Ralph the raccoon is very demure, very mindful; the prairie dogs are poppin’; the bats are brat and Stilton the goat, in his mind at least, is the GOAT (that’s obviously Greatest Of All Time, sheesh).
We know all this because a new social media video for Northumberland zoo has, virally, gone supersonic.
More than 6 million people have viewed a video on TikTok featuring a couple in their 60s guiding people through the zoo using the language of generation Z.
Part of its charm lies in the deadpan delivery of Linda and Brian Bradley. It looks as if there may well be someone, off screen, aiming a loaded pistol at them.
“That’s me!” joked Maxine Bradley, who directed her parents. “It took a long time. It was: ‘You two, please concentrate!’”
The conceit of “getting your gen Z employee to write your marketing script” is the latest TikTok trend to take off.
Popular videos of recent weeks include a tour of Fyfield Manor, a B&B in a beautiful 880-year-old (“no cap”) building in Oxfordshire, by its owner Christine Brown, who tells us in a cut-glass English accent that “the medieval dining room has so much rizz” and that the “Georgian panelled room” understood the assignment.
There’s also Beamish Museum in County Durham – “Pockly Old Hall is always serving” – and Kenyon Hall Farm in Warrington: “the vibes in the farm shop, immaculate”.
Maxine Bradley was directly inspired to make her video after seeing one for Edinburgh zoo, narrated by its chief executive, David Field.
“I thought, ‘This is awesome … can we do this?’ Personally, I don’t like TikTok and social media does my head in, but another member of staff who’s super into trends saw it too and we both said, ‘We have to do this.’”
The big problem soon became clear: that both Bradley and her colleague are millennials with little grasp of gen Z (people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s) lingo. “Lucy had gone on the internet and found all these definitions and I was like, ‘What is this? This is not real.’”
A script eventually came together and they enlisted another colleague, from gen Z. “She understood it. She was able to say, ‘You can’t use that, it’s too old … Yes, this is on trend.’ She was teaching my dad what you’re supposed to do and how you’re supposed to do it.
“I couldn’t believe my parents were so up for it, but yes, it was a frustrating process filming it. The one-minute video took two hours … My dad just wasn’t paying attention. Neither of them knew what they were saying. I still don’t, to be honest with you.”
Northumberland zoo, a family-run, not-for-profit organisation near Morpeth, has steadily grown since getting its licence in 2015. Its inhabitants include snow leopards, Asian short-clawed otters, capybaras, owls, lemurs, meerkats, wallabies, and it is a mix of the deadly serious and the out-and-out bananas.
The zoo, for example, is playing an important role in the conservation of critically endangered Livingstone’s fruit bats, which come from two tiny islands between Madagascar and the African mainland. It is the only place in the UK with a population.
It is also probably the only place in the world where the guinea pigs live in a wild west-themed village, which includes a jailhouse, an inn and a blacksmith and is a YouTube hit.
It’s mad and fun but, Bradley hopes, also helps teach people how to keep guinea pigs as pets. “We explain what’s an appropriate diet, what is an appropriate space. Too many people keep guinea pigs in tiny spaces, which is really sad.”
Innovating is important to the zoo, which is the reason Ralph the racoon is also available to do birthday wishes or pep talks on the greeting video site Cameo.
Why Ralph? “Raccoons can be difficult; they are one of the only animals in the world which will seek revenge,” said Bradley. “But Ralph is our nicest raccoon. People love him.”
