UR TV CAST

There’s sufficient chrome candy to satisfy the most serious petrol-head and enough classic Clarkson to prevent the petrol-head’s wife from battering her spouse to death with the remote. It helped that they featured my favourite tarmac starlet of the moment, the Aston Martin Vanquish, but the new format is also extremely funny. There’s a slot called “star in an average price car” (Ross Kemp last week, plucked from his Porsche and landed in a family saloon), while the pi? de r?stance was “grannies driving doughnuts”, where blue-rinses were shown how to drive like teenage joy-riders. And in the next few weeks the show promises us an interdenominational challenge entitled “I’m a man of God and I want to drive fast”.If that weren’t bliss enough, Jeremy Clarkson bestrides the whole enterprise like a be-denimed Michelin man Less a hero than a god. Sunday evenings haven’t been so thrilling since the tragic demise of One Man and His Dog.. Torrential overnight rain threatened to flood large areas of England and Wales today. “The water levels in the rivers have built up with the heavy rain during the week.

There has been no rain today but rain is predicted for tonight. If that happens and the ground hasn’t had chance to dry out then there could be floods.”A Met Office spokesman added that up to an inch of rain was expected to fall in the North-west and half an inch in the Midlands The rain is expected to clear up by this afternoon. Forecasters expect the wind to pick up then, with possible gale-force winds in the North-west.. The shipping news was unpromising: “Low, south to south-west, force five to seven, increasing occasionally gale eight.” Outside the warmth of the bridge, three scientists stand at their stations wrapped in oilskins, their eyes peeled, binoculars at the ready.

She is the Rainbow Warrior II, the emblematic flagship of Greenpeace, and once again she is sending out a conservation message to the world.But this is not a tale of environmental apocalypse from a faraway tropical paradise. The Rainbow Warrior’s present mission is closer to home: she is monitoring what environmentalists describe as the “killing season” of whales and dolphins off the west coast of England.Winter heralds the main season for mid-water trawling of sea bass, but the gill nets used by fishermen catch not only fish but also by-catch cetaceans, the collective name for dolphins, porpoises and whales. More than 120 dead whales and dolphins were washed up on West Country beaches between January and April, according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS), which believes hundreds more are killed but their carcasses never found.It is a cruel death. Trapped in the nets, the dolphins close their blowholes rather than drown and so instead suffocate. The tight nylon fishing nets leave deep cuts and carcasses have been deliberately mutilated by fishermen removing them from the nets.Greenpeace has provided the Rainbow Warrior and her crew to assist the WDCS in a six-week population study of western Britain’s coastal waters, from Cardigan Bay to Poole.

More than 20 species of cetacean can be found in UK waters, including bottlenose dolphins, rarer Risso’s dolphins and harbour porpoises. Due to the elusive lifestyles of the cetaceans and a lack of dedicated research, the full consequences of the threat from the intensive fisheries is not well understood. The message, though, is a stark one: unless action is taken, the much loved spectacle of dolphins playing in local waters could be lost within a few decades.As we trundle along the Cornish coast towards Plymouth, the waves grow larger. We look for the distinctive dorsal fins of dolphins and the flukes of whales. Acoustic equipment is set up to track the animals by hydrophones. Dolphins squeal, I learn, while orcas can be individually identified by their speech – and even by dialect.At Plymouth, the plan is to head due south and out to sea for perhaps 30 miles, following random routes to find a snapshot of the moving patterns of the animals. But the barometer is plunging and it is time to call it a day.”The weather is right on the limit,” said Derek Nicholls, the ship’s captain.