"Dublin’s antediluvian infrastructure is causing many of us to grow ancient and ossified before our time. But occasionally the city’s reluctance to fully inhabit the 21st century — who needs reliable and affordable mass transit or tall buildings? — throws up an unexpected benefit. For instance, the Dead Zoo.
As with much of the capital, the National History department of the National Museum of Ireland stands marooned in the distant past. This, for once, is a good thing. Evoking Victor Frankenstein as much as David Attenborough, it has the uncanny charm of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities: it is lovably creepy.
Or at least it was before they closed it to fix the roof. And that is the tale told in The Dead Zoo (RTÉ One, Monday, 6.30pm), a chronicling of the painstaking process of removing two suspended whale skeletons so that the leaky ceiling could be patched."
