Oh, the inner turmoil of the Andrex puppy
SIX THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT WILDLIFE ON TV
1 SPEAKING at the Cheltenham Literary Festival this week, veteran wildlife TV cameraman Doug Allan revealed that, in the past, some animals have been placed in custom-built sets and filmed under controlled conditions, rather than in the wild.
‘You can’t make a film about mice just by going out into a meadow and looking at mice. You need to introduce them to a safely built set in which they will be happy,’ he said. He also acknowledged that a sequence in Frozen Planet showing baby polar-bears with their mother in a cave was, in fact, shot in a Dutch zoo, using fake snow.
2 IN 2005, a teenage penguin called Wayne came under heavy criti ci sm f or employing bad language on the set of the movie March Of The Penguins.
‘The director was pushing us too hard,’ he explained to TV anchorman Charlie Rose at the time. ‘Jeez, get real: what penguin in his right mind would walk 62 miles in the freezing cold from his breeding ground to the open water if he knew he could hitch an hour-long ride in a snowmobile? Do the math, man!’
After a period in rehab, Wayne the Penguin has embarked on a successful career as a rapper, noted for his outlandish antics on stage. Early next year he is due to appear in the American edition of Celebrity Animal Big Brother, alongside veteran British TV presenter Basil Brush OBE.
3 ARTHUR, a labrador retriever best known for his leading role as an Andrex puppy, has revealed that neither he nor his fellow performers ever had any real interest in running downstairs with toilet rolls.
‘Have you ever placed one end of an Andrex toilet roll in your teeth and tried to run downstairs with it?’ he asked veteran TV anchorman Donald Duck on Fox News at the weekend. ‘It’s not easy. On an average day, we’d have 15, 20 takes — and still the director would want us to do it again.’
Arthur now says that the incessant pressure of filming led him into what he describes as ‘ a dark place’. Offscreen, he could be snappy. Sometimes he would even bark at strangers.
Now r etired f r om t he film business, he lives quietly in Wales. ‘These days, if I ever see a toilet roll, I just walk past it and leave it alone. My days of pulling them downstairs are long behind me.’
4 CHANNEL 4’s groundbreaking new series Sex Box is due to feature its first non-humans.
Sue and Geoff, two stoats from East Sussex who have been in a loving relationship for well over a year, will enter the Sex Box in a fortnight. They are expected to emerge half an hour later, ready to tell the panel of experts exactly what they got up to.
Sue and Geoff are believed to have been recruited by the programme- makers after t he original participants, Wang Wang and Ting Ting, a pair of giant pandas, stayed in the Sex Box for months on end.
‘Our resident sex experts spent six months sitting outside the Sex Box, waiting for them to appear,’ reports presenter Mariella Frostrup. ‘When they finally came out, top sexpert Tracey Cox asked the pandas what they’d been up to. They replied, ‘Bam! Boo! Bam! Boo!’ so of course we all got very excited. But it turned out that they’d just been snacking all that time.’
5 PHARAOH, the golden labrador who features in the opening titles of Downton Abbey, is to be given a major role later in the present series. ‘ My l i ps are sealed,’ says Downton creator Julian Fellowes. ‘ But what I will say is that a missing codicil to the will of the late Matthew Crawley leaves the entire estate t o Pharaoh.
‘This means that if Lady Mary wishes to inherit it, she will be obliged to marry the labrador. Half the f amily will be f or the marriage, and half against it.
‘And then one day Carson answers the door to a labrador in a bush hat who, it emerges, has travelled all the way f r om Australia, and claims to be t he s on of Pharoah f r om an earlier marriage.’
6 THE polar bear famous for posing on the wrapper of Fox’s Glacier Mints last night revealed that he now employs a body-double.
‘When I was first asked to perch on an enlarged model of a mint at their factory in Leicester all those years ago, it seemed like a dream come true,’ he said before a crowded conference hall at ACCA, the Annual Convention of Confectionery Animals. ‘But now I feel it’s just the same old same old.’
After a year posing on the Glacier Mint, the polar bear in question, Timothy Simkins of Byfleet, Hants, attempted to relieve his boredom by taking up smoking and drinking, but the company felt that it sent out the wrong signals.
Since he began employing a body-double, he has been able to pursue other, healthier, interests. ‘I spend a lot of time skinny-dipping at my local zoo,’ says Simkins.