With its Pythonesque, illuminated manuscript title sequence and blaring trumpet theme, one might be forgiven for thinking that Terry Gilliam had a hand in creating the BBC's Fabulous Animals series.

Aimed at the under-11s as half-term viewing fodder, the series featured an earnest and still youthful-looking David Attenborough zipping through a panoply of monster stories covering everything from mammoths locked in ice to Bigfoot.

For each episode, a largely studio-bound Attenborough inhabited a set resembling the back room of a museum. The desks and tables were littered with worse-for-wear antiquarian books on monsters from Attenborough’s own collection and a variety of plastic dinosaurs, creating the illusion that this was Attenborough’s own study, or a close facsimile thereof.