Animal Magic - Johnny Morris - Terry Nutkins - Complete episode

Here's a 1980 colour episode of one of my all-time favourite TV series from my childhood with the great Johnny Morris a veritable Dr Doolittle and Terry Nutkins. Johnny Morris had an amazing way with animals and he gave them humorous personalities by giving them human voices.

Ernest John "Johnny" Morris OBE (20 June 1916 – 6 May 1999[1]) was a Welsh television presenter. He was known for his children's programmes for the BBC on the topic of zoology, most notably Animal Magic and for narrating the imported, Canadian-produced Tales of the Riverbank series of stories about Hammy the Hamster, Roderick the Rat, GP the Guinea Pig, and their assorted animal friends along a riverbank.

Terence Paul "Terry" Nutkins (12 August 1946 – 6 September 2012) was an English naturalist, television presenter and author. He was best known for his television appearances, notably in the UK children's programmes Animal Magic, The Really Wild Show, Brilliant Creatures and Growing Up Wild.

Animal Magic was a BBC children's television series which ran from 1962 to 1983 from BBC Bristol. It began fortnightly and was transmitted weekly from 1964.

The presenter was the avuncular Johnny Morris. His charismatic style and genuine fondness for animals made the show an instant hit with children and adults alike. The show combined jovial voiceovers applied to various animals from Bristol Zoo with some basic educational features.

Morris' co-presenters over the years were: Gerald Durrell, Tony Soper, Keith Shackleton, Roger Tabor, Sheila Young, David Taylor and Terry Nutkins. When Nutkins joined the show in the early 1980s, the producers tried to update it, using new video effects technology. This allowed them to do such things as "shrink" the presenters to allow them to see life from an ant's viewpoint, or to swim in a riverbed for example. Dottie the ring-tailed lemur appeared as a regular guest for eight years in the 1970s. Much to Morris' anger, the show was discontinued in 1983 when the programme's anthropomorphic treatment of animals fell out of fashion.

The 100th edition was transmitted on 4 January 1967.

Many editions of the show were junked by the BBC in the early 1990s when they were assumed to be of no further use. Recent documentaries such as The Way We Went Wild have had to resort to using clips from off-air recordings of some shows.

The signature tune, "Las Vegas", performed by Group Forty Orchestra, was written by Laurie Johnson in 1962.