The Ape That Got Lucky was a four-part radio series broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 2005. Written by Chris Addison and Carl Cooper, it was based around Chris Addison giving a lecture on the evolution of man from "ugly ape" into the all time "Top Species".
BBC Radio 4 is a radio station owned and operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is Gwyneth Williams, and the station is part of BBC Radio and the BBC Radio department. The station is broadcast from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasting House, London. On 21 January 2019 Williams announced she was quitting the role. There are no details of when or who will be her replacement.
Christopher David Addison is an English comedian, writer, actor and director. He is perhaps best known for his role as a regular panellist on Mock the Week. He is also known for his lecture-style comedy shows, two of which he later adapted for BBC Radio 4.
Addison was supported in this spoof lecture by Professor Austin Herring, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at St Dunstan's College Cambridge, who was played by Geoffrey McGivern. The Professor was frequently ridiculed, and was usually introduced as the author of a particular book. The books were always amusingly titled, and were different in every introduction. Other cast members of the show were Jo Enright and Dan Tetsell who performed sketches to illustrate the lecture. The series was produced by Simon Nicholls.
Geoffrey McGivern is an English actor in film, radio, stage and television.
Jo Enright is an English stand-up comedian and actress who has appeared in a number of television and radio comedy programmes.
Dan Tetsell is a British actor, comedian and writer for radio, television and stage. He has worked on a number of projects, including The Museum of Everything, That Was Then, This Is Now, Newsjack and Parsons and Naylor's Pull-Out Sections. He is married to actor and comedian Margaret Cabourn-Smith.
Professor Herring gave the impression of being a prolific author, although his book titles were invariably absurd. In the preamble to each show, Chris Addison would introduce the Professor as, for example: "...our resident expert...polymath...and author of many important scholarly works such as 'What are YOU looking at? – a sideways look at the origins of the squint' ...and... 'Here's looking at Euclid – geometry in the films of Humphrey Bogart' , as well as being editor of 'Pop Goes The Weasel– a treasury of vivisection anecdotes' ." For each of his contributions within the main show, The Professor himself would also mention an 'appropriate' paper he had written relating to the topic being discussed, also humorously titled.
Vivisection, also known as V-section, is surgery conducted for experimental purposes on a living organism, typically animals with a central nervous system, to view living internal structure. The word is, more broadly, used as a pejorative catch-all term for experimentation on live animals by organizations opposed to animal experimentation, but the term is rarely used by practicing scientists. Human vivisection, such as live organ harvesting, has been perpetrated as a form of torture. However, as vivisection etymologically means a surgery on a living being, all forms of open surgery on living people are literally human vivisection.
In May 2006 The Ape That Got Lucky was awarded the Gold Sony Award for comedy. All four episodes were then released on a 2-CD set.
The 24th Sony Radio Academy Awards were held on 8 May 2006 at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane in London. There were 29 categories of award and two special awards.
The April 2006 series Chris Addison's Civilisation is a follow-up to The Ape That Got Lucky; it has the same format and the same cast but the lectures focus on the building and making of a civilization rather than the evolution theme of this series.
BBC Online, formerly known as BBCi, is the BBC's online service. It is a large network of websites including such high-profile sites as BBC News and Sport, the on-demand video and radio services co-branded BBC iPlayer, the children's sites CBBC and CBeebies, and learning services such as Bitesize. The BBC has had an online presence supporting its TV and radio programmes and web-only initiatives since 1994 but did not launch officially until December 1997, following government approval to fund it by TV licence fee revenue as a service in its own right. Throughout its short history, the online plans of the BBC have been subject to harassment from its commercial rivals, which has resulted in various public consultations and government reviews to investigate their claims that its large presence and public funding distorts the UK market.
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