Sparking new gorilla warfare

As someone who once played the supporting role to a chimpanzee on a weekly television show, I know my place when it comes to working with apes. Congo, the star of Granada's Zootime programme, was a law unto himself. I never attempted to train him, because I wanted people to see the natural behaviour of apes. This often led to chaos, like the day I took him to lunch at the CafÈ Royal.

In the car on the way there, he entertained himself by pulling the chauffeur's cap down over his eyes, so that we zigzagged blindly down Regent Street. During lunch in the restaurant, he spotted a huge dog, a St Bernard, and pursued it, hooting wildly, into the ladies' lavatory, from which there soon emerged a stream of screaming, half-dressed women, followed by a panic-stricken St Bernard. Inside, I found Congo urinating into one of the hand basins while noisily kissing his image in the mirror, hugely enjoying himself as he always did on such occasions. As far as he was concerned, this planet was definitely his.

Having studied apes at uncomfortably close quarters over a number of years, I was excited to learn that a new version of Planet of the Apes was about to be released and I hurried along to see it.

It soon became clear that these new film apes were so far removed from real apes that my hard-won ability to communicate fluently in chimp language would not be needed. With ape characters that wore toupees, false teeth and lipstick-and complained in English about having "bad hair days", I could forget all about natural history and instead settle back and immerse myself in a Hollywood fantasy.

At one level, Planet of the Apes is a fashionably violent sci-fi adventure, loosely based on Pierre Boulle's brilliantly simple switcheroo - for apes read men, for men read apes.

To many, it has a very modern theme, forcing us to consider chimpanzees, orang-utans and gorillas in a new context. As the film unfolds, we encounter these great apes as the dominant species on the planet, subjugating pathetically primitive humans, and we are able to view them in a new light. In their attitudes towards the weakling humans, we are reminded of the way in which, in recent history, we have treated them.

For conservationists concerned about the rapid decline of great apes, this film offers, by inversion, a timely parable of the horrors of species-intolerance. In the real world, we have repeatedly persecuted our ape cousins, using them as human substitutes in disgusting experiments, cruelly displaying them in bleak cages in zoos to make us laugh, killing them for "bush meat" or simply destroying their forest environments in our everexpanding greed.

Today there are few great apes left, and some kinds are already dangerously rare. Orangs are down to their last 25,000, bonobos to 20,000, and the magnificent mountain gorillas to no more than 650. In Planet of the Apes, with the humans reduced to a remnant population, we sense what it must be like to be driven to the brink of extinction. This leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, forcing us to confront ourselves as species bully-boys who have used our superiority to exploit and exterminate the apes. It is a sobering lesson to extract from what is intended to be no more than an entertaining action thriller set in an imaginary future.

But there is an even darker level at which this film operates, for it is also a parable of the horrors of racial prejudice. Pierre Boulle, who created this enduring fantasy back in the 1960s, had been a French secret agent in the Far East during the Second World War.

On a journey into Indochina in 1942, floating down the Nam-Na river on a bamboo raft, he was captured by the Japanese. For two years he was subjected to brutal forced labour until he managed to escape in 1944. During his two years in captivity, he experienced first-hand the inhumane way one race could come to treat another.