She picks up beautifully my mother's slightly flustered, not-quite-with-it-half-the-time air, and not knowing, if the family were squabbling, whose side to take. He felt Hannah Gordon fitted the bill perfectly:

He gave invaluable advice to the production team at the scripting stage, demanding the power of veto over only one thing – the casting of his mother. At the end of July 1987, Gerald Durrell flew out to Corfu to be present for the last few days of the filming. It was intended that there should be at least three minutes of natural history footage for every half-hour episode, and twenty scorpions, ten praying mantises, three giant toads, a number of snakes, tortoises, terrapins, barn owls and pigeons trained to dance had been brought to Corfu, together with six hundred frozen mice, as food for the snakes. Exterior scenes were filmed in Corfu in the summer of 1987. The £2 million production was a combined effort by the BBC's Drama Department and Natural History Unit. In Corfu they experience a lot of adventures and befriend many interesting people, including Spìro, a taxi driver who lived for many years in Chicago where he learned to speak broken English, and doctor Theodore Stephanides, a polymath who, just like Gerry, adores nature and helps him explore the island's varied wildlife. The family consists of Gerry (young naturalist), his widowed mother (excellent cook), his eldest brother Larry (starting writer), another brother Leslie (mad about guns and boats) and sister Margo (who suffers from acne). The show tells the story of the extravagant Durrell family who, tired of the rainy and unhealthy English climate, move to the sun-drenched Greek island of Corfu. The series consists of 10 episodes and was aired for the first time between 17 October and 19 December 1987. It is based on Gerald Durrell's autobiographical book by the same name, My Family and Other Animals, which tells about the time his family spent on the Greek Island of Corfu in 1935–1939.

My Family and Other Animals is a 1987 British TV mini-series produced by the BBC and directed by Peter Barber-Fleming.

My family and other animals book