Our Zoo
BBC One
**
Horizon: Inside the Dark Web
BBC Two
***
Echoing the Sabbatarian framing device of Call the Midwife, whose fingerprints were all over it, Our Zoo was topped and tailed by the gurgling sermon of a four year old. How appropriate. Although shown after the watershed on a Wednesday night, the first episode of this pre-knackered period drama could hardly be more sentimentally Sunday school, or more childish.
Let us not worry that the real story of how George Mottershead founded Chester Zoo is markedly different from Matt Charman’s retelling, that Mottershead had been an animal collector since childhood, that his father ran a garden nursery and that George opened his first zoo in a farm cottage in Crewe. We’ll go with his mum and dad (predictably played by Anne Reid and Peter Wight) running an Arkwright-style corner shop, with George, exhibiting the unlikeliest symptoms of shell shock, bringing first a monkey and then a camel to reside in their backyard and with him then transporting his family and other animals to a manor house in Chester where he gets to play Dr Dolittle.
Or, at least, we would go with all that if Our Zoo was a zoological Hi-de-Hi!. The show, however, is not remotely funny, at least not intentionally, unless monkey escapes are your thing (was that the same miscast simian similarly unamusing in Upstairs Downstairs?). Even as a class comedy it fails, although its makers clearly have an eye on another Sunday hit, Downton, for Sophia Myles, playing a “Lady”, rides by periodically to give humble George encouragement, de haut en bas.
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As George, Lee Ingleby, whom I rate highly in Inspector George Gently, misguidedly chose to deliver a performance of psychological intensity, a choice signalled by the incomprehensibility of some of his delivery — although lines such as “Let me put a bit of beauty back in the world” rang, unfortunately, clear enough. Yet nor is Our Zoo dramatic. A confrontation between George’s wife (Liz White) and her errant brother, her husband’s funny turn at a regiment reunion, and George’s crucial meeting with a bank manager, were scenes all notable for the tension they failed to generate. I spot a turkey down in George’s aviary.
Horizon is frequently on the money these days and with Inside the Dark Web it alighted on a topic even hotter than it might have hoped. Not that there were naked celebrity snaps on offer. On the other hand, all the way from the Ecuadorian embassy it did feature Julian Assange, who told us, paradoxically for an exposer of secrets, that the universe was on the side of privacy. If you are afraid of Big Brother, be it CIA or Tesco, the answer seems to be to download the anonymising Tor browser. Unfortunately it is also the answer for drug dealers and child pornographers. The programme’s argument was at times so hard to follow it may well have been encrypted itself but I think I now understand why Sir Tim Berner-Lee, also interviewed, looks more worried every time I see him. His baby is now 25. Its delinquency looks like rather more than a phase it is going through.