1 9 6 2 – 1 9 8 4 (UK)
440 x 30 minute episodes
Animal Magic first aired on 13 April 1962 and ran for 22 years with host Johnny Morris mixing tips on animal care with information on wildlife and zoos, while providing the animals with quintessential English voices – the blustering retired colonel, the spinster maiden aunt, the tongue-tied suitor . . .
The qualities he attributed to his menagerie always had an innate gentleness though, and what he was doing was child’s play: anthropomorphising animals as children have always done with pets and toys.
His young viewers instinctively responded with love for the dumpy, grey-haired little man. He usually closed the show with Dotty, the ring-tailed lemur, on his shoulder.
He was as good as gold on screen because I kept a pocket full of sweets, and he knew I would give him some as long as he behaved,” said Morris.
There was no artifice. Morris was the real thing – a countryman and animal-lover, who stumbled into radio, and then television, almost by accident.
Born in Newport, Monmouthshire in 1916, of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire stock, he left school at 14 and had several jobs before moving as a farm bailiff to Aldbourne in Wiltshire, where he soon became a local character and raconteur.
Another resident of the village was Desmond Hawkins, who, impressed with Morris’s stories, invited him to take small acting parts for radio in Bristol – the first on April Fools” Day, 1946.
Morris eventually abandoned acting and found his métier giving country life talks in the Plug In The Wall series. He moved to the Home Service in the early 1950s with a rural-based magazine programme, Johnny Comes To Town.
In 1957 he launched Johnny’s Jaunts, in which he chatted to people around Britain, and, when the series transferred to television, he expanded his journeys to take in the Mediterranean.