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Synopsis : When Smokey the Giraffe goes berserk, the consequences exceed Simon Carter's worst fears. "The fact is, if Filson's death is a question of negligence, someone will have to pay". A clutch of fanatical old men, a power-hungry Press baron and an international crisis conspire to make his first day as Secretary of the National Zoo a most bizarre experience. Publicity : Under Observation - Based on Angus Wilson's novel but updated so the action takes place in the near future, BBC-2's new five-part serial follows the fortunes of Simon Carter, a hero set loose in a social and political jungle. Septuagenarian Wilson invites Michael Moorcock to lunch at the Zoo: Most people don't think of writers as outdoor workers, dependent like farmers and grave diggers on the vagaries of the weather, yet part of the reason Sir Angus Wilson looks so healthy at seventy must be that his books have largely been written in the sunshine. "I only started to write when I was just on forty," he says, and he remains perhaps a little thrilled by good fortune other writers often take for granted. He still enjoys the luxury of being his own master, able to work in the garden of his East Anglian cottage or, when abroad, the grounds of boarding houses and hotels. After leaving Oxford in 1936, he worked in the British Museum Library, served in Intelligence during the Second World War, then returned to the Museum with the job of replacing three-hundred-thousand volumes destroyed during the bombing. The crunch came in the late 1940s; a breakdown, the idea of writing stories as therapy, the discovery of a remarkable talent for fiction. His first collection of short stories - Such Darling Dodos, The Wrong Set, A Bit Off The Map - brought him immediate recognition and his novels have established him, in the opinion of many, as the leading English writer. His books display a consistently expanding range of technique and subject, yet always remain highly readable while rigorously exploring his moral and social themes. "I'm against deceit - especially self-deceit. I've always been a liberal-radical, and yet many of the people who are attacked in my early work are rich people who propose themselves as socialists". Many of his characters are people who find themselves in crisis, beginning to realize the extent of their own self-deceptions. His first novel, Hemlock And After, dealt with an eminent novelist, a married man who discovers he is homosexual. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is about the rationalisations of academics building up their own miniature empires at a university; The Middle Age Of Mrs Eliot expanding his range. With Late Call he had a hard-working, self-possessed woman, forced to live with her obnoxious headmaster son in a new town; and then with No Laughing Matter he drew on his own background to tell the story of a somewhat bohemian family from the turn of the century more or less to the present. "My family were people who lived, most of them, an absurd and mocking life, almost a pantomime. My mother, a Christian Scientist, was given to social pretence, I'm afraid. My father was always spending both his and her money very rapidly and we lived in boarding houses - private hotels they were called. Once a year, because it would look bad if we never seemed to go away, we would "go abroad" to Boulogne. "But on the boat coming back my mother would say: "Angus, dear, you know that place where the Prince of Wales stays; it's called Le Touquet, and I think the people in the hotel would find it more interesting if you said that's where we were". I've always had a hatred of that sort of social deceit, I find it terribly destructive". No Laughing Matter combines a variety of nineteenth and twentieth century literary techniques to tell of the consequences of such social and self deceit. In As If By Magic he again consciously expanded, this time to deal with a much broader geographical canvas, chiefly in the Far East while Setting The World On Fire is almost a single location, Tothill House, the aesthetic and idealistic focus of two brothers. This book is also an attack on the unimaginative cruelties of blind terrorism. All very different books, all united by a relentless examination of personal and social evils, a tremendous sense of comedy and a hatred of sentimental and moralistic sham exemplified by the ludicrous, yet sinister, Blanchard-White of The Old Men At The Zoo. "I live in a world of danger. For a modern novelist I do have a strong sense of evil - perhaps because I was brought up a Christian Scientist and we simply pretended that sin, sickness and death didn't exist. I do detest the voice of sweetness. I'm suspicious of people who merely try to make life lovely without seeing what they're doing. Like that woman at the beginning of Late Call who comes to the farm and teaches the little girl "life is lovely dear, you must enjoy it", then has nothing to offer when the girl, in hot weather, takes her clothes off and the father beats her; the woman can do nothing but withdraw in horror". When not traveling, Angus Wilson lives quietly in the country, either writing in his garden or working on it (experience he used for his autobiographical essay The Wild Garden). I interviewed him in his small flat near Regent's Park Zoo. He's a member of the Royal Zoological Society and believes firmly that "one can't engage with people unless one engages with the rest of the natural world". He realised this consciously with The Old Men At The Zoo, he thinks. Simon Carter, the hero, has a great talent for natural observation which is obscured by his other talent for administration which ultimately leads him astray. "He's based very much on someone I knew, a very able man. The watching of the badgers is what he "should be doing" as it were, but he's also got a way of coping with people, though it's not his own real feeling. That's his acting". Much of the book was drawn from his own experience of the late 1930s. "I had the job of taking valuables from the Museum down to Aberystwyth on the train, where they put a lot of them in caves. I was one of the first people to go. I'd been demonstrating for two years against Hitler and the Blackshirts, and so on, though I remember feeling we'd never really have a war. But that was the moment, on the train, when I felt that war was going to come". He has never compromised his principles, which made his knighthood, in 1980, all the more welcome to those who knew him. For years he championed the cause of writers as Chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, actively opposed censorship in the arts and all forms of political oppression and bureaucratic stupidity. Yet he believes one can never know how one might have behaved, for instance, if Hitler had succeeded in conquering England. To some extent The Old Men At The Zoo is an examination of how decent, well-meaning people might have behaved under Nazis. Remarkably, the story avoids sensationalism, forces us to examine our own areas of self-deceit and concentrates on the ordinary subtleties of a near-future in which a fascist government gradually assumes power. As in all his books, there are some tremendously funny scenes and it's this mixture of irony, social observation and comedy which makes him such an entertaining writer. He's also a highly entertaining companion, with a gift for accurate mimicry which can make you ache with laughter. "I've always had this talent for mockery, imitation and so on. But I do think that as a substitute for life, mockery is not really quite good enough. So my books, I hope, contain reality with mockery all mixed in together". His enthusiasm for other writers means that he's an excellent and original teacher. He was Professor of English Literature at East Anglia and frequently visits universities, especially in America, to teach. His talent for passing on insights about Richardson, Smollett and Dickens, for instance, as well as about more recent writers (he was an early champion here of Eudora Welty, the Mississippi novelist) has brought him the additional bonus of going abroad for some five months of the year to teach, returning to England via some warmer country (where he's able to write outside). "I'm very fond of Arab countries," he says, in reference to the television version of The Old Men At The Zoo (which substitutes Arabs for Europeans as "the enemy"). He's written on the edge of the Saraha, in the jungles of Sri Lanka, and on the African shores of the Mediterranean. Perhaps his love of the sun has something to do with his mother being from South Africa where he spent much of his childhood. This could also explain his special fondness for the Zoo. He used to enjoy lying in bed at his London flat listening to the roaring of the big cats, the trumpeting of the elephants at night, and much of this atmosphere was captured in The Old Men At The Zoo. He remains as curious about people as he does about the natural and the created world around him, and this is probably the reason why each new book is so fresh and vital. "I've always led a tremendously full life. I still do". His books are exceptionally sensual - crammed with sounds, smells, sights, tactile sensations, whether he's writing about an English country garden in full bloom, a barren African desert or a mysterious South-East Asian jungle. For me it's the mark of a good novel if you can recall its scenes vividly after twenty years. I mentioned I was surprised his stories, so easily adaptable to a visual medium, had not been snapped up for television sooner (Late Call has been the only other serial). "I must say I'm a little surprised, too," says Sir Angus. "Still, it's nice that it's happened now". Energetically he rises from his chair, not at all like an old man, and suggests we walk to the Zoo for lunch. (Radio Times, September 10, 1983 - Article by Michael Moorcock. Additional Cast : Ronald Culver, James Grant, Rufus Collins, Priscilla Morgan, Fleur Chandler, Michael Siberry, Anna Wing, Robert Arden, Ahmed Khalil, Jill Meager, Gayle Coleman, Gabriel Woolf, Rio Fanning, David Cole, Dewi Peters, Norman Corner, Lois Mahoney, Julian Firth, Annette Badland, Eileen Way, Sarah Brackett, Matthew Solon, A W Armour, Peter Howell, Alison O'Neal, Titian Deakin, Stephen Speed, David William, Ellen Pollock, Tim Meats, Julian Fellowes, Tony Rhor, Bill McGuirk, Ralph Nossek, John Oxley and Eileen Helsby. Notes : Originally transmitted between 9:30pm to 10:20pm on BBC 2.
Synopsis : The death of a young keeper has not provoked the public enquiry Simon Carter had hoped for. The zoo's director can only think of his forthcoming television lecture. Additional Cast : Ronald Culver, James Grant, Rufus Collins, Priscilla Morgan, Fleur Chandler, Michael Siberry, Anna Wing, Robert Arden, Ahmed Khalil, Jill Meager, Gayle Coleman, Gabriel Woolf, Rio Fanning, David Cole, Dewi Peters, Norman Corner, Lois Mahoney, Julian Firth, Annette Badland, Eileen Way, Sarah Brackett, Matthew Solon, A W Armour, Peter Howell, Alison O'Neal, Titian Deakin, Stephen Speed, David William, Ellen Pollock, Tim Meats, Julian Fellowes, Tony Rhor, Bill McGuirk, Ralph Nossek, John Oxley and Eileen Helsby.
Synopsis
: As Godmanchester intended, the television lecture
is a resounding success and he hands over his entire Welsh estate
to the zoo for use as a wildlife reserve. It is Edwin Leacock's
dream come true.
Synopsis
: After the collapse of the nature reserve, Edwin
Leacock is forced to resign and Simon Carter finds himself moving
the zoo back to London as a triumphant Sir Robert Falcon flies
in from the Amazon.
Synopsis
: Simon Carter was badly injured in the nuclear attack,
and two years passed before he recovered to learn that England
has become a totalitarian state and Doctor Englander was now
director of the zoo.
The series was written by Troy Kennedy Martin, adapted from the novel of the same title by Angus Wilson. The series was produced by Jonathan Powell and directed by Stuart Burge. Script Editor for the series was Betty Willingale. |
 Based on Angus Wilson's popular novel from 1961 (but updated so that the series took place in the near future…approximately 1990), The Old Men At The Zoo was a five-part drama serial adapted by the renowned Troy Kennedy Martin. A dark comic mixture of high drama and very low comedy, the series was set against the backdrop of London Zoo and the fictional keepers and curators responsible for its on-going profitability.  In a "Fantasy Football League"-esque scenario, the programme featured characters as grim metaphors for a radically-changed British society. The Government and Civil Service were seen as atypically corrupt and liable to turn any public amenity or locale to a profit should they wish to do so - and the once sacrosanct London Zoo was no exception (the thematic mood of the piece was relatively similar to John Cleese's Fierce Creatures in that respect). The programme opened with Smokey the Giraffe going beserk, and a keeper subsequently dies from being kicked in the testicles. 
Simon Carter (Stuart Wilson), newly-appointed Secretary of the National Zoo, is left to clean up this unsavoury mess as a collection of fanatical old men determine to preserve the Zoo and its image, and an over-zealous press baron (Robert Morley as the deliciously wicked Lord Godmanchester) plans to exploit the Zoo's recent difficulties for maximum profit.
This wonderful
comedy-drama series, which featured notable supporting performances
from Robert Morley, Maurice Denham, Andrew Cruickshank and Marius
Goring, was a rare television adaptation of an Angus Wilson
novel (the only other notable example having been Last Call in
the 1970s). Largely disregarded in favour of more high-profile
series, this programme was a worthy addition to BBC Television's
drive towards more lightweight fare throughout the early 1980s.
The series was globally exported but never commercially released.
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