If you annoy enough of them...

So poor old Steve Irwin finally annoyed the wrong creature enough for it to kill him.

And while we can all shake our head and mumble "he asked for it" and while there is some truth in the fact that if you annoy enough wild animals then eventually one of them will fight back, you can't deny his achievements in the field of wildlife education for young children.

He, and his scare-you-shitless style of wildlife documentary programming, are a perfect example of how the boundaries of educating young people have changed in so short a time since I was educated, ok maybe its not so short a time, but its certainly changed in my lifetime.

When ah wor nobbut a lad we learned about wildlife by reading from big, stuffy, cardboard-backed books called encyclopedia's, most of the content of which was both unintelligible and uninteresting to us, we'd scan the alphabetically listed topics until we found something readable, such as "african lions" or maybe even "how to wrestle a crocodile" and when we finally arrived at the page in question, and if we were very lucky, we might find a hastily sketched picture of the subject, or if the encyclopedia was an expensive one (like the ones your auntie's bought you at christmas) then you might be fortunate enough to find a photograph.

Programming for children on TV was still being birthed by the BBC when I was at my optimum infancy learning curve and so, aside from the specialist "Schools Programmes" which we watched occasionally in class, we only had two programmes a week to provide for our education - Blue Peter and Animal Magic.

Blue Peter is known to every single living person in the UK, and even some dead ones. Its been around for ever and you can date a UK citizen very easily by simply asking them who was presenting Blue Peter at their very earliest memory ?

My answer by the way is Christopher Trace and Val Singleton which dates my earliest Blue Peter memory to the early 1960's.

But Blue Peter was/is a "general interest" childrens programme, it featured animals but not exclusively, for your total animal fix every week you simply had to watch Animal Magic and if you are of the same vintage as me you will still be able to hum the theme tune.

I wish I'd been at the BBC when the Animal Magic producer pitched his idea in the boardroom for the new show, "Its a half hour programme to educate young children about the animal world" he would have started, "we'll be filming most of it at Bristol zoo" he would have explained, "and we've got this nice old man called Johnny Morris to present the show, we'll dress him up as a zoo keeper and he'll explain to the children all about the animals in the cages"

And the BBC board of directors would all have nodded their heads wisely and sagely and muttered to each other "I like the idea"

And then the producer would have played his ace card, "..and every animal that Johhny Morris talks about will be able to talk back to him"

And the BBC directors would have sat up with a start and gazed at each other in astonishment and one of them would have pressed the secret button underneath the boardroom table to have security alerted to escort this lunatic producer from Broadcasting House.

"How will you manage to get the animals to talk to Johnny Morris then ?" one of the more enlightened directors would have asked.

"Johnny Morris will do all the animal voices himself" the producer would have explained, "he's very good at doing funny voices, I've heard him, he had me in stitches"

"We'll have him in a straitjacket soon" one of the directors would have whispered to another.


The word for it was anthropomorphic, the art of casting human characteristics onto animals, its what Johnny Morris did and he did it well, and we all truly believed that when he walked around Bristol zoo in his zookeepers uniform, the monkeys all said "thank you old chap" when he handed them a banana.

Children today are not as gullible, frankly they are not as stupid as we were, they know that monkeys don't talk to their zookeepers every morning, but worse than that, children now need to be entertained, excited by education before it starts to sink into their heads.

Hence Steve Irwin.

And now that one of his subjects has killed him there will be another Steve Irwin waiting in the wings to entertain and educate in far more dangerous ways than Steve Irwin did, its what TV programmers want.

I just can't help thinking that its just a shame that Steve Irwin hadn't watched Johnny Morris a bit more often when he was a kid, maybe talking to the animals would not have invoked such extreme reactions amongst them.