Last night's TV: Inside Nature's Giants

An elephant autopsy has it all: eager scientists, posthumous farts - and Richard Dawkins
Elephants in Zimbabwe's Hwange national park
Episode one of Inside Nature's Giants delved into the anatomy of an elephant. Photograph: Guardian

For once, everyone is talking about the elephant in the room - maybe because it's a dead one. It - she, we know that much, but not a name, that would be wrong - led a happy and fulfilled life in captivity before being put down. We learn of her "very brave fight" against arthritis and of her "tragic death". But happily, in her will, it was found that she left her body to television entertainment, and now for Inside Nature's Giants she is being cut up on Channel 4.

An elephant produces around 2,000 litres of methane a day, and that doesn't stop when she dies. She is all pumped up, ready to burst. You wouldn't want to be around when that went off, especially when you see what's inside. Death by massive intestine, the longest string of the biggest sausages in the world. So the first thing to do is puncture her. The pressure eases, she lets off a long, low whistle, and a big pong - one final, posthumous fart.

It's a shame there aren't other elephants around to pay their final respects: along with us, they're the only creatures to ritualise death. Instead, the room is full of eager veterinary students with their notepads, and a team of scientists dressed in orange to do the disassembling.

It's all absolutely fascinating - those massive guts, the cooling system in the ears, the self-replenishing teeth. And the springy Nike Air Max feet which give elephants their funny run - more of a fast, bouncy walk than a run, actually, as if they're trying to sneak up on something (yeah, like they could: they're elephants). And here's one swimming, filmed underwater: is there anything lovelier than that?

Almost as interesting as the insides of the elephant are the men and women taking her apart. I like Richard, with his butcher's knife and sharpener, expertly slicing through enormous slabs of flesh at lightning speed, a veterinary Zorro. And Joy, a "comparative anatomist", who can't hide her excitement. Whales are really Joy's thing, and here's a picture of her slopping around inside one, a taste of treats to come later in the series. Joy has been inside more whales than anyone else on the planet, we're told; she makes Jonah look like an amateur.

And here's another Richard: Richard Dawkins, who will turn up to anything on telly, even the opening of an elephant. It's too good an opportunity to miss, another chance to give the creationists a kicking. The elephant's trunk is a perfect example of evolution at work, a nose that has extended over generations to cope with the problems of drinking for something so big.

Except that you're wrong there, Richard. Everyone knows that the elephant got its trunk after a tug of war with a crocodile on the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo river, all set about with fever trees.

We're still in Africa, and on Channel 4, for Madonna and Mercy: What Really Happened? And there's more natural selection. But here in Malawi, as documentary-maker Jacques Peretti points out, it's survival of the cutest, the most Mercy-like. Mercy is Madge's latest African mail-order child, taken from her rural orphanage to a life of vast wealth, celebrity and Kabbalah wrist-band nonsense.

Peretti seems an unlikely investigative reporter, reluctant even. He admits to nervousness. And to naivete - such as the moment, in the village where Madonna plans to build a girls' school, when he thinks some ancient tribal pride has been offended, whereas in fact the locals are cross because they aren't getting any money from the famous American singing lady.

There's something attractive and refreshing about that. His softly-softly-Mr-Nice-Guy approach serves him well. He gains heaps of trust, and gets to talk to just about everyone worth talking to: Mercy's gran, her dad, judges, other kids at the orphanage, even Madonna's creepy right-hand Kabbalah man, a slippery snake of a character who makes no attempt to answer any of Peretti's questions.

Where he is less successful is in deciding for himself whether Madonna is in the right or in the wrong. Has she given one child a better life, as well as highlighting the plight of others and injecting big wads of moolah into a cash-strapped country? Or is it an arrogant new kind of colonialism, with a bonkers new-age celebrity religion at its heart?

I don't think it matters that you can't decide, Jacques; it seems most people in Malawi can't decide either, not even the judges. You've done the hard work, the going-out-there and talking to people, leaving the verdict to us at home. Not that I know the answer, either.