The Dead Zoo: ‘The guy who is doing the whale has a T-rex to put up in the Netherlands’

Dublin’s antediluvian infrastructure is causing many of us to grow ancient and ossified before our time. But occasionally the city’s reluctance to fully inhabit the 21st century — who needs reliable and affordable mass transit or tall buildings? — throws up an unexpected benefit. For instance, the Dead Zoo.

As with much of the capital, the National History department of the National Museum of Ireland stands marooned in the distant past. This, for once, is a good thing. Evoking Victor Frankenstein as much as David Attenborough, it has the uncanny charm of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities: it is lovably creepy.

Or at least it was before they closed it to fix the roof. And that is the tale told in The Dead Zoo (RTÉ One, Monday, 6.30pm), a chronicling of the painstaking process of removing two suspended whale skeletons so that the leaky ceiling could be patched.

There is a charming story to be told about the Dead Zoo, but I’m not sure this film quite nails it. What you want is a valentine to a typically unorthodox Irish institution. Other natural-history museums have interactive exhibits and gift shops that stretch to the horizon. The Dead Zoo has an elephant shot in Punjab in the 19th century, the bullet holes still visible in its hide.

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With Brendan Gleeson narrating, the documentary initially gets the tone right. The museum, housed in a mausoleum-like structure between Government Buildings and Leinster House, is described as a “child’s toy box” and “Aladdin’s cave”.

But from there it gets slightly bogged down. The particulars of taking down the whales and removing the other exhibits from the first floor are not especially riveting. And the documentary errs in delving too deeply into the minutiae of the process.

There are, it is true, some moments of wry comedy, such as when one of the museum’s managers reveals there may be a delay because “the guy who is doing the whale has a T-rex to put up in the Netherlands”.

But the whales should have been merely an excuse to rhapsodise about the zoo itself, and to fill in some of the blanks. Who established the institution? How is it that it has never been modernised? What about the assertion of the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J Gould that this calcified fossil from the 19th century was a powerful example of the “cabinet museum”? The film needs that extra context.

Where it does well is in capturing the sense of the zoo as a haven of eccentricity. The people running it are a colourful bunch. Senior curator Paolo Viscardi is an Englishman with an Italian name and Indian heritage who has ended up tending to stuffed elephants and skeletal whales in Dublin. And then there is Karen van Dorp, from the Netherlands, who moved to Ireland to help curate this cabinet of curiosities and has never looked back.

We are also introduced to the “whale guy”, aka the taxidermist Mickel van Leeuwen, whose passion for zoos was kindled when he brought home a recently expired squirrel to his parents. “When it’s dead you can see how beautiful the animal is — that’s how I started, by finding a red squirrel,” he says. “My parents said, ‘Can’t you find yourself another hobby? It’s started to smell.’”

The film airs as the zoo prepares to throw open its doors after its long shuttering. Or, at least, it is preparing to partially do so. When it reopens, on Tuesday, August 2nd, only the ground floor will be accessible, and you’ll have to book in advance. (Entry remains free.) In other words, it’s reopening but only a bit and not really. And that truly is Dublin in a nutshell.