6.2 /10 1 Votes
First episode date November 1952 | 6.2/10 IMDb Cast Glyn Daniel | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Put Your Money Where Yo, To Buy or Not to Buy, Show Me the Monet, The Big Allotment Challenge, Britain's Brightest | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? was a popular television game show which ran from 1952 to 1959. In the show, different archeologists, art historians, and natural history experts were asked to identify interesting objects or artifacts from museums and other faculties, including university collections.
Contents
Occasionally the presenter would try to fool the panel with a corroded modern artefact e.g. a part of a pram or a bicycle. The prospect of such an event enlivened the programme.
The quiz show was presented by the BBC, continuing a long history of bringing contributors to archaeology into the media limelight.
History
The UK television show was modelled on an American TV show called What in the World? and included appearances by archaeologists such as Glyn Daniel and Sir Mortimer Wheeler. Wheeler was voted TV personality of the year in 1954, providing the world of archaeology with its first media star.
Legacy
Sixty years later Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? is still concerned with events in archaeology. In September 2011, University College London announced that they were bringing back the popular 1950s show for one night. The panel of experts included Claire Thomson (Scandinavian Studies), Ryan Nichol (Physics and Astronomy), Tom Stern (Philosophy) and Sam Turvey (Institute of Zoology). It was hosted by Joe Flatman (Institute of Archaeology) and consisted of a visit to the UCL museum, where the experts tried to identify some of the objects there.
The show and its format were also often referenced in comedy shows: Not Only...But Also, At Last the 1948 Show, Do Not Adjust Your Set and The Complete and Utter History of Britain each contained sketches with experts analyzing a "mystery object", often with totally wrong conclusions or, in At Last the 1948 Show, the items getting destroyed.
Episodes
Only four episodes exist in the BBC's archives, three of which are available to watch from the BBC iPlayer. The fourth one is mute, because its audio track has been lost.
Some (incomplete) episode information follows:
Additional information
The person responsible for choosing the artefact for each episode was David Attenborough, who was also the camera director. However, on the Christmas special, Glyn Daniel and Mortimer Wheeler selected the item for Attenborough to examine. Mortimer Wheeler often "cheated" by investigating beforehand which objects had been removed from their next location, and looking up the relevant information about the corresponding items in catalogues. On one occasion, a fake item (a stone axe made by the forger 'Flint Jack') was presented to the panel. The signature music for the series was Partita #3 in E by J S Bach.