When Louisa from The Ark read our reference to Gerald Durrell’s connection with Corfu, she wrote to tell us how The Ark itself is connected to Gerald Durrell:
“In 2006 the BBC did a TV remake of his book ‘My Family and Other Animals’ and asked The Ark for stray dogs to act in some of the scenes. Three of our dogs took part, one specially chosen for his nice barking! It took us two weeks of training for them to be in the episodes.”
Louisa also gave us copies of a special 2013 calendar for the owners of Arapina, Tychi, Julia, Apollo and Athina, that features these five animals throughout. You can see a few pages from it below.
Calendar front cover
November next year
Calendar back cover, featuring Spiridoula and all our passengers
Great calendar and interesting info. By the way, that is one of my favourite books of all time. I simply loved it as a kid. I generally refused to read anything (probably just to annoy my folks) but that book had me hook line and sinker from the first page.
It is very special – what a life he had!
In fact as Ark we arranged for about 8 owners with their stray dogs for some scenes were stray dogs had to turn up according te script. Roger , the hairy dog of Gerard according to the book, was a real tranined dog and came with all the crew from the UK. Our dogs were supose to snuffle the pavement for a certain scene, training was done by brushing heavy chickenbroth on the pavement….the shooting took a whole day, and you might see the doggies for xxxseconds…
but it was great fun. Louisa
Ha ha ha – never act with children or animals eh?! Must have been fun seeing how they went about the shoot.