TELEVISING ZOOS
Kath Hudson, freelance writer for Attractions Management
ANIMAL MAGIC
The sex lives of meerkats, rhino births and sick tigers; zoos are a soap opera with a cast of cute and dangerous characters, so it’s no wonder there’s a constant appetite for television series about them. Kath Hudson reports
“A
visit to the zoo is only the tip of the iceberg and the tv series shows all that goes on underneath.”
So says Helen Pantenburg, senior media officer at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. Providing a look behind the scenes as animals give birth, undergo operations, or even get a bit feisty with keepers, the zoo story never gets old. As one series draws to a close, another springs up elsewhere. So, if your zoo were to open its doors to a film crew, what would you be letting yourselves in for? Would the disruption be worth the publicity? What shape does the zoo need to be in first? And how does it impact the bottom line? The usual arrangement is that zoos
don’t get paid for hosting tv crews, and generally don’t receive any royalties. The financial gain from the zoo’s point of view is the uplift in visitor figures and increased spend. If the shows run in prime time, the viewing figures can be significant. As Pantenburg at Taronga Zoo says:
“Wild Life at the Zoo reached a national audience of more than half a million each Wednesday and was channel ABC1s third
146 Attractions Handbook 2014-2015
Ben Fogle and Kate Humble presented the Animal Park series from Longleat Safari Park
highest rating programme of that night, reaching a total audience of 4,459,932, plus 31,000 more on iView.” Secondary spend can also increase as a result of the tv series: sales of cuddly toys rocketed as a result of Wild Life at the Zoo. In anticipation of this, Busch Gardens in Florida has created a line of merchandise to accompany its new series, The Wildlife Docs, which started airing on ABC last October. Longleat Safari Park in the UK hosted Endemol for a decade: from 2000 to 2008 Animal Park aired on the BBC channel at teatime, attracting one million viewers, and then children’s tv programme ROAR aired from 2009–2010. “We saw it as a great marketing oppor- tunity,” says Steve Mytton, media and PR manager at Longleat. “It gave us exposure on a national and international level, gen- erating fans from all over the world and significantly boosting visitor numbers.”
WHY DO IT? The airtime isn’t the only reason why many zoos have decided to embark on this journey: it also provides the opportunity
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