Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolley.

Music

My castaway this week is an anthropologist far from being a dry observer of the human condition.

He's enjoyed participation as much as academic study.

He was a teenage boyfriend of Diana Doors. He taught a chimpanzee to paint and filmed the female orgasm for a BBC television series.

A lonely childhood in Wiltshire surrounded by a managerie of pets led first to a job as a zoologist and then as a presenter of television programs.

His series Zoo Time explored the relationship between men and animals.

But his book The Naked Ape, published in 1967, took the lid off the whole thing, demonstrating to an excited readership

that man is a risen ape, not a fallen angel.

Since then, he's continued to astonish and explain in a series of books and television programs the world in which we live and are placed in it.

I'm not happy to die, he says, until I've seen the entire planet. He is Desmond Morris, not wishing to be cruel Desmond, but I mean, 76, you're slightly pushing it for time.

I mean, how much more of it have you got to see?

Well, I've been to 90 countries so far. I'd like to get to 100 before I die, just for fun.

But that will still leave a hundred that I haven't seen, which is sad, because I would like to see the entire planet.

And you have been cramming it in all your life, really, haven't you?

And that's been your approach to life, is if I'm going to do it, let's do it now.

Yes, because I always thought I would die young. The males in my ancestry have always died young, and I thought I would be one of them.

And so I didn't think I'd got all that much time left, and so I've always been trying to pack it in.

And what you've done and what you've obviously enjoyed most of your professional life is you've people watched.

And I have to say it does seem that the epitome of it now is big brother. I mean, is it any good to you? Do you watch it scientifically?

Well, about five, six years ago, a Dutchman got in touch with me. He said, I'm going to put a lot of people in the house, and I'm going to have cameras all around.

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