Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
Contents |
Host
Glyn Daniel (1952-9)
(but see Trivia below)
Prof. Barry Cunliffe (1971)
Co-hosts
Regular panellists: Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Prof. Thomas Bodkin, Hugh Short, Dr. Julian Huxley, Adrian Digby, Norman Cook, Dr. W. E. Swinton, Jacquetta Hawkes.
Broadcast
BBC Television Service, 23 October 1952 to 18 March 1959
as A.V.M.?: BBC2, 30 May to 29 August 1971 (14 episodes in 1 series)
Synopsis
A popular panel game in which archaeologists, art historians and natural history experts were asked to identify interesting objects from museums and university collections.
Key moments
There were a few uneasy moments during naturalist Julian Huxley's first appearance on the programme, when he failed to identify the egg of the Giant West African Snail, an object familiar to generations of zoology students. Certain that it was the egg of some sort of reptile, he even bet host Glyn Daniel five pounds that he was right. He wasn't, and he never paid up on the bet either.
Inventor
Nora Wood
Trivia
This was one of the programmes commissioned by the "Talks Department" of the BBC. This was a tactical move, as it was one of a raft of programmes introduced to increase viewing hours ahead of the imminent arrival of ITV in 1955.
In the early series, the man responsible for selecting the items to be shown to the panel was none other than the young David Attenborough, who also acted as camera director on the show.
Archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, for many viewers the star of the show.As a one-off, the 9 December 1954 edition was billed as a "transatlantic exchange", featuring a UK panel in the first half, and then a recording of a panel from the US equivalent What in the World facing the same items in the second.
The tables were turned for the 1956 christmas special, when Glyn Daniel and Mortimer Wheeler selected the items to be put to a panel comprising David Attenborough (by then a TV star in his own right as host of "Zoo Quest"), series creator Paul Johnstone and producer Mary Adams.
The show was originally going to be hosted by Lionel Hale who hosted the first two shows, but Glyn Daniel soon took over for the entire run, when he was unable to host the show on a couple of occasions, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, John Betjeman, Maxwell Knight and Rupert Bruce-Mitford stood-in.
