London Zoo, Commercial Television, and Primate Ethology from the Launch of ITV to The Naked Ape

This thesis argues that the foundations for a new vision of human nature as a composite of apish instincts overlaid by a thin veneer of culture - of ‘man’, ‘the naked ape’ - were built on British commercial television. It highlights TV as a major arena of science and cultural politics, while also unpicking its intermedial relations with other technologies of expert and mass communication. Above all, it uncovers the remarkable interpenetration and interdependence of academic zoology and commercial entertainment. Challenging a TV-historical literature dominated by the BBC, this is the first history of science on ITV, the ad-funded service which broke the BBC monopoly in 1955. Beginning with the launch of ITV, I trace the establishment, outputs, and legacies of the Granada TV – Zoological Society Film Unit. Through the unit broadcasters and zoologists co-produced films about animal behaviour which circulated widely, shaping disciplinary knowledge in ethology - the evolutionary science of animal behaviour - industry norms of natural-history broadcasting, and the institutional identity of London Zoo. High hopes for financial and scientific rewards brought the unit into being. Conflict and fraught negotiations between Granada and the ZSL punctuated its first two years. But when filmmaking began alongside live transmissions, the unit came into its own. The first director and later the curator of mammals, Desmond Morris, built up an ethological research group focused on apes and monkeys. Working with Granada and then the zoo’s in-house production unit, this was a filmic research culture. Its members filmed pioneering work on chimp intelligence, primate facial expressions, and the behaviour of dogs and wolves. All the while, Morris was collecting, trialling, and debating material for a project on ‘the human animal’. In 1967 this filmic research culture fed into the sensational authorship, publication, and reception of the international bestseller, *The Naked Ape*.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Kempton, Miles

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hopwood, Nicholas

• Animal behaviour
• Desmond Morris
• Ethology
• History of Science
• ITV
• Natural history filmmaking
• Primates
• Television
• The Naked Ape
• Wildlife documentaries

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/01804608-c164-4088-b3fa-225818685bb6/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0002-8258-1819

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/370559