TV pick: Our Zoo

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29 Apr, 2015 09:30 PM3 mins to read

Lee Ingleby enjoyed playing George Mottershead.

A shellshocked veteran creates the Chester Zoo as the world recovers from the horrors of WWI.

Chester Zoo is an institution in England and one of the top zoos in the world. That it still exists today is something of a spoiler to this BBC series about George Mottershead, who founded the place in 1931.

But this, a charming old-fashioned six-parter tells a story about how George, a WWI veteran still suffering mental and physical scars from his time in the trenches, starts his menagerie on an impulse.

Off down the docks to buy supplies for his family greengrocer's shop, he returns with a monkey and a parrot left abandoned by the freighters who brought them to England.

The terrace house he shares with his wife, two daughters, father and mother can't comfortably accommodate the animals too, so George is soon persuaded he can't keep the bird and primate and tries to give them to the local circus.

But he returns from the big top with a camel - and the monkey and the parrot.

So begins George's adventures in zoo-keeping - while his wife worries that whatever the war did to him is causing his Noah-like behaviour.

But he persists, finding a spot where he thinks he can create a zoo without cages, only to run into local opposition.

The series was critically acclaimed when it screened in Britain last year, though many questioned why such a period drama wasn't in a Sunday night slot - TVNZ has followed suit by programming it on a Thursday.

George Mottershead is played by Lee Ingleby, best known for his supporting role in Inspector George Gently, while the cast includes veteran actress Anne Reid as George's mum - the show's middle class answer to Downton's dowager countess

Ingleby says he didn't mind breaking the old acting adage about not working with animals and children - young Honor Kneafsey and Amelia Clarkson play the Mottershead daughters, whose childhood was spent alongside Chester Zoo's growing collection of animals.

Ingleby says he enjoyed the character and his motivations for creating an animal sanctuary.

"It makes him happy. It brings calm to him because he suffered from what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder - which was called shellshock in those days - and it's taken him all this time, 12 years later, to get over that.