If the idea of one more show with (check one) a reindeer, mouse, moose or dog who must travel to the North Pole to help Santa save Christmas makes you feel like you’ll shoot out your TV set, Animal Planet is offering a fine holiday alternative: man-eating crocodiles.

Tonight, wildlife photographer Roger Horrocks and underwater cameraman Didier Noiret do something that has never been done before in recorded history: they dive with Nile crocodiles, man-eating, prehistoric creatures who live in the darkest waters of the Nile in Africa.

The purpose? After watching the show, I can only guess that it was to do what no one’s ever done before. Why, you might ask, has no one ever dived into the lairs of 12-foot Nile crocodiles? Because these creatures are among the few animals on the planet who consider humans to be food.

Horrocks and Noiret travel by tiny boat to the areas most densely populated with these truly terrifying creatures. We learn that the river is so thick with papyrus that it is only passable where hippos and crocodiles have cut paths through it.

The show meanders along as slowly as the Nile itself, until the last 10 minutes, when the men actually dive right into the lair of a huge crocodile. They not only dive, but they stay there, just feet away from the giant predator who normally reacts instinctively to prey (that would be Horrocks and Noiret) by going in for the kill.

For reasons unknown, the croc not only lets them swim near it, but allows them to follow it into the deepest, murkiest underwater tunnel it had previously cut.

Unfortunately, the documentary ends up being more about how Horrocks feels — fear, love, more fear — than about crocs. We learn that he spent most of his working life toiling in large corporations until he couldn’t take it anymore. “I was not proud of what I was doing,” he says. In other words, he went from swimming with the sharks to diving with the crocs.

Noiret, who used to be Jacques Cousteau’s underwater cameraman, says the most interesting thing in the entire show: “Everybody dies, but not everybody lives.”

Word of advice to Horrocks: Next time you decide to live dangerously, bring us back more info about the animals and less about your feelings.