Scarred by fame, the former PG Tips chimp being taught how to be an ape again: She stayed in five-star hotels and watched Westerns on TV - now she struggles to live with her own kind

Choppers was huge star but is now last surviving British PG Tips chimp



42-year-old potters about her enclosure in Twycross Zoo, Leicestershire

PG Tips apparently have no interest in funding retirement of their star

As celebrity retirement homes go, this one is disappointingly low key.



There are no chaises longues, no gilded mirrors, no hot and cold running servants, and no carb-free meals arriving under silver domes.

There isn’t even a telly (though there was one once — showing Westerns and old episodes of Kojak all day long).

Fancy a cuppa? Choppers, in the wig, starring in a PG Tips advert

Instead, there’s a large mound of grass populated by a couple of tree stumps, and a very basic climbing-frame draped with rope, all enclosed by a mini-moat and high smeary glass walls.



Inside, behind two floppy plastic doors, is a large area covered in straw. There are four shelves for beds and lights go out at 8pm.

Choppers the last surviving British PG Tips chimp and, in the Seventies, one of our biggest television stars

This is home to Choppers, the last surviving British PG Tips chimp and, in the Seventies, one of our biggest television stars.



Now 42 years old, she has a kindly face, a bit of a stoop and a lot of very bristly facial hairs.



She potters about her enclosure in Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire, occasionally stopping for a sniff, a scratch or a rub against the tree stump.

Her previous incarnation — dressed in flowery frocks and enormous wigs, proffering cups of tea and opening fetes, shopping arcades and new schools — seems quite unbelievable.



And long forgotten.

But memories have come rushing back after zoo officials claimed that Choppers (along with the rest of ‘The Tipps Family’) was irretrievably damaged by her brush with celebrity and human contact during her developing years.

‘She’s mixed up. She didn’t know how to interact with other chimps. It’s taken years for her to re-integrate,’ said Sharon Redrobe, of Twycross Zoo.



To add insult to injury, PG Tips apparently have no interest in funding the retirement of their one-time star.

It’s hardly surprising if Choppers is a bit confused. For at the height of their fame, the Twycross chimps didn’t exactly lead normal lives.

Under the loving (if, with the benefit of hindsight, misguided) supervision of the zoo’s eccentric founder, Molly Badham, they starred in countless commercials, became massive stars and helped fund Twycross as it is today.

It all began in 1956, back when nobody baulked at the thought of dressing up wild animals in pinnies and blue-rinse wigs and training them to iron shirts, ride exercise bikes and sip daintily from china cups and saucers.

PG Tips chimp Choppers in one of the PG Tips adverts that aired during the 1970s

For nearly three decades, generations of Twycross chimps posed as tea ladies, exercise fanatics, James (‘Brooke’) Bond, cowboys with ten-gallon hats and six shooters and Tour de France cyclists, all to sell more tea.

Perhaps the most enduring advert featured two removal men — Mr Shifter and son — wrestling with a piano stuck on the stairs.



The apprentice asks his dad if he knows the piano is on his foot, earning the reply: ‘You hum it, son, I’ll play it.’

Cue Choppers’s big moment — wearing a flowery dress, frilly pink pinny and blue rinse wig, she offers them a consolatory cup of tea.

Although we could never admit it now, the adverts (voiced by, among others, Peter Sellers, Kenneth Williams, Cilla Black, Arthur Lowe, Bob Monkhouse and Miriam Margolis) were brilliantly funny.



Popular: Picture shows the chimps trainer Kenny Reid with 'Jacky' in 1986

And they were fantastic for business. Within two years, PG Tips went from fourth in the market to Britain’s top-selling tea.



For their part, the chimps — all young and bouncy and brilliantly malleable and adaptable — had an absolute ball. They are natural show-offs and adored the attention.

They are also fantastic mimics, highly intelligent and with 98.5 per cent of their DNA identical to humans, very easy to teach.

Each action — pouring tea, ironing, man-handling a piano — was broken down into a series of parts and demonstrated over and over until they couldn’t resist mimicking. Everywhere they went they caused a stir.

They hosted tea parties watched by enormous awestruck crowds, appeared on Blue Peter and Tiswas and even took part in a race from London’s Post Office Tower to the Empire State Building in New York, staying in five-star hotels where they enjoyed room service.

Instead of the recommended chimpanzee diet of leaves, fruit and the occasional low-flying bird, they were fed sugary tea, jam sandwiches for breakfast and snacked on buns, ice cream and boiled eggs.

Handler: One of the PG Tips monkeys with handler Molly Badham

Meanwhile, they lounged around on heated beds for up to seven hours a day watching Westerns and the wrestling on their own wide-screen television. Some could even work the remote control and use a human toilet.

Molly and her partner, Natalie Evans, hand-reared dozens of baby chimps in a house in the grounds of the zoo.



At one stage, several of the chimps lived with them, cuddled up on the sofa and even accompanied them the hairdresser.

But as they approached maturity, between six or eight years old, such domestic bliss came to a halt. They were too big, too dangerous.

According to Choppers’s current keeper, adult chimps are five times stronger than humans and can be killers if provoked — and are prone to aggressive outbursts.

The Brooke-Bond PG Tips chimps making their 100th TV commercial in Rome in 1986

For Choppers, the celebrity life ended in the mid-Seventies.



For other, younger, chimps coming up through the ranks, the high life continued up to the Eighties, until, uncomfortable at the demand for increasingly ornate outfits and wigs, Molly withdrew her apes from their PG Tips contract.

Although the chimps’ time being treated as humans was at most five or six years, according to Dr Charlotte Macdonald, the zoo’s head of life sciences, the damage was done.

‘It’s not a good start in life to be treated like a human. It means they don’t learn ape behaviour and they’re not very good at being with other chimps,’ she says.



Since then, poor Choppers has been trapped between two worlds — half-chimp, half-human. It didn’t help that, as long as Molly Badham stayed in charge at Twycross, certain privileges remained — TV, sugary tea, jam sandwiches, chocolate bars, toys to play with.



Fame: A chimp films a PG Tips advert in 1989 which was part of a campaign which cost £5million

And although, in the wild, chimps live in groups, Choppers and her long-term companion Louis (aka Brooke Bond) were given private accommodation.

There is no question that Molly (who died in 2007, aged 93) adored her chimps and meant well. She was a world authority on primates and the TV revenue transformed the zoo from a few sheds to a thriving breeding centre.

‘The chimps would do anything for her,’ says retired Mail photographer Mike Hollist, who spent a lot of time with Molly. ‘They loved dressing up and watching themselves on telly. You forgot they were chimps and thought they were children. They enjoyed it immensely.

‘There was no cruelty involved. She’d know immediately if they’d had enough and never pushed it. She really loved them.’

While life got back to normal at Twycross, PG Tips looked elsewhere for chimps — first in Italy and then America, until the tea firm killed off The Tipps Family in 2002.

Adverts: Choppers, a 42-year-old ape, became one of the stars of the PG Tipps tea adverts in the 1970s. She lived in a cage at the zoo with co-star Louis (pictured right in the advert) until he died at the age of 37 last July

Meanwhile, life rumbled on in Leicestershire for Choppers and Louis until, last year, the latter passed away, aged 37.

Today, Choppers spends her time lounging about, foraging for food and playing a brain game with boxes of hidden food and a stick and occasionally even taking part in the all-important mutual grooming sessions with her new pals Benji, Noddy and Rosie.

Meanwhile, Twycross is busy trying to erase links with PG Tips. There is no mention of PG Tips on the website, no merchandise in the shop, no photos on the wall, not even a commemorative plaque on Choppers’ enclosure.

There, ever the performer, she’s still keen to put on a bit of show. I watch as this showbusiness veteran climbs atop the tree stump, scratches, sniffs, urinates, smacks her lips, jumps up and down a bit and grins.

There’s not a flowery pinny in sight, and she happily looks much more chimp than human.