A Day at the Zoo Timeshift

A day at the zoo.

How could we have grown up without it?

Ferocious lions...

..playful elephants...

..and funny monkeys.

A family occasion,

a part of our education...

Perhaps even the facts of life -

if you see something happening, that might be the moment.

..and our entertainment.

Gosh, there was an elephant, and you could ride on Rosie!

Not everything always went to plan.

Really, the keeper was very glad at the end of the day

when the animals hadn't sort of consumed any of the visitors.

And not everyone agrees with keeping animals in captivity.

Quite simply, it's wrong to hold animals captive

in order that people can go and look at them.

So where did this love affair for the rest of us start?

The first giraffe was walked from London Docks,

and fancy seeing a giraffe! You don't know what a giraffe is.

And how have zoos evolved?

From Regency high science...

..to 1930s showmanship...

..post-war re-invention

and the challenge of conservation.

This is the story of Britain's day at the zoo.

I'd seen pictures in books.

But I'd never seen anything like this ever.

Going to the zoo is something most of us take for granted.

It's one of childhood's rites of passage.

For a short while, we get up close with animals from another world,

and they become etched in our memories for a lifetime.

I mean, we used to bring things from home to feed the elephants.

We'd buy a packet of biscuits to eat ourselves,

and we'd give it all to the elephants.

We'd break off branches and give it to the giraffes.

Uh...

Things that wouldn't be allowed today!

I mean, I hope we never killed any of them,

but I don't think we did.

I think, certainly, there was a kind of an idea

of what a zoo should contain,

and you almost got your Ladybird book of zoo animals,

your rhinos, giraffes, elephants, zebras,

the kind of things you'd expect to see in a zoo.

What have you got on the brown signs on the motorways around this country?

It's elephants.

Actually, very few zoos have elephants in the UK now,

but it's still inextricably linked with the idea of what a zoo is,

to have those big iconic animals.

Perhaps we can think about zoos as places and spaces of nostalgia,

that children are taken to zoos by their parents,

and they see these wonderful creatures,

and when they grow up and they're looking for family outings,

they're taking their children.

So the parents are telling the stories

about the places they went to when they were children.

It's more of a thrill

to actually think you can hold something in your hand

and give it them, erm...

hoping your hand'd still be there when you brought it back!

Oh, we didn't...

we didn't feed lions and tigers, oh, no.

We got the... No!

There are important scientific things going on in zoos.

They've got important breeding programmes,

but the public space is about families

and parents taking children.

So I think they're important places of nostalgia

and storytelling about wild animals.

Our story takes us back to 1838,

and a young scientist who was captivated

by the weird and wonderful animals at the zoo,

none other than Charles Darwin.

"Two days since, when it was very warm,

"I rode to the Zoological Society.

"Such a sight has seldom been seen

"as to behold the rhinoceros kicking and rearing.

"The elephant was in the adjoining yard,

"squealing and braying like half a dozen broken trumpets."

ELEPHANT TRUMPETS

London's Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park

had been opened in 1828

amidst an explosion of interest in science.

The place was a living catalogue

of all the known creatures in the animal kingdom,

the very first scientific zoo.

Entry was a members-only affair,

for chaps like Darwin and guests,

and it displayed creatures that were so exotic

even Darwin had never seen them before.

It was at London Zoo that Darwin first saw man's closest cousin.

She was called Jenny, Jenny the orang.

She was a young orang, three or four years old, they thought,

and she'd come from the Far East, people weren't quite clear where.

But she's given a woollen jacket and trousers,

and he saw at once

just how close this young orang was

to a young human.

What is that, Jenny?

You know, it's historic.

This is a human looking at an animal

and for the first time thinking, clearly and positively,

"How close may we be."

Darwin's encounters may have helped lead to grand scientific theories,

but the Zoological Society was strapped for cash.

Its large collection of animals was costly to feed and maintain.

The zoo needed a new source of income,

and so, in 1847, the unthinkable happened.

The gates were opened to the general public.

It was transformed from an exclusive enclave in Regent's Park

to a day out with a difference for ordinary citizens.

So if you can imagine cages upon cages of lions and tigers,

all quite small areas, the noise, the smell,

plus, then, hundreds and thousands of people

jammed into these houses as well, trying to see the animals,

as the keepers were trying to feed them and...

So there was smells of meat,

the smells must have been quite incredible,

the noise must have been quite incredible.

But...one could say that it was a full sensory experience.

It did give people the sights and smells of wild animals.

CHIMPANZEES HOOT

ELEPHANT TRUMPETS

Even in these early years,

there were already a few essentials needed for the full zoo experience,

and possibly the most important of all was feeding time...

..although knowledge of animal needs was a bit sketchy

and sometimes odd things appeared on the menu.

So, typically, in the early years, animals would be given carrots

or kind of apples stewed in sugar or types of rice and flour maybe.

Um... Rum and stout.

All this sort of stuff was given to the animals,

because it was thought to make them more hardy,

particularly kind of stout and rum.

But to really keep the public happy, you need a showcase animal.

In order to get people to come, to pay, to the zoo,

they need to have exotic novelties,

strange animals that will attract people,

and these are the kind of flagship animals, the event animals.

It wasn't enough to have the same old stuff.

The public could look forward to seeing the odd escapee

or perhaps someone falling into the bear pit,

but what zoos have always needed to keep the punters coming

are new and exciting headline acts.

London's first attempt was a hippo called Obaysch.

"I have seen the hippo both asleep and awake,

"and I can assure you that, asleep or awake,

"he is the ugliest of the works of God."

So Obaysch, a hippopotamus

that was caught on the upper White Nile in 1849 as a calf.

Its mother certainly was killed in the process of catching the animal.

And it was brought to Southampton on the steamer Ripon,

and there were many crowds there to greet the animal when it arrived.

Now, the press really built this up,

because the translation of hippopotamus,

which is Latin, is "river horse",

so there's this idea that this is a horse

that lives in rivers, in water.

And when people see the hippo, Obaysch,

they're disappointed,

because it looks more like a grey pig, essentially.

This is not, to them, a horse - this is really disappointing.

Why have we got this fat grey hippo?

The sense that this is not other or exciting

or novel or curious enough, it's just a bit dull.

Despite the anticlimax,

Obaysch doubled the number of visitors through the gates.

For a short time, the hippo became part of popular culture

as a figure of fun.

Obaysch was missing one key ingredient for a fickle public.

He just didn't have the personality.

However, the zoo's next big acquisition

would be a real character and became a British animal icon.

ELEPHANT TRUMPETS

Jumbo the elephant was the ultimate star attraction.

Jumbo was an amazing elephant.

But he was an extraordinarily sized elephant.

He grew and he grew and he grew to literally being jumbo sized.

Everybody came to the zoo to see Jumbo,

he was almost worth the admission price by himself.

He was a huge beast.

Jumbo became a national emblem,

so Jumbo became not only an event animal,

but he had something about him which meant that his popularity endured,

and that's quite different from Obaysch.

Obaysch, his popularity was fleeting, just for a few years.

But with Jumbo, there's something about the elephant as a species

that makes it quite attractive, it means we can relate to it,

it means we can turn it into a personality very easily.

And that's the case with Jumbo, who becomes a personality in himself.

He becomes a British elephant, a London elephant.

Jumbo became so famous that he lent his name to anything supersized.

But Jumbo was maturing,

and older male elephants have a habit of getting cranky.

Before long, their star animal was becoming a danger to the public,

and something needed to be done.

Then there was an opportunity

from the great circus man Phineas T Barnum,

who wanted to exhibit the most amazing animals,

to offer to buy Jumbo...

..which, to the council of the zoo, was a wonderful opportunity,

a real solution to their problems, erm...

To the people of London, it was the worst thing ever!

There was Jumbo's wife, as she was called, Alice.

Alice was going to be forlorn,

because Jumbo was going to be moved away.

There was questions asked at the highest levels of government,

and inten...various petitions

and everything possible to keep Jumbo back in London Zoo.

"We can't possibly sell him to America, to a showman's affair."

Despite the chorus of complaints,

Jumbo was sold to Barnum for £2,000.

And eventually he sailed

and met a rather untimely end, crossing some railway tracks.

He didn't move, and Matthew Scott, who'd gone with him,

couldn't encourage him to move,

and he was hit, sadly, by an unscheduled train.

The outcry at Jumbo's departure

showed how close the zoo was to the public's heart.

That this British beast

should be sold to an American was affront enough,

but, even worse, Barnum's outfit had no scientific credentials.

The zoo was not a circus!

But whatever the lofty aims of the institution,

visitors still demanded that they put on a good show.

Bears were exhibited in pits,

and in those pits there was a big tree or something

that the bears could climb up.

And you could buy a bear-prodding stick at the entrance,

so you could just, to get this bear to move,

you could just gently give it a nudge with this stick.

You could...feed the animals, of course, in those days.

You could actually bring in food,

and some people were bringing in pilchards and things

to feed to the penguins and sea lions.

But in those days people were encouraged.

They'd paid their admission fee to come in,

and they considered it their right

to go around the collection and, erm...cajole, if you like,

the animals into moving or putting on some sort of a show for them.

By the turn of the century,

the zoo experience had become well established.

London had competition from other animal collections

and was beginning to struggle again financially.

It was no longer enough to simply show beasts in cages.

People wanted more from their day at the zoo.

The whole act needed to be more spectacular,

so the zoo turned to a German showman called Carl Hagenbeck

for a big new idea.

I think a revolutionary movement occurred with Hagenbeck,

particularly in his zoo near Hamburg.

Hagenbeck was an animal collector, he supplied animals to zoos,

but he established his own zoo,

and he wanted a different kind of theatre.

Hagenbeck thought he could improve

on the small cages that the Victorians had used.

His revolutionary idea

was to put the animals in naturalistic-looking panoramas

that made it seem as if they could happily roam around together.

It was a dramatic spectacle based on an optical illusion.

So he was creating landscape designs for animals,

where you could have animals on mountains behind other animals.

You might have predator and prey together,

and it looked like they could interact,

but they couldn't, there were moats between them.

Fundamentally, it was about impact.

Seeing these animals with zebra in the front,

lions in the back, birds behind

gave an incredible impact and display.

It was time for London Zoo to pull up its socks

and embrace the 20th century.

They commissioned a new enclosure

that recreated a panoramic mountain vista

out of reinforced concrete.

It was named the Mappin Terraces,

after the crown jewellers Mappin & Webb,

whose glittering profits had paid for it.

Oh, how I wish at times I could have seen that,

with all of these animals,

with all of the mountain goats on top of the Mappin Terraces,

with polar bears, with black bears, with grizzly bears, Kodiak bears,

with then all the pigs and the different various beasts,

and then penguins in the front.

It was undescribable in terms of the amount of animals

that were on those Mappin Terraces,

and the impact and the visual display.

Suddenly, people could see all these animals

against what they considered to be a natural setting.

Most people hadn't been abroad, of course,

and people didn't have TV,

so they couldn't see what the animals' natural habitat was like,

so they imagined that this is what the Arctic must look like

for the polar bears,

this is what the South American pampas must look like

for the peccaries.

However, welfare, was it the best display?

It was of its time.

The vast concrete mountains

may not have been the best for its inhabitants,

but they certainly looked the part.

This naturalistic new world,

where the beasts appeared to roam free,

caught the imagination of one particular family.

Out on a day at the zoo with his son Christopher,

AA Milne came across a black bear called Winnie.

Christopher was smitten by the uniquely friendly bear,

and Winnie-the-Pooh was born.

It was a sign of the times.

Over the years, attitudes towards animals had gradually been changing.

We'd become a nation of pet owners,

industry was replacing beasts of burden with combustion engines,

and we read animal stories to our children.

There's an increasing sense of anthropomorphism,

which is turning animals into humans, essentially,

or giving them human characteristics,

and increasing ways in which that's done

through films and various kind of books.

It means that people are relating to animals more as little people,

little furry people - you know, less animal, more human -

and this means that when they see them in cramped spaces,

they can more easily envisage themselves in those spaces.

And I think that's what's kind of going on, it's about empathising.

It's about thinking, "I wouldn't want to be in those spaces.

"Those creatures, I can see they're a bit like me,

"so therefore they must hate it there."

And I think that's what's kind of informing it,

this sense of an increasing kind of proximity,

emotional and experiential proximity, between the human and the animal.

The views about animals were getting more sentimental,

and zoos had to take note.

Entertainment was blurring the boundaries

between humans and zoo creatures.

Our little furry friends were made to act like little people,

and chimps' tea parties were a result.

The chimps were out of their enclosure

and now really acting like humans, you know,

pouring tea for each other, drinking out of cups,

but making a mess of it.

They're naughty, they're misbehaved but slightly behaved.

They were popular because they were basically like little children.

Children loved them because the chimps were misbehaving,

they were throwing the jelly around, cramming stuff into their mouth,

um...had no manners whatsoever,

all the things the children would have loved to have done at home

but were prevented from doing so.

By the 1930s, the bars and cages of the old-school zoo

had fallen firmly out of favour.

No-one wanted places that looked like animal jails any more.

In 1937, a brand-new zoo

would blow the bars off the British zoo establishment.

An entire zoo picked up where the Mappin Terraces had left off,

but went a step further,

adding futuristic enclosures with no attempt to look natural.

At Dudley, the gates of Britain's first barless zoo were opened,

and a quarter of a million people clamoured to get in.

As we were only young,

it seemed as if we were walking and walking and walking.

And then we saw the crowds.

Not hundreds, thousands.

Absolutely!

And I said, "We're going to get in, you know."

And Mum... Mum hummed and harred, because I thought,

"Oh, we're going to have to wait for hours and hours,"

which we did.

Building an entire zoo without the Victorian bars

was the perfect way to make the public feel closer to the animals

and less troubled about their captivity.

So losing the bars is about presenting the animal

in a happy state, in a less distressed state,

in a less captive state.

So people going to the zoo are becoming progressively less inclined

to want to see animals visibly restrained by small spaces and bars.

So removing the bars allows them to see the illusion of freedom,

and it is an illusion, because they're in on the joke.

They know this, people aren't thinking,

"Wow, these animals are actually free."

They know they're not, but it's presenting them as such,

and so I think it alleviates this kind of sense of...of disquiet.

One of the reasons for that, also, because people go to the zoo,

they want to take photographs,

and bars don't make good photographs.

People could get a better view of the animals,

it was a more pleasant viewing experience,

and of course that psychological idea

of animals being behind bars was taken away.

I mean, the bars have a lot of connotations to them,

the sense of the prison,

but also the sense of the madhouse, the asylum,

so people would, in the 19th century, go to asylums

to see the inmates as a spectacle.

And I think all of this adds up to a sense of disquiet

and unease at animal captivity.

Dudley was the work of Russian architect Berthold Lubetkin,

who had some radical notions about designing a zoo.

His enclosures weren't just barless.

They were also modernist masterpieces

that made the animal perform for the public.

It was an idea he first tried out on enclosures at London Zoo.

In the penguin pool,

it's constructed in such a way as to make the penguins be penguin.

You have the ramp that goes up from the pool to go up a level,

and that's intended to make the penguins waddle, be penguins.

I've come to see the penguins be penguins,

I really like penguins, they're funny, they walk amusingly,

and now I can see that at the Lubetkin penguin pool.

But at Dudley, Lubetkin had an entire zoo to play with,

and he perfected his craft.

Polar bears would jump off a stylised concrete iceberg

into their pool.

And sea lions climbed modernist ramps

to be face to face with the visitors.

For a ten-year-old Muriel, the wait to get inside was worth it.

When we did manage to get inside,

almost pushing our way,

pushing the people aside to get in...

..and when we did get inside...

..oh, it was wonderful.

There was a cage...

Well, I can't say it was a cage, it was too big for a cage.

It was like this room,

and it was absolutely full of monkeys.

Absolutely!

And we were pushing our way to get to them,

we couldn't get close enough.

I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

I'd never seen anything like it! Never seen anything like it.

Lubetkin's zoo was a modernist theatre,

with wild beasts placed at the centre of the show.

His enclosures were like amphitheatres

that offered a close-up and unrestricted view of the animals.

Looking at something you didn't expect to see...

you didn't expect to see.

Don't ask me the man's name, I've got the book about him,

but don't ask me the... cos I couldn't pronounce it!

We thought we were with it!

I don't know all the modern names you'd say today,

but we were with it.

My word!

But of course there was no health and safety there,

so you just climbed anywhere.

Not so many fences then!

Though the concrete designs lacked a natural surface

and there was often little for the animals to do,

Lubetkin had created

a barless, immersive and playful experience for visitors,

ideas that all zoos would one day aspire to.

He'd achieved something that was at the heart

of every successful day at the zoo.

Dudley was a playground for the imagination.

My favourite film at the time

was Johnny Weissmuller...

..the world-famous swimmer

and film star.

And it was like Tarzan.

I expected Johnny Weissmuller to come jumping through the trees.

In Tarzan And His Mate,

Johnny Weissmuller found himself in a jungle

that was more Californian than African,

but the film did make use of live animals,

capturing some realistic wildlife behaviour on camera in a way

unusual for the era - one reason for the success of the Tarzan franchise.

Perhaps other people had seen places

but it was the first zoo I had seen.

So I thought it was almost like Africa.

And Johnny Weissmuller, my favourite film star,

I expected to see him jumping through the trees.

I knew he wouldn't.

But I thought, you never know!

That was it. And the love affair started then with the zoo!

And it never went away.

In the 1930s, Hollywood was in full swing

and the movies turned the spotlight onto one particular animal.

King Kong was one of the biggest hits of the day

and 100 miles south-west of Dudley,

the second-oldest zoo in the country had something just like him.

Bristol Zoo had its very own superstar ape.

First time I went,

I would think it was 1946.

Went with the Sunday school from Clarence Barr Baptist Church

in Weston-super-Mare and we got a green double-decker bus

and children sat three to a seat

and then there was a row of chairs down the middle of the aisle.

No health and safety in those days!

It was so exciting, with the war just finished.

This was a real treat, to be going to Bristol Zoo.

Maureen and her friends had all come to see major animal attraction

Alfred the Gorilla.

# Mr Big Stuff

# Who do you think you are... #

Scary and yet lovable,

which sounds ridiculous but it's true.

He was. He was special.

I wouldn't have liked to have been in the cage with him,

I have to admit. But...!

He was a great animal. He was almost human.

He almost knew that you were going to be there

to watch his antics

and his spitting and his urinating at you, all the things

that he shouldn't do, and yet he knew,

he seemed to know he shouldn't do.

Alfred had arrived at Bristol Zoo as a youngster in 1930.

He was one of only two gorillas in Europe and was an instant sensation.

In the 1930s, King Kong is a Hollywood film

and because this is the same sort of time you have Alfred here,

it all heightens the hype surrounding the animal.

It's about going to see this animal

that could almost be the gorilla that was in King Kong.

It's all about creating this kind of cultural excitement

surrounding the species, I think, and Alfred is emblematic of the species.

Alfred was the biggest and longest-lived gorilla in Britain

and visitors felt a sense of connection to him

that only a great ape could offer.

Well, he was this big, great

brute of a chap

and he used to sulk most of the time, so he just sat!

Well, it was daunting, really, cos he was an enormous great chap,

so you stood and looked in awe, really. That's it, yes.

There's certainly more empathy with Alfred than there is

with other animals, because he is so, almost, human.

There are records of people looking at Alfred and seeing in his eyes

that he understands what it is to be human.

And they write this. There's this sense that, when they go to the zoo,

he loves seeing them, he waits for them to come to see him annually.

There is a sense that he remembers particular people as his friends.

When people come to the zoos, they bring their own stories,

their own imaginations, their own ideas about animals, with them.

So, they might not be thinking about ethology, animal behaviour -

scientific stuff. They'll be bringing stories that they've learnt

from children's books, from films, and they start attributing

human characteristics, immediately, to animals.

"Oh, that animal looks sad."

"Those two monkeys are hugging, they must be in love."

"Oh, look, they're kissing."

Or "The big gorilla over there is just like Dad -

"sitting on his backside and doing nothing."

But the feeling of a link with Alfred would get even deeper

for the public as, just like them,

he endured the burdens of the Second World War.

The war brought tough times for zoos.

Rationing meant food was scarce,

money was tight and no-one wanted dangerous animals

escaping from their enclosures.

If a bomb hits, these animals are going to get out.

The polar bears at Bristol were shot

and the polar bear enclosure, which was quite new at that time,

was turned into an air-raid shelter.

This was a very difficult time for animals. If they weren't shot,

then many of them starved. They didn't have the sort of food

they had before, so it's not just a human tragedy here,

in terms of war, there is an animal one, as well.

Despite the hardship, the Second World War

propelled Alfred to international fame.

In 1937, it's said that he's the most famous animal in Europe.

By the end of the Second World War,

it's said he is the most famous animal in the world.

Alfred is seen as sharing the plight of Bristolians during the war.

So, his food is rationed,

he's living in a war-torn city that was bombed on a number of occasions.

And so, there is this sense

that he is a symbol of life lived in the shadow of war,

just as normal Bristolians are.

But also, you have garrisons, battalions of GIs, American GIs,

posted here and they are told, "Go to see Alfred.

"He's the great attraction of Bristol, go and see him."

They go and see him and, allegedly, they send some thousands

of postcards back to their families back home and this spreads

the message of Alfred. Alfred's story appears in newspapers

in Australia, New Zealand and America. So his story is global.

From being a simple animal attraction,

he became a hero to the people of Bristol.

There is a poem about Alfred, in which he's referred to

as "Bristol's glamour boy".

And this is a Hollywood reference. So he is, you know, he's a star.

He's Bristol's star, he's Bristol's glamour boy.

The spotlights are firmly positioned on this animal.

Everyone knows about his life, what he's doing every day.

People go to see him, specifically, to see HIM,

as you would go to a movie premiere to see a particular star,

for instance.

Alfred was there through thick and thin

and his death in 1948 hit his fellow Bristolians hard.

Alfred died of TB

in 1948. For a while, it was suggested he died from fright,

because an aeroplane flew quite low over the zoo.

That was later disproved, when they found tuberculosis in his body.

His death was a great sadness for the zoo.

The zoo had lost its main animal,

its star attraction. For a great deal of time before his death,

Bristol Zoo was Alfred and Alfred was Bristol Zoo.

It was also a great sadness for the people who went to go to see him,

because they thought of him as a friend. They thought they'd go

to see him and that he understood them,

so they were losing a person - a family member, a pet.

Although the loss of Alfred, the cantankerous family friend,

would cast a shadow over the place,

it would soon be boom time for Bristol Zoo.

Rising disposable income, skyrocketing car ownership

and a new bridge over the River Severn

would see the zoo become more popular than ever,

as visitors flooded in.

You felt it was a magical place. When you walked in,

there were lovely flowerbeds and grass and the animals were always

along in a straight row, then.

And when you got to the end of the path, there used to be

a bear, a big brown bear, there, with a pool in the centre.

That used to smell just a little bit, but bear-like, you know.

It was wonderful. We used to spend lots of time there, actually.

You went in and there was a tree there, that lovely tree.

And all the flowers you looked at.

You were in another world, really. I thought it was

lovely. And it was always sunny. The sun was always shining.

Whenever you went to the zoo, it was always shining, yes.

You looked forward to the outing, going to the zoo.

Yes, a big day in your life.

In this golden age, zoos had got it spot-on for the visitors.

Lots of exciting animals, intriguing displays

but most important of all, plenty of interaction.

The ever-expanding numbers of visitors kept one young keeper

on his toes. Don Packham was in charge of the monkey temple,

where it wasn't just the animals who made a mess.

In those days,

the public were allowed to feed.

And peanuts, of course, were not loose peanuts,

they were peanuts in shells.

And the monkeys ate the peanuts inside the shells,

but didn't eat the shells, so the monkey temple would be covered

in monkey shells, which, of course, if it rained, they would then stick

to the floor and it would be an awful job trying to clean that up.

Innocent enough behaviour could become a real problem

on a busy day, especially when everyone had the same idea.

People always brought a bun for the elephant.

The number of times when you said, "Please don't feed the elephants."

"It's only a bun." What they don't realise is,

20,000 people in the zoo, if only a quarter of those brought buns,

that's 5,000 buns you're going to offer to an elephant!

The public wanted to get ever closer to the inmates

and monkey around themselves -

a constant source of worry for keepers.

I'm afraid the one thing that used to worry keepers

probably more than anything else -

one, obviously, animals being given unsuitable objects

and the other was people climbing on fences. The monkey temple

was one where my heart was in my mouth several times there,

where children would want to climb onto a wall

and sit on the wall, with their feet dangling over into the temple.

And as they lean forward to look at the monkeys,

you could see the next stage was that

they were going to go over there. The same thing applied to the bear.

It was something which, really, the keeper was very glad at the end

of the day, when the animals hadn't consumed any of the visitors!

But it wasn't just visitors getting eaten that keepers

had to watch out for. There were monkey escape plots,

aided and abetted by members of the public.

I went home on the Saturday evening, everything was fine.

No problems at all. Fed them the usual way.

Came in in the morning and the monkey temple was empty,

except for something that hadn't been there the night before,

and that was that a ladder had been put over.

Somebody had broken into the zoo at night, put the ladder

over into the temple and, of course, needless to say,

all the monkeys had escaped. 36 monkeys roaming around.

Although it might sound a humorous story, in fact, it was not,

because those monkeys were potentially very dangerous

and it took us three weeks, actually, before we finally

captured the very last monkey.

We had to take over a flat, actually, so we could set a trap

inside the flat there and then we used to have to wait

for hours outside, hoping that the monkey would go in for the food. Eventually, we did get him.

But it was a very serious business and obviously whoever did it

thought they were being very, very funny, but they certainly weren't.

Even if you didn't have the cheek to bust out the animals,

there was still one thing that could be enjoyed.

It was perfectly acceptable to ride on the back of an elephant.

You got here and, gosh, there was an elephant and you could ride on Rosie

and from that time onwards, Rosie was my favourite.

Whenever I went to the zoo, and we went every year with Sunday school,

I might have gone with my parents in-between,

and always wanted to ride on Rosie.

Well, they had steps to go up, proper big steps

and a platform where you climbed onto the top of the elephant

and she walked all along the wide main path

very slowly, led by the keeper

and turned round at the end and came back.

I think the rides were about thruppence or fourpence,

something like that. It was lovely.

They had the seats going either side and, um...

I suppose there were about five or six children each side.

And then, Jumbo or whoever it was,

Judy, I think, in this case,

would walk along the promenade there

and you'd roll about as the elephant walked along, really.

That was the thing and it was quite exciting, really.

You'd actually been on an elephant.

1967 was Bristol's busiest year

and crowds weren't deterred by the queues.

If you wanted to get from one side of the zoo to the other,

it was quicker to get out of the zoo

and walk around and come in at the other gate than walk through the zoo.

It was mad and people would queue for hours

to see a particular animal exhibit.

Perhaps it was a different mentality in the '60s.

People expected to go out and spend ages queuing for things.

Bristol Zoo had novelties to keep visitors interested,

like rare white tigers and their adorably cute cubs.

It was more popular than ever before.

But slowly everything was beginning to change

and it was driven by a newcomer to the wild animal business.

Television.

Natural history programmes would have a major impact on zoos

but they didn't start out life

in glorious, high-definition Technicolor.

Well, I've got a handful here, and, hello, how are you?

And here's Bibi, a really obstreperous little lion cub...

Early programmes were crude, no-frills affairs.

One of the first presenters was George Cansdale,

Superintendent of London Zoo.

The BBC contacted London Zoo,

and my father would have been the one they spoke to,

and asked him to take some animals to show on television.

But it was before outside broadcasting

so he took animals to a studio in Alexandra Palace

and he would take in particular animals and talk about them

and handle them

and millions of people watched.

He got bitten from time to time.

It was live television.

And for many people, that's why they watched,

expecting he'd be bitten, perhaps hoping he'd be bitten.

Oh, I think we'll have to let her go... Now, look!

Johnny Morris's zookeeper in Animal Magic depicted the zoo

as a friendly, safe place, with approachable, happy animals.

Television initially reinforces this sense of the animal as a tame friend,

someone you can go to the zoo and you're not going to be threatened by.

You'll have a nice time with it. It will connect with you, recognise you.

You can communicate with it if you like

and I think television certainly promotes that idea to begin with

on shows like Animal Magic or News From The Zoos.

But another type of natural history programme emerged.

It had extraordinary colour footage and was filmed in wild habitats.

So zoos had to react to later television programmes

like Attenborough's natural history shows for a number of reasons

and the most important being that they presented

animals in a very different way than they had been presented before.

There were no bars.

There was no perceived pretence about animal behaviours

and animal environments.

It was presenting them in a state of liberty being as authentically

animal as they could possibly be.

There's a sense of a camera hidden in the undergrowth recording

an animal being animal.

The humans aren't really there.

Now the public could see wild animals in their natural environment

and for some, the comparison was troubling.

Television does change things significantly.

It's not a rival to the zoo because the experience is very different

but what it does do is change people's

perceptions of what the wild is and how animals in the wild are.

So when they go to the zoo,

they suddenly have a new frame of reference.

Suddenly they're thinking of the animals they've seen

in their living room on the box in the corner

in a state of liberty, so when they go to the zoo,

suddenly captivity is really obvious and quite unsettling and what they

want to see is the animals as they're being on the television screens,

being active in the wild places, breeding, with their cubs,

all this sort of stuff.

So it changes people's expectations of what animals should be doing.

People seeing wild animals on television I think

may have given them a renewed interest in them

going to see these animals in the zoo for real.

But also you then begin to give people a very selected

view of what the world is like, you know.

Actually everything's lovely and wonderful,

and these wide-open spaces where animals can roam.

Perhaps it was the origins of people being

uncomfortable about animals in captivity

and a change therefore perhaps in the attitude of people towards zoos.

People who had first visited the zoo as children returned as parents,

but some harboured doubts as the public mood began to change.

Well, I was pleased to show them what I had seen as a child

and the experience that I'd had,

but I was beginning to think then that this is not right,

having a zoo purely for the animals to be looked at,

and the attitudes generally were changing.

People were thinking what an awful thing it was to coop up animals.

Making things even trickier for zoos was the arrival of

a new type of competition in the wild animal business.

Certainly that excitement of being with your family in your vehicle,

as if going on safari without having to go to Africa or wherever else,

much cheaper to just drive round the safari park,

and the excitement of being told to keep your windows wound up as well,

that air of tension that there's a lion just outside your car

and there's nothing between you and the lion but your window pane

that you could wind down but you won't because it's too dangerous.

So, you know, great family excitement driving through a lion enclosure.

-ARCHIVE NEWSREEL:

-This is lion country right enough,

but a green and pleasant land.

Not a desert or a national park in Kenya's dry bushland.

This is England and we're looking at the Marquis of Bath's

latest idea to keep the visitors flocking to see

the sights at his stately home of Longleat.

In 1966, Longleat Safari Park was unveiled to the world.

It appeared to have the answer to public worries about

small enclosures and offered an entirely different experience.

Safari parks were the brainchild

of circus impresario Jimmy Chipperfield.

He set up Longleat,

which was the first safari park of its kind outside Africa.

Times were tough for country toffs with large estates

and Chipperfield saw an opportunity.

In exchange for a chunk of their land,

he would make an animal attraction that made visitors feel like

they really were seeing wild animals.

He had the nous to realise that it was possible to have the

visitor in the cage, the car, and to drive through the reserve.

He'd seen in east Africa that lions pay no attention to

people in cars as long as those people don't get out of the cars

and he thought what works in Tanzania is going to

work in Wiltshire and he was proved correct.

Suddenly, people who were accustomed to seeing lions in fairly small

cages, suddenly they could see them in a huge 50-acre field.

And this is about authenticity. It's the latest evolution of the zoo.

It's about presenting the animals in a state of liberty.

It's about driving through the animals' domain

experiencing a more authentic nature than you would get at the zoo

and that is what underpins the safari park.

In the early safari parks, it's less about science.

It really is about commerce.

Although initially the public loved the idea

that animals had miraculously been set free to do their own thing,

the reality was a bit more awkward.

Animals they'd previously seen in city zoos in fairly small

cages they could now see in a 50-acre field.

And they thought, not always correctly,

that this was necessarily better for the animal.

An animal can be just as unhappy in a 50-acre field as it can in a

small cage, but people are deceived into that notion of freedom.

The idea that you were...

you were the one in captivity, if you like,

stay in your car, and you're driving through the animals' habitats -

of course, essentially what you've got is just very large enclosures.

They're still enclosures.

And some would say, actually, that driving through animals' territory

can be more disruptive than staying outside of it.

We might have cared about the size of an animal's enclosure,

but having paid for our tickets,

we still wanted to see them up close.

Sometimes you are still very far away from the animals.

You have the animals right over the other side.

Even in zoos, some zoos have very large paddocks with hoofstock.

I've seen loads of people who say,

"Well, I went to see this zoo and it was really boring

"cos the animals were all, like, really far away

"on the other side of the field."

But there's a tendency to think that actually if you go to a zoo,

you see a wider variety of animals and you see them more close.

Everybody was saying that safari parks are the new zoo,

that safari parks will cause the death of the traditional zoo.

They didn't do anything of the sort.

The heyday of safari parks was in the late '60s, early '70s.

Zoos lived to fight another day,

but the pressure was on to change their ways.

Safari parks weren't the future after all,

but a writer called Gerald Durrell

had been steadily growing an idea that would change everything.

I've always wanted a zoo as far back as I can remember.

In fact, I'm told that the first word I said was "zoo"

and not "mama" and "dada" as normal children do.

Gerald Durrell was the founder of Jersey Zoo -

the first to be created specifically to protect endangered species.

Conservation would one day become the industry rallying cry.

So we drove through these gates

to this beautiful, beautiful parkland...

set up with trees, and it was a gorgeous day.

And I just... I just couldn't believe it,

it was a...

It was open, the enclosures were large.

Walking around for the first time, all the animals looked healthy

and behaving naturally.

And I thought, "This really is, it's a bit of an Eden...

"for animals.

"A sanctuary for animals."

Durrell had created something revolutionary,

but he'd started his career as an animal catcher,

a job that led him to transform his thinking about how zoos operated.

So Gerry in this period when he was collecting for other zoos,

he'd...bring them back, he'd sell them to the zoos.

Then he'd find out that they had died.

He'd spent months in the bush with them...

trying to learn their needs and feed them properly.

So, that in itself was very distressing for him.

But he was also in a position to see that,

in the places where he'd been - west Africa, South America -

the destruction of habitat was starting over,

exploitation of animals.

The zoos of the day, their attitude was,

"Oh, there's plenty more where that came from."

And he knew that wasn't the case and that is why, and how,

he decided to set up his own place.

Jersey Zoo's mission was to become an ark for species survival.

No longer was the visitor the main concern.

It was animals first, the needs of the animals to be met first.

Then the requirements, the needs of the keepers,

who were the people looking after the animals.

And only then the public.

Animals should not be made to exhibit themselves.

They need an area off view to the public

that they can go into at any time.

They shouldn't be shut out, as some zoos did,

in order to put on a show for the public.

For Durrell, the big event animals were not what zoos should be about.

He was not...

His zoo was certainly not one that was going to exhibit giraffes

and tigers and all of that.

He felt every animal had some sort of right to exist.

And therefore he kind of went forth.

What he called the "little brown jobs", the little obscure creatures,

not the big box-office creatures.

There was a never-ending supply of "little brown jobs"

that needed Durrell's attention.

Saving something like the white-eared pheasant

was unglamorous work and meant doing things differently than other zoos.

He had a row of aviaries, six aviaries,

with nothing in it but white-eared pheasants.

You can't save a species from extinction

with just the one pair of pheasants breeding every year.

You need more than one pair.

So he built a row of six aviaries.

No other zoo at that time would have even considered doing that.

They'd have built six aviaries

and probably had 18 different species of birds in them.

Gerald Durrell just had six aviaries - white-eared pheasants.

It was revolutionary.

And none of the other zoos at that time,

particularly the venerable zoos,

like London, like Dublin, like Bristol,

none of them really thought this would work

because it was an untried, untested formula.

You have to make concessions for the public.

You're not going to get the public, they said, if you don't exhibit

things like tigers, like elephants, like giraffes...

..none of which Jersey Zoo has ever had.

Unless you exhibit that type of animal,

you're not going to get the public in.

Durrell's ideas were ahead of their time and one day all zoos

would have to take note of conservation

or face possible extinction themselves.

But while Jersey was starting to have success

with breeding programmes,

rumblings of a more aggressive anti-zoo feeling were emerging.

-ADVERT:

-What are zoos for?

PROTESTERS SHOUT

An animal welfare movement

that had been fighting against battery farming and vivisection

turned its gaze on zoos and vehemently opposed

the very idea of keeping animals in captivity.

Rather than this old model of animal welfare is important

but animal welfare accepts that people use animals for our means

as long as we treat them kindly while we're doing it.

The animals rights' theory would reject that and say,

"Well, actually, no, animals have lives of their own,

"for their own purposes,

"to fulfil their own desires, to fulfil their own needs,

"we shouldn't have control over them full stop."

And that leads to questions about how we treat them

and should we have the right to hold animals captive?

It was no longer enough for the focus of zoos to be entertainment,

they had to reinvent themselves as bastions of conservation.

With the rise of the environmental movement,

animals rights' issues,

more and more people became concerned

about what we were doing by keeping animals in zoos.

And I think the zoo world had to respond,

they had to change their landscaping,

they had to change their types of enclosure.

They had to move to barless zoos.

They had to move to imitations of natural spaces.

Plus, what they had to do was solidly sell this message of conservation.

We are keeping animals in the zoos because it's necessary,

we need breeding stock,

we exchange animals between other zoos

and we're doing it for good conservation reasons.

And that's what they do, these important zoos do that.

The zoos that generations had grown up with

were being transformed

and many of the large, iconic animals were phased out.

But the reasons people went back were the same as ever.

A lot of zoo people would like to say,

"People want to learn about animals, that's why they come to the zoo."

I think the truth is more that people want something else

to do with their family.

It's a day out.

I hear lots of people saying...

I say, "I work in the zoo," and they say,

"Oh, I haven't been there for ages cos my children grew up."

And so there's almost people have an excuse to come to the zoo,

to bring their children or their grandchildren.

It's a family day out,

but it's also seen as good for children's education.

Zoos have come full circle.

A mission of educational improvement and animal science

still competes with the need to entertain and bring in the visitors.

Not everybody likes them, but zoos remain wildly popular for families,

and stories about the elephants and giraffes, penguins and rhinos

are handed down from one generation to the next.

Whatever the reason we go,

whether it's science or entertainment,

because it's educational or amusing,

there's nothing quite like a day at the zoo.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd