This is the second series of articles about BBC programmes from the 40s and 50s, when the corporation was a much-loved institution broadcasting material the listeners wanted to hear. This time I will be including some early TV shows. You can see earlier episodes in the series here, and the first series is here.
THIS week, instead of featuring a programme, I’m looking at a legendary TV personality, Johnny Morris. If anyone is deserving of the title ‘national treasure’, I think he is.
Ernest John Morris was born in 1916 in Newport, Monmouthshire, the only child of a civil servant who at the time was fighting in the First World War.
Describing his origins, Morris said, ‘As a child I wanted to be an actor, but looking as I looked, with a big nose, it was quite out of the question and I resigned myself to a normal, ordinary life as a solicitor’s clerk.’
Soon tiring of the office routine, he went to London where he worked as a salesman and later as a timekeeper on a building site.
In 1939 he was on the verge of accepting a job teaching English in Germany (which would almost certainly have led to internment on the outbreak of war) when a chance meeting with a farm-owning stockbroker led to a position as a farm manager in Wiltshire, looking after 600 cows and 2,000 pigs for £2.10s (£2.50) a week. The curiosity of locals was aroused when the stranger arrived driving a German Opel car, and Morris soon found himself under house arrest on suspicion of spying for the enemy. It was well into the war before he was allowed to join the Home Guard, where he was appointed lance-corporal of a platoon made up of farm workers.
He was a natural mimic and impersonator, and soon after the war he was heard telling stories in the local pub by a BBC Home Service producer, Desmond Hawkins, who realised his potential and encouraged him to try his hand at broadcasting.
Morris made his radio debut in 1946, and featured in a number of regional series throughout the 1950s. In a weekly programme called Pass the Salt he tried his hand at a new job for a few days, including bricklaying, litter-picking and fare-collecting on a ferry boat. In another radio series, he spent three weeks walking from Manchester to Torquay, filing a five-minute report every teatime.
Morris first appeared on television as The Hot Chestnut Man (1953-1961), a short slot in which he roasted chestnuts while telling a self-written yarn in a West Country accent, often ending with a moral.
His big break came when he was asked to narrate Tales of the Riverbank, the classic children’s programme starring Hammy the hamster, GP the guinea pig and Roderick the rat. (My husband Alan wrote about the programme here.)
The programme was created by two Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)film editors, David Ellison and Paul Sutherland, the latter being the narrator. CBC turned down the pilot episode so Ellison, who was British, took it to London to show it to the BBC. The head of BBC Children’s Television commissioned an initial 13 episodes, but the Corporation had a policy of not using North American accents in children’s programming, so Johnny Morris replaced the Canadian Sutherland. The first programme appeared BBC on July 3, 1960 at 4.50pm, and ultimately a total of 52 were made in black-and-white, running until 1963. Here is one episode.
The theme music is the first section from the Andante in C major by the Italian guitarist and composer, Mauro Giuliani (1781-1828).
Much of the filming was done in a barn at Wootton Creek on the Isle of Wight, in which Ellison constructed a 40ft river with the animals’ homes built into the bank.
They operated miniature artefacts including boats, cars, and aeroplanes. Various techniques were used to persuade the animals to do what was required, including smearing jam on the objects they were to handle.
The action was filmed by producers Dave Ellison and Ray Billings using high-speed cameras. This footage was then played back at a slower speed, making the animals’ movements look more purposeful. (This doesn’t make much sense to me but it is what everyone on the internet says.) The narration was often added after the footage was captured. Johnny Morris would watch the raw film and improvise dialogue or plot points that matched the animals’ actions.
Each episode ended with Morris alluding to an event involving the characters and refusing to elaborate, saying ‘But that is another story.’
Morris’s best-known role was in Animal Magic, which overlapped with Tales of the Riverbank and ran for more than 400 programmes from 1962 to 1983.
The signature tune, Las Vegas, performed by Group Forty Orchestra, was written in 1960 by Laurie Johnson for KPM, a company that provides a library of music for use as film and TV signature tunes or incidental music.
It more recently featured as the theme music for the BBC2 comedy W1A (2014–2017).
In the 1970s the original orchestral version on Animal Magic was inexplicably replaced with an updated version.
Later still and even more inexplicably a sort of jazz arrangement was used. It featured an electric guitar with a wah-wah pedal. Ghastly.
Composer Laurie Johnson was amazingly prolific. He was born in Hampstead in 1927 and studied at the Royal College of Music, where his tutors included Ralph Vaughan Williams. He spent four years in the Coldstream Guards playing French horn before moving into the entertainment industry in the 1950s, composing, arranging and recording.
From the late 1950s to the 1980s he composed more than 50 themes and scores. One of the first was for the police series No Hiding Place.
Others were This Is Your Life, titled ‘Gala Performance’,
The Avengers (from 1965, when Diana Rigg replaced Honor Blackman),
The New Avengers
and The Professionals (in this video you get two sets of titles, the first series and the rest)
Johnson’s film scores included The Good Companions, The Moonraker (1958), Tiger Bay, Dr Strangelove, First Men in the Moon, You Must Be Joking!, And Soon the Darkness (1970), Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter and Diagnosis: Murder (1975).
He retired in the early 1990s and died in 2024 at the age of 96.
Animal Magic was the brainchild of Pat Beech, a former news editor of the BBC in Bristol, with Morris as presenter, narrator and ‘zookeeper’. Every show featured a segment filmed at a zoo, often Bristol Zoo, in which Morris in keeper’s uniform would chat with various animals, voicing their parts as well as his own. A regular companion was Dotty the ring-tailed lemur, which was given a French accent. Other animal stars were Cocky, a sulphur-crested cockatoo, Brolly, an umbrella cockatoo, and elephants Christina and Wendy.
Here is part of the first episode, broadcast on April 13, 1962.
Here are some favourite clips which clearly show Morris’s natural affinity with animals:
I love the gorilla section at the end of this one.
Morris’s co-presenters over the years included Gerald Durrell, Tony Soper, Keith Shackleton, Roger Tabor, Sheila Young and David Taylor.
The final co-host was Terry Nutkins, who had an unusual background to say the least. He was born in 1946 in Marylebone, and frequently skipped school to spend time with the elephants at London Zoo. When he was 12, the naturalist Gavin Maxwell asked the zoo for two assistants to help look after his otters at his remote home in the Scottish Highlands, and despite his age Nutkins was hired as a summer placement. With the permission of his parents he stayed on for several years, and Maxwell became Nutkins’s legal guardian. At the age of 14 Nutkins lost part of two fingers to an otter. Maxwell wrote several books during Nutkins’s time there, including the highly successful Ring of Bright Water published in 1960.
Nutkins went into the zoo business and by his late 20s had worked his way up to become general manager at Woburn Wild Animal Kingdom (now called Woburn Safari Park), near Milton Keynes. It was there, in around 1975, that he met Johnny Morris, who was filming at the park.
In 1979 or 1980 Nutkins joined Morris on Animal Magic, bringing with him the sea lion Gemini, which he had hand-reared.At this point the producers tried to update the show, using new effects technology. This allowed them, for example, to ‘shrink’ the presenters to allow them to see life from an ant’s viewpoint.
Here is an episode from that period.
However despite the revamp, the programme’s days were numbered. For some time the BBC had been unhappy about the anthropomorphic approach of humans pretending to be animals, and it cancelled Animal Magic. The last episode was broadcast on March 8, 1983. Morris, by now aged 67, was bitterly disappointed and angry. As if to rub salt into the wound he was made an OBE soon after for his services to television.
A year later Nutkins was asked to put together a new animal series. He nervously visited Morris and received his blessing. This resulted in The Really Wild Show which he presented from 1986 to 1993, when he suffered the same fate as Morris and was ousted from the show.
He lived with his wife Jackie in Glenelg, amid the scenery he had grown to love during his time with Gavin Maxwell. They had eight children and at one stage divorced, then remarried. He died of leukaemia in 2012, aged 66.
This article has barely scratched the surface of Morris’s work output. He made numerous other programmes and narrations – he must have hardly had a spare moment. After the demise of Animal Magic he remained in demand for ads and voice-overs because he could operate as a one-man sound effects department, his talent for mimicry extending beyond animals to noises like steam engines and squeaking signs.
He once described his work thus: ‘A grey-haired man drives to a railway station. He catches the InterCity to Paddington. Takes a waiting taxi to the West End. Enters recording studio. Sits at microphone. Watches film. Waits until donkey turns. The man says “Thistles”. Gets up, shakes hands all round. Takes taxi to Paddington. Takes InterCity to country station. Gets in car and drives home.’ In this case he was lip-synching a donkey for a commercial.
Among the adverts he did was a series of Creature Comforts for the electricity boards produced in 1990-92. This gives me the opportunity to show some of the most brilliant ads ever made (the best one features Frank the tortoise).
Not long before Morris’s death, ITV were planning to revive the ‘anthropomorphic’ format disdained by the BBC with a new series called Wild Things. However Morris fell ill as it went into production and died on May 6, 1999, aged 82.
Epilogue
When Johnny Morris was working on the farm he met Eileen Monro, a former model who was separated from her husband and had been evacuated to Wiltshire in 1942 with her two small sons. At 36, she was ten years older than him, but Morris fell in love, wooing her with vegetables from the farm (these were scarce luxuries during the war). It worked, and they married in 1944. They brought up her sons Nick and Stuart, and by all accounts it was a very happy marriage. When Eileen died in 1989, she was buried at the end of their four-acre garden in Hungerford, Berkshire, and it is said that for the rest of his life Morris visited her grave every evening to tell her about the day’s events.
In the mid-1990s, Morris bought the Pelican, a popular pub in the Berkshire village of Froxfield, for his step-grandson Claude Munro and Claude’s partner to run it with him. Morris told a newspaper that Claude fell in love with another woman and left his partner and their two children to live in Los Angeles. Terry Nutkins stepped in to help but the venture collapsed and in 1997 it went into receivership with a total loss of £500,000. Morris was reportedly furious.
After Morris’s death two years later in 1999, his stepsons were shocked to find that they had been cut out of his £650,000 will. He left £20,000 to his housekeeper and smaller sums to his gardener and builder. The rest of his fortune went to Terry Nutkins in the form of his house, which had an outstanding £210,000 mortgage.
The family challenged the will, claiming that Morris was not in his right mind when he changed it. I can’t find out if the case went to court but the bequests remained as Morris intended. He was buried with his Animal Magic zookeeper’s hat beside his wife.
