Colin Hogg: Doddery dinosaurs come roaring back

David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive uses technology to resurrect extinct creatures.

Senior celebrities return to become new faces of primetime.

Having exploited almost everything going, it seems primetime television is now adding exploitation of elderly presenters to its hit list. Poor old Penelope Keith, I thought after seeing her new one.

And what on earth was 88-year-old David Attenborough thinking when he decided to dance with dodos and dinosaurs on his new show?

The two celebrity seniors were scheduled up against each other here at our primest of TV primetime, 7.30 on Sunday night. There was 74-year-old Keith on Prime with her bonkers new series The Manor Reborn and Attenborough on TV One with his David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive, a beautiful but over-baked natural history show.

I hadn't previously expected to ever laugh at the redoubtable Attenborough, a man whose work in teaching us about the natural world is legendary, but I gasped and, yes, I tittered.

Some of his great mouthful of a new show was preposterous, not to mention cheesy - though a fine, aged cheddar or course. And at least he knew what he was talking about. He's had plenty of practice.

Penelope Keith, on the other hand, is a plummy English actress famous, beloved even, for her work playing plummy English women of a certain class in The Good Life and To the Manor Born.

Her new show is a loose fit, being a slightly bizarre thing, a stately home challenge, a DIY show for the Downton Abbey crowd, who are numerous and maybe can't get enough of this sort of thing, lord help them.

But this one's twaddle, though you pretty much know that right from the get go as poor old Pen opens with, "I'm Penelope Keith and I'm on a mission to change the way we visit stately homes."

Say that again please? On second thought, don't bother.

What the show seemed to be about was remaking a neglected old country manor house in a way that would make it more fun to visit than the usual stately home.

The Manor Reborn then let loose its charismatic makeover team, leaving Pen to pop up here and there saying something slightly dizzy like, "Oh dear". Oh dear indeed.

Meanwhile, over on TV One, dear old David was doing a Disney sort of thing, lurking about after dark at London's Natural History Museum, playing it cute, bringing things back to life with the aid of a vast amount of technology. And musing and pecking out his words like the odd old bird he is. But Attenborough was on the edge of fiction here, doing a bit of a Night at the Museum angle on a selection of extinct inhabitants of the spooky beautiful old museum. This required Attenborough to play the mystical alchemist, hobbling about the corridors conjuring up dinosaurs, a vast snake, a sabre-toothed tiger, our moa and Haast eagle and even that maybe creature, the dodo, not to mention a yeti.

Natural History Museum Alive's technology was extraordinary, if sometimes foolish, as bones walked and regrew their flesh, blinked their eyes at us and roared and rumbled and ancient birds flew and reptile fish swam and frolicked around the ancient presenter.

And all the while, the anything-could-happen music swelled and ebbed.

At this rate, I imagine Attenborough's producers are working on plans to reanimate the presenter himself, should the need arise.