There’s a slight, bespectacled academic looking bloke I see most mornings being dragged along by a massive American mastiff called Tyson.
Then there’s the talented comedian Catherine Tate who has a chihuahua-Brussels griffon cross.
To make her dog choice even odder, there she was on SAVING THE BRITISH BULLDOG (BBC1) last night declaring her passion for that breed.
But if you love British bulldogs the kindest thing you can do is not own one.
All dog breeds are down to human tinkering but the British bulldog has suffered the most.
The quest for the ultimate flat face has resulted in dogs with awful breathing difficulties, joint problems and skin infections.
The true tragedy of the British bulldog however is how easily things could be changed.
Catherine met breeders trying to introduce a health standard for bulldogs to breed out the life-shortening issues over the generations.
If you love British bulldogs the kindest thing you can do is not own one
She met scientists working on a genetic test for the main bulldog disorder, brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome.
You’d think The Kennel Club, the leading authority on pedigree dogs, would be doing everything to help.
Catherine’s interview with the organisation’s health and breeding manager suggested otherwise.
If The Kennel Club made people get health tests for their British bulldogs, he said, they’d stay away from The Kennel Club.
I know what Catherine Tate’s “Nan” character would have said to that. Bulldogs.
What makes a serial killer kill? Perhaps they need a kind of excitement that ordinary people don’t.
Perhaps they’re acting out the things done to them in their usually broken, abusive childhoods.
In THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE: AMERICAN CRIME STORY (BBC 2) writer Tom Rob Smith takes the real-life trail of mayhem left by Versace’s killer Andrew Cunanan and gives it the dramatic touch.
This doesn’t glamorise the man but it presents him as a human craving something. In last night’s instalment, as in the first, that thing seemed to be authenticity.
The story began with Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light) hawking her perfumes on a shopping channel.
Nothing could look less authentic then or later as she chatted at a fundraiser with secretly gay hubby Lee (Mike Farrell) beside her.
Regardless of Lee’s secrets though he was authentic and every scene with him and Cunanan showed the contrast between them.
Miglin, a self-made property tycoon, wanted to build a huge tower called the Sky Needle. He wanted people to raise their heads up and look higher, he said, as he had done.
Cunanan (Darren Criss) scoffed at the idea. “Call it the Lee Miglin Tower!” he said.
In the aftermath of Miglin’s brutal murder, we saw Marilyn holding it together with the detectives, boasting about her son’s acting career, insisting the killing was a random attack.
Assassination of Gianni Versace: Cast and real-life people
Wed, January 17, 2018
Gianni Versace was murdered outside his Miami home in 1997. American Crime Story has dramatised the investigation. Here are the cast of ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ vs real-life people.
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Gianni Versace played by Edgar Ramirez
Despite the pretence, when her grief came out it was raw and real as the love between her and Lee had been.
Three episodes into Tom Rob Smith’s canny reimagining, this seems to be what Cunanan homes in on.
Not wealth, not weakness, he’s drawn to people whose relationships are real and he destroys them.
