Читать книгу Almost Human - Alfred Fidjestøl - Страница 8

Chapter 4

HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

“Julius to spend Christmas among his own kind.” ⁶⁷

FÆDRELANDSVENNEN NEWSPAPER

IN THE MIDST of the turbulent cage-training process, on December 1, 1980, the NRK channel premiered the program that Elisabeth Nergaard had produced about Julius. The feature episode was twenty-two minutes long and was first broadcast on the children’s TV program and later repeated multiple times on the so-called school television programming during the daytime. In 1980, most Norwegians only had access to this one channel, so the majority of Norwegian children soon developed a relationship with the charming chimpanzee. The concept was particularly well suited for children’s television, since it was easy for children to identify with a chimpanzee in diapers who crawled around and played with his “siblings.” The whole country watched Julius do chores, scrub the floor with soapsuds on his chin, climb the curtains, paint and draw with the Moseid girls and build Playmobil structures with the Glad boys.