"Whale meat again, " as they're singing on barges up and down the Thames this week. Ah, there he goes, you're thinking, another cheap crack at the suffering of an innocent animal. And only weeks after his pu-erile rant about the outpouring of public sympathy about that penguin which was pinched from a zoo on the Isle of Wight, which got some of you rather exercised.

Well, no, actually. Variously known as "Pete", "Willy" or, most innovatively, "Whaley" in the tabloids over the weekend, the death of the great beast which swam up the Thames and captivated TV audiences worldwide was both a moving and ultimately uplifting event.

The difference between the public response to the theft of Toga the penguin over Christmas and the plight of the whale which didn't really have a name - apart from its secret whale name, which probably sounds a bit like an elephant breaking wind in the bath - was tremendous.

On the one hand, you have a bunch of "celebrities" such as Keith Harris and Orville offering money for the return of the stolen bird (which, let's face it, was locked up in a zoo in the first place) and, oh, look, they've just happened to have had some altogether coincidental publicity for the panto they're starring in.

On the other, you get some serious coverage of a tragic and, at the same time, rather spectacular event; the intrusion into our ordered, normal, boring Friday afternoon lives of the wild, boundless natural world.

Even Londoners, not noted for their friendliness and willingness to communicate with someone who isn't on the other end of a mobile phone, stopped and watched the efforts to turn the whale away from its up-stream course and try to get it to head back to the estuary and the open sea.

The sight of volunteers getting waist-deep in the river, splashing water over the beast as it threatened to beach, was a heartening thing to observe.

The operation to wrap the whale in protective inflatables and then winch it on board a barge for a journey out to salt-water was as tense as any supposed drama I've watched on TV so far this year.

And the fact that the beast - which experts now believe might have been sick, prompting its swim up the Thames (would you take a dip in the river where Londoners have pumped the contents of their toilets for hundreds of years if you weren't a bit ill? ) - ultimately died was poignant and sad.

But there was an upbeat undercurrent to the whole story, the fact that as jaded as we are with modern life, we still stop and stare when something magnificent and bizarre happens. We forget about the ongo-ing grind of life and take a moment to marvel at the wonder of the world, and not only that, we root for the animal, willing it to live, to be saved.

I was sorry that Toga the penguin probably ended up buried in a shoe-box in the garden of some mental-ist, really I was. It was the public reaction that bothered me, the candlelit vigils in New York, the croco-dile tears of celebrities with something to promote, the mass hysteria from former Big Brother contest-ants.

In contrast, the efforts to save the whale were carried out for the best of reasons and those who watched did so with quiet dignity and were genuinely rooting for the mammal.

Two animals have suffered high-profile deaths this year, but whereas one was turned into a cheap public-ity stunt and a smirking tabloid punfest, the other was truly an opportunity for humanity to show its best side.