Our Zoo

If you are working with material (very loosely) based on true events about a not so well-to-do family starting from zero that sets up the first ever safari park in interwar Britain, you are vulnerable to about 101 pitfalls that can turn it into a shallow, sunny, overly sweet pitcher of lemonade hiding behind cute animals (and you don’t have to go far to see prime examples of this). But this is the BBC, so they of course managed to fight off that peril and did not create a rather naive melodramatic family series, but a series where “family" isn’t a pejorative classification, but a thoroughly flattering one. In essence this is a pleasant, nonconfrontational period series for the whole family in modern (albeit period) narrative style in a way that, in terms of current series, only the Brits have any talent at. (29.09.2014)