ATTENBOROUGH AND THE GIANT ELEPHANT,
BBC1, 9pm

HARDLY anyone in Europe had seen a living elephant 150 years ago. They were just weird looking creatures in picture books.

So when Jumbo, an African elephant said to be the world’s largest, was brought to Britain and then America to be displayed, he caused a sensation and became “the first animal superstar”.

We hear his story, and of how his “celebrity status took him across the globe” and inspired Hollywood movies like Dumbo.

Naturally, the real story of Jumbo is not all about fame and excitement, and here David Attenborough tells the truth about Jumbo’s strange life, including his tragic death, and of how he used to destroy his cage in frustration, prompting his keepers to feed him large amounts of alcohol to calm him down.

In 1882, Jumbo was transported to New York by ship in a huge crate and it’s at the city’s American Museum of Natural History that the “treasured specimen” of Jumbo’s remains are kept, and Attenborough examines them to try to find the truth behind Jumbo’s myth.

LEONORA CARRINGTON: THE LOST SURREALIST,
BBC4, 9pm

I thought this documentary was about Dora Carrington, the surrealist painter played by Emma Thompson in the 1995 film, but apparently there was another surrealist painter called Carrington.

This is about Leonora Carrington, an artist who worked alongside Pablo Picasso and Andre Breton in Paris, and also Max Ernst, with whom she had a passionate affair.

When she moved to Mexico City and settled there her work struck a chord with the Mexicans and she was finally lauded as a great painter, having been overshadowed by the big names she was previously working with in Paris.

This documentary tells the fantastic story of her life. She began as an aristocrat who was presented to the Queen as a young debutante, then lived in bohemian Paris and exotic Mexico.

Having been largely ignored by the international art world, her paintings now sell for millions.