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SUMMARY:'Congo' the TV chimpanzee and the 'biology of art' at London Zoo\,
  1956–62 - Miles Kempton (Department of History and Philosophy of Scienc
 e)
DTSTART:20201109T130000Z
DTEND:20201109T140000Z
UID:TALK152347@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Joanne Green
DESCRIPTION:In April 1956\, the Zoological Society of London signed an unl
 ikely contract with Granada TV\, Britain's newly established commercial te
 levision franchise for the North West. The result\, a resident film and TV
  unit in the grounds of London Zoo\, was a world first. The unit is best r
 emembered today for producing _Zoo Time_ (1956–68)\, the weekly children
 's show that gave Desmond Morris his big break on television. This paper f
 ocuses on a _Zoo Time_ personality – not Morris\, but a young chimpanzee
  dubbed 'Congo' by the programme's audience. Congo became the mainstay of 
 _Zoo Time_'s success in its first years on air\, endearing himself to mill
 ions and earning an international media following for his remarkable abili
 ty to paint and draw. Morris\, who first handed Congo pencil and paper\, m
 ade him the subject of a systematic investigation into the evolutionary ba
 sis of art\, spawning an academic film\, a widely publicised exhibition at
  the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London\, and Morris's first academi
 c monograph\, _The Biology of Art_ (1962). In this paper\, I use the story
  of Congo to exemplify how the complex media ecosystem of the Granada/ZSL 
 Film and TV Unit could be pressed simultaneously into the service of comme
 rcial television\, publicity for the world's oldest scientific zoo\, and t
 he burgeoning discipline of ethology. I suggest how these domains shaped o
 ne another and put this in the context of the dynamics of science communic
 ation on British television in the 1950s and 1960s.
LOCATION:Zoom
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