Charlotte Uhlenbroek's appearance on television has been sold as a tantalising new chapter in wildlife documentary. In the three-part series, called Cousins, the 33-year-old zoologist promises to make some startling revelations about the monkey world. But this isn't what's got critics gasping for oxygen like expiring fish. The combination of Uhlenbroek's youth, her PhD and her long, swishy hair has proved too much for certain elements of the press, who have heralded her as the "sexy new female David Attenborough", and, more desperately, "the new Charlie Dimmock".
In mannerism, in fact, Uhlenbroek is more like David Bellamy, wriggling about in her chair and flexing her hands as she strives to communicate her passion for primates. She is not glamorously dressed, but in baggy jeans and big trainers befitting a woman who spent four years in a shack in the Burundian jungle, monitoring chimpanzee behaviour. Her hair, however, shoulder-length and wavering, is emphatically impractical and when asked if she resents the slant of the pre-programme coverage, she looks cheekily delighted. "I've heard mention that I'm going to do for primates what Charlie Dimmock did for water features, and that's fine. I think Charlie is absolutely great, I think she's very natural and enthusiastic about her subject." Uhlenbroek quickly adds, "Of course, I wouldn't like the focus to shift off the wildlife too much."
Just as Dimmock shone like a rare orchid beside the dumpy Alan Titchmarsh, so Uhlenbroek's on-screen glamour gains much from the fact that her only competition is a bunch of apes. Her energy and obvious love for her subject are, however, genuinely attractive. On several occasions, she almost levitates out of the chair with the excitement of explaining the habits of a particular species. "There's a tendency to think of chimps as amusing caricatures of humans," she says, leaning urgently forward. "But they are sophisticated animals in their own right. Although the development of chimps and humans is comparable in primitive terms until about the age of three, after that we go our separate ways." It is her aim in Cousins to explain where the two species run into each other again, and by doing so, to shed light on the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
Uhlenbroek's first encounter with a primate came when she was 15 and on holiday in Tanzania, although it was not her first encounter with the jungle. She is well-qualified to spend long stretches in distant lands, because her childhood left her with indistinct notions of home. Her Dutch father, an agricultural specialist for the United Nations, and her English mother, brought her up in Kathmandu, Nepal, before moving to Tanzania when Uhlenbroek was 14 and sending her to school in England.
"I suppose that culturally, I am mostly English. I've spent a lot of time in English schools. Even when I was in Nepal I was at an American school. I've never lived in Holland, and although I'm proud of my roots there, I can't say that I'm culturally Dutch. But in terms of where I'm at home, I am a bit of a nomad. It means that I feel at home in most places."
The emotional investment she makes in her research projects is such that, the first time she touched down in Burundi, she felt the euphoria one only gets on returning home. "I had never been to Burundi before, but I had the feeling that I was happy to be home." It was the culmination of seven years' work in the footsteps of her role model, Jane Goodall. Uhlenbroek was introduced to Goodall at the age of 15 while out in Tanzania. The ground-breaking primatologist had struck the young Uhlenbroek as "extraordinary". When she left school, Uhlenbroek enrolled for a bachelor's degree in zoology and psychology at Bristol University, then got a job as a researcher in the BBC's natural history unit in Bristol. It was while she was there that a colleague casually asked if she'd heard that Jane Goodall was looking for volunteers. "Things went on from there."
Over 80 per cent of primatology PhD students are women, a fact that, quite nauseatingly, has been attributed by some observers to the likeness of a chimpanzee to a baby human. Uhlenbroek rejects this as fanciful: "I don't think it's that at all. All the women I've met that do primatology are very interested in animal behaviour. I'm sure they find the little ones sweet, but I don't think that's the primary motivation. One of the reasons that so many women have gone into primatology is because the stage was set by people like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey of Gorillas in the Mist fame, and prior to that it never occurred to them that it was something they could do."
Uhlenbroek's flourishing television career happened by default, she says, while conceding that she has taken to it extremely well. "It never crossed my mind to work in television, which is stupid because it's a great job. I should have thought of it a while ago." She was given an "easy" introduction to the camera six years ago, when the BBC invited her to make a programme called Chimpanzee Diary while doing her PhD with Goodall in Burundi. She hit on a style of delivery that involved speaking to the camera as if to an old friend and ad-libbing from a very informal script.
The reaction to her growing celebrity in the academic world has been surprisingly good, particularly since "pop scientists" like Susan Greenfield are routinely sniped at by less celebrated colleagues for selling their subject short. But Uhlenbroek insists she is not compromising the complexity of her field by presenting it to a television audience. "I believe that there's no concept that is too complex to talk about in ordinary language." She does miss the depth of doing non-televised research, and she finds trying to play the fame game in the middle of the jungle ludicrous. Tight BBC budgets have so far kept living conditions on location as basic as her student digs, but Uhlenbroek had the experience of "If you're in the bush, you might as well be in the bush." Just as long as you have a good hairdryer.
Cousins is on BBC1 on Wednesdays