Andy Richardson: Animal magic for Noah and Sir Lenny

Paws just for a moment – paws/pause, geddit – and cast your mind back to those heady days of childhood and school trips to see the animals pacing up and down in cages.

In those days it was a quick mooch around the zoo, buy a bag of feed for 20p and run away from any birdlife trying to peck at your feet.

And no, they didn’t let you throw steaks into the lion enclosure.

But today it’s all different. Now you can invest in a ‘zookeeper for a day experience’ which is exactly what Weekend has done.

It’s Zoo Day for the supplement and Weekend’s celebrating all the things that Noah put aboard his ark so that they could one day come to rest on the top of a hill in the deepest darkest Black Country.

Yes, the biblical soothsayer knew all along that by saving giraffes and lions and stuff, he’d provide a commercial opportunity to those who wanted to preserve wild species and give us the chance to gawp at the zoo’s magnificent collection of flamingos. Go Noah. Go Noah. Go Noah.

Remarkably, Noah almost lived long enough to see the creation of Dudley Zoo. The bearded boat builder didn’t die until 350 years after the flood – an episode that was almost as bad as the 2007 flooding of the Severn Valley Railway, in Bridgnorth – having lived to the ripe old age of 950. He had reached the maximum human lifespan and was the last of the long-lived antediluvian patriarchs, apparently. And who says the Bible is full of silly stories. I believe every word.

Especially that stuff about walking on water.

Noah no doubt foresaw the joys that Lynx would bring to the school children of Brierley Hill and was probably also the brains behind Bewdley’s finest tourist attraction: The West Midlands Safari Park.

One man who followed in the footsteps of Noah was the writer Benjamin Mee, who literally bought a zoo.

He turned his real life story into a memoir and then a movie, starring Matt Damon. I worked with him for a year, sometime in the 1990s, in London. A decent writer and unhurried sage, he wrote for a magazine called Men’s Health with his future-but-now-late wife, Kathryn, before persuading his family to buy Dartmoor Zoo in 2006 for £1.1 million.

Within four days of moving in, their jaguar escaped and had to be captured after leaping into the nearby tiger enclosure.

It makes you wonder. If poor old Benjamin had those problems with his big cats, what on earth must Noah have had to contend with on a boat jammed full of animals.

Thankfully, the jaguar problems were brought under control and the zoo went on to win a Global Enterprise award as well as form the basis for the hit film starring Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson, earning $120 million.

The big cat problems persisted, however, and a lynx went awol for three weeks in 2016, eventually being tracked down in Devon countryside.

No such problems at Dudley Zoo, of course, whose 1,300 animals are infinitely better behaved.

And yet for all of the animals, there are those of us who remember the zoo best as being the springboard to Lenny Henry’s comic career.

All-round-decent-fella Sir Lenny cut his teeth at the former Queen Mary Ballroom – now Oak Kitchen at the Queen Mary Restaurant.

The comedian and actor started out with weekly stand-up slots in the Queen Mary and also worked as a barman in the Safari Night Club in the early 1970s.

He remembered that era in the peak time drama Danny and The Human Zoo though his cartoon series Polar Bears was even more masterful.

In the era before animal welfare the bears lived in a concrete enclosure, which was beautifully recreated for TV in Sir Lenny’s comedy series.

A family of bears spoke with broad Black Country accents and brilliantly poked fun at a time and a place now thankfully resigned to the history books.