In an article about Desmond Morris, the writer, artist, zoologist, television presenter, and so on, in the Guardian Stephen Moss is fascinated by his insistence on the importance of playfulness.

Desmond Morris is keen on the concept of playfulness, and thinks it tell us a lot about humanity’s evolution. Our playfulness fuels our ingenuity and inventiveness, allowed us to defeat physically more powerful species to become global top dogs, and explains how we ended up wearing clothes, playing computer games, dropping “smart” bombs and watching Strictly Come Dancing. We play, therefore we are.

Morris began life as an artist, then got his doctorate as a zoologist with a thesis on The Reproductive Behaviour of the Ten-Spined Stickleback. He then met people from Granada television and filled my childhood with appearances on Zoo Time, which was a staple of children’s television during the nineteen fifties.

This led him to write The Naked Ape, which “which treated humans as animals and sought to explain all human behaviour in zoological terms”. It was a late sixties hit; one of those book, like The Female Eunoch, that you could find in most rooms in any university hall of residence. After that he was a writer, thinker and pundit. He has just finished The Naked Man, which was the reason for the interview, and thus completed a trilogy of sorts, since The Naked Woman was published in 2004.

He has also written The Human Zoo and Intimate Behaviour, Manwatching (which developed the concept of “body language”), The Soccer Tribe, Catwatching, Dogwatching and Babywatching. Populist but not dumb, is the usual journalistic description of them.

Moss notes that Morris – “a large, beaming, soon-to-be-80-year-old surrounded by books (many of which were written by him) and surrealist paintings (all of which were painted by him) in a converted coach house at the back of his rambling home in Oxford” – seems very happy with himself and his life. He concludes by saying that

Happiness may lie in having theories that match one’s own personality.

Possibly true.