Yep, that's the upload I was talking about - half of those have been copyright-blocked and are now "ghost listings'.
I've requested The Velvet Claw on the Netflix request page a couple of times now. I know it is probably in vain, but one can only try, and hope!
The first series of the zoo vet program one by one in the eighties was filmed at Dudley though I think they referred to it as the great northern zoo, it would have received income and exposure from the series
Yes, Dudley did feature in that series, but I don't think it was touted as being Dudley at all- there would have been some financial gain for the zoo no doubt, but I don't think the public would have been drawn there from seeing the programmes.
Any fans of the series Primeval ? They filmed one episode of the first series at Whipsnade and London zoo, does that count ?
It was later filmed at Chester, given the name of Bellington Zoo. One scene also featured Edinburgh, when the keeper and the vet went to look at scimitar-horned oryx.
It wasn't touted as Dudley - it may have been referred to as Belle Vue in Manchester where David Taylor worked when he first became a Zoo Vet. I can't remember whether there was an acknowledgement to Dudley in the credits.
I don't think Belle Vue was ever mentioned- it was portrayed as a fictional city zoo I think. Part of one sequence (which was also fictional) about gorillas was filmed at Jersey Zoo also.
I recall a meeting at Chester where the Director was asked whether the use of Chester for filming One By One had resulted in increased visitor numbers. Michael Brambell's response was that the series had helped attendances, but not because it was filmed at Chester. It was just that any (neutral or positive) tv coverage of zoos helped attendances generally. Which makes sense. If you lived in Runcorn and enjoyed One By One it might prompt you to visit Chester; if you lived in Southampton you would visit Marwell. SLofZ might be set at Chester but might well benefit zoos from Cornwall to Edinburgh by raising the general profile of zoos.
There may have been several reasons for not mentioning Belle Vue, but it was pretty clear that it was the subject.
This is certainly the response I see amongst the staff and families at the school where I teach. Many people watch SLotZ, but we are far too far away from Chester for them to visit that zoo. However, there is definitely an increased interest in visiting more local zoos. Combined with the frequent offers Twycross have on, it makes it actually feasible for the families to afford to visit.
It was probably irrelevant to the T.V. series exactly where it was in the books, and BV may already have closed anyway. It closed in 1977, I don't know when the 'One by One' series ran exactly.
The discussion which spurred the creation of this thread, on another thread discussing the issue of car parking at Chester zoo, concerned the extent to which certain zoos seem to receive a possibly disproportionate amount of coverage in the press, while others zoos very much fly under the radar. For what it is worth, my feeling is that some places do get such a disproportionate focus, for a number of reasons… Obviously, the bigger a place, the more stories there are to tell. It is therefore to be expected that Chester zoo is going to receive greater focus and attention than, for example, Blackpool zoo. However, it is not just about this. I think a part of it is luck – being in the right place, with the right story, at the right time (Wild Place were very fortunate to be able to ride a surge of interest in the concept of “re-wilding“ when they opened their new bear exhibit, and received a great deal of coverage as a consequence). There is also the key point that the print media certainly has never been so short of resources. Local newspapers have been decimated in recent years, and as a consequence, their ability to cover local stories in any meaningful way is far less than was once the case. My experience, working in a completely different sector, is that such newspapers will pretty much publish what they are given, especially if it comes with an attractive picture. Even national papers struggle in this regard, and I am always amazed at the apparently random pictures and stories which they cover. In the UK, the Guardian has a daily selection of interesting photos, and very often – at least once or twice a week – one of these will be from a zoo. However, zoos featured are as likely as not to be obscure places in, for example, Vietnam or India. I guess a busy picture editor stumbles across an attractive picture, and is not concerned as to whether it comes from Thailand or Twycross. I think, too, that there needs to be something on which a story can be fixed. The currently available series about Borth zoo (and if you haven’t watched this on the BBC iPlayer, you really should) has a very clear story to tell (clueless couple take over failing zoo with good intentions, and find disaster at every turn). Without such a story, such coverage simply isn’t going to come. Connected to this, I imagine that the “easiness“ of working with a particular organisation is going to be crucial. That could be down to practical concerns – location, topography – or it could be down to the willingness of people within an organisation to “play the game“. It always amazes me, with that Chester zoo series, that staff at the zoo are willing to suggest that individual fish and invertebrates have names, and are treated as if they were very individual creatures. Maybe they are, and I am being excessively cynical, but it does strike me as an example of an organisation playing along, in the interest of the TV company. Many years ago, I introduced some friends who made highly-regarded television documentaries, to the late Clinton Keeling. They and I envisaged a wistful, possibly slightly melancholic, BBC Two style documentary, in which he was shown taking his animals to schools in his very small car, caring for them in his very small house in Surrey, and, all in all, living up to every expectation of a great British eccentric. Unfortunately, Clin simply would not play that game, and instead insisted on calling the shots himself. There was no way that any TV programme would have been made on this basis, and the opportunity passed.
Early 1980s. I remember well watching it at school, and loving it. I recently saw an episode, thanks to YouTube. It was genuinely appalling, in pretty much every regard: script, acting, production.
I am sure there is a case of the production company leading certain things in SLotZ, but I watched an old repeat of an episode recently where the keepers were quite frank about the meerkats not having names, just the numbers of their microchips.
You make some interesting points here. Its long been a bugbear of mine that 'feel-good' news stories often feature overseas zoos instead of our own, which often have equally interesting things going on that can go by largely unnoticed by the general public. Yorkshire Wildlife Park have definitely benefited from having some really good, inspiring stories to cover - whilst I don't dispute that they were acts of great kindness, the lion rescue really put them on the map, and the arrival of the brown bears helped to cement their status in the big league of UK zoos. I'm doubtful they'd have got the starring role in Big Week at the Zoo without these factors. I think you're a bit too cynical about Chester, though - whilst I would imagine they do play along with what the TV team want to an extent, I do believe (naively or not) that animals like frogs and insects get a very high level of love and care. Maybe some elements of their stories are fabricated, or at least made more interesting for TV, but the level of enthusiasm shown by the staff comes across to me as entirely genuine. If its not, they should be actors instead frankly! I think once a zoo has a foot in the door with media coverage though, its more likely to receive more. I've seen it suggested before that Secret Life... could perhaps switch to another zoo, but I think a lot of viewers have formed an interest in Chester and got to know various animals and humans, so its good to be able to go back and feature them again. Also film crews etc. will have formed a relationship with the zoo so everyone knows what works and how to work together, they will presumably have a pool of keepers who work well on camera and are willing to be featured, and so on.
I decided to give Animal Park a go, and was quite intrigued by their choice of wording about the wombats: "The only Southern hairy-nosed wombats in Europe". But not the only wombats even in the UK, hey Longleat? Wouldn't it be nice if, in the interests of education or information, they could have even mentioned the other wombats in the UK right now (and who arrived first) at Hamerton?
