphaned animals in Karin’s life.

She says she’s never been maternal and decided not to have children. The baboons she nurtures and loves are clearly child substitutes.

Her close attachment borders on the obsessional. At least she recognises this, saying it’s probably why she shouldn’t have children – “I would have kept them in cages”. And that would have been a whole different TV documentary.

Baboons were revered as wise and intelligent in the old days, but in 21st Century South Africa, they are the primates that people love to hate. Seen as destructive pests, they are killed in their thousands.

But not when Karin’s around. She lives in a remote cabin at the edge of a forest inhabited by troops of wild baboons.

She’s struggling to raise an orphaned baby baboon, while learning to communicate with one particular troop of baboons in a Dr Dolittle talking to the animals kind of way.

This is not only unusual behaviour for a human, but also baboons, who don’t usually allow humans as close as they do Karin. She spends months at a time in the forest observing their behaviour.

Growing up in suburban Pretoria, she recalls having dreams about baboons. As a childhood friends tells us: “She’s always been strange.”

Karin feels misunderstand, saying something about wanting to be true to herself. She also wants to save a two-yearold orphaned baboon, who she gives a name that means “to walk in silence”. The aim is to rehabilitate the animal and release him into a troop of wild baboons. At the moment, they’re among the wild animals free to roam in South Africa, but as man encroaches more and more into baboon living space, these primates are shot at, maimed and killed. Footage shows what pests they can be. Stop on the road and forget to lock your car door and before you know it, a baboon has opened the door and is rummaging about inside the vehicle. One man tells how the baboons get into his house, where they open the fridge, microwave and cupboards. “It’s only a matter of time before they learn how to open a beer and then they are in real trouble,” he warns. Not everyone agrees with Karin’s methods. Baboon researcher Justin O’Riain doesn’t believe too much contact between man and animal is good.

Karin’s boyfriend, John, despite playing second fiddle to monkey business, defends her way of doing thing. He thinks what she’s doing is amazing, adding: “These animals need a voice.”

ANY fears that by series six, Paul Abbot’s Shameless would be showing signs of dramatic fatigue are proving groundless.

The arrival of new characters – including the Maguires next door, who make the Beverly Hillbillies look like royalty, and interplay of existing ones – is being brilliantly managed.

David Threlfall’s mother of all fathers Frank Gallagher totters, drunk and drugged to his eyeballs, through the series as his children, friends and neighbours fall apart.

Even the Gallagher scallies look like angels next to the Maguire clan where dad’s a heroin addict, mum’s in jail and their daughter’s involved with an evil wife-beater.

At least son Jamie has taken over the family extortion business.