Can Graeme Le Saux save the Rwandan mountain gorilla? It’s a big ask for the former Chelsea and England left-sided player. It doesn’t matter who you have faced in your career, those gorillas are always going to be unsettling in a one-on-one situation. They don’t come much bigger or much harder, wildlife-wise. Or more threatened, as it happens.

And then you look at the quality of the opposition. On Extinct, ITV’s new pro-celebrity conservation smackdown, Le Saux is going up against Anneka Rice with the polar bear. We’re talking a gigantic, bleached-white icon of the natural world with a huge sentimental pull when it comes to generating viewer response. And the polar bear has its fans, too.

Then there is David Suchet, representing the ever-popular giant panda. The big-eyed bamboo-chewer is bound to be somewhere in the reckoning when the phone votes are counted at the weekend and Sir Trevor McDonald and Zoë Ball announce which endangered creature is going to be saved and which ones are going to the wall.

Actually, the winning animal gets half the prize-money spent on it. The other half is divided between the losers. So, by choosing to vote for Le Saux’s gorilla, you aren’t automatically agreeing to wipe out, for instance, Sadie Frost’s orang-utan. Which is probably good, from a conscience point of view.

Le Saux is scheduled to make his pitch tomorrow night. On the launch show, there was a tantalising glimpse of him giving it the full Sir David Attenborough, whispering into the camera from a crouched position in some tall grass as, over his shoulder, several tonnes of male ape was debating with itself whether or not to eat him. Quality work from Le Saux, although, if we’re being picky, Sir David never looks quite so terrified.

At the risk of speaking prematurely, I think we can write off Michael Portillo and the macaw. No disrespect to the macaw, of course, but the decision to twin a retired politician with a soon-to-be-ex-parrot can probably be dismissed as the exercise in easy satire, on the producers’ part, that it probably was.

Stiffer challenges for Le Saux are likely to come from Miranda Richardson, who is bound to get a big performance out of the Asian elephant, and Pauline Collins, who is championing the Bengal tiger — always there or thereabouts when the big extinction prizes are being handed out.

We’re backing Le Saux and the gorilla, though, to pull off a surprise here. Rumours on the grapevine that the gorillas were hoping to get Sandi Toksvig are surely just so much jungle tittle-tattle. The personable and articulate full back has more than enough in his locker to get the nation behind the mountain gorilla. And behind is the best place to be when those guys get going. You definitely don’t want to be in front of them, anyway. Come on, then, Soxy. And come on, the gorilla.

What with Extinct, Strictly Come Dancing, X-Factor and the Sports Personality of the Year, the weekend just passed was a hectic one for home phone-voting. It’s perfectly possible that, in the inevitable pandemonium, I voted for Matt Dawson to go through to the final of X-Factor, texted the word LEONA to the jury on Sports Personality of the Year and added 08 to save Monty Panesar from extinction ahead of the leather-backed turtle.

It’s probably no thanks to me, then, that Dawson and Mark Ramprakash are safely through to the final on Strictly Come Dancing on December 23, where they will meet Emma Bunton in the closing, white-knuckle dance-off. I’m happy about it, though, and only wish they could be joined by Peter Schmeichel, the one who got away, to make an unprecedented one-two-three for sport.

The former Manchester United goalkeeper and accomplished foxtrot merchant at least knew the consolation of stepping on to the stage in Birmingham to present a prize at the Sports Personality of the Year show — where, of course, he was promptly mocked for his dancing skills by Gary Lineker.

If, so deep into the history of televised pro-celebrity ballroom, Lineker genuinely does still regard this physically and mentally taxing discipline as (to quote him directly) “poncing about”, he needs to take a much harder look at what these contestants are achieving out there. In any case, it ill-behoves any man known to dress up in women’s clothing for crisp adverts to cast the first stone in any “poncing” debate.

Tell it to Dawson, Strictly Come Dancing’s most improved performer. Or tell it to Ramprakash, who, unfortunately, on the eve of the final, is caught up in some unfortunate “love cheat” headlines.

What a shame it would be if the voting public allowed these irrelevant allegations to cloud their judgment of the cricketer-turned-dancer and his spectacular work with Karen Hardy, his professional partner. Can’t we be grown up about it? What a man gets up to in the arms of a beautiful and almost naked woman and what he does in his private life are completely separate issues. ITV