Morris fronted several hundred hours of television, beginning his television career with the Granada children's weekly programme Zoo Time in 1956. The programme was broadcast from a special residential television studio built within the grounds of London Zoo.
Alongside his broadcasting work, Morris maintained a separate and distinguished career as an artist. His career as a painter began long before 1958, with his first London exhibition in 1950. That exhibition was shared in a gallery with the surrealist master Joan Miró. In 2019, Morris had a solo show at Farleys House & Gallery in Chiddingly, East Sussex, which was once the home of the critic Sir Roland Penrose and the photographer Lee Miller. Throughout his life, Morris saw living things as works of beauty, and paintings as a form of biology. According to reports, he also took over the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in Pall Mall.
Morris's career as an impresario of the modern arts was interrupted by the success of his book The Naked Ape in 1967. The book became one of the world's bestselling titles, selling an estimated 18 million copies. It was a contemplation of the evolutionary pressures that fashioned the only one of the 193 living species of ape or monkey to have no hair. After its success, Morris moved to Malta for a few years. The book was placed on the Catholic Church's index of forbidden books, a list that also contained Balzac, Stendhal, Voltaire, and Zola. Morris willingly accepted the ban as flattery.
The Naked Ape was not the first popular book that decade to treat human society as shaped by evolution. In it, Morris addressed the detailed intimacies of the human animal as 'the sexiest primate alive'. The book included intricate considerations of arousal, copulation, and 'falling in love, for becoming sexually imprinted on one partner, for evolving a pair bond'. Morris argued that the hairless primate is a social carnivore pulled one way by hunter-gatherer instincts and another by culture.
Most popular science theses are overturned or overtaken sooner or later. Some of The Naked Ape's text now seems obvious, some contentious, and some just daft. In 1967, however, the book struck a note that chimed perfectly with the febrile mood of the times. It created a literary template that later generations of popular science writers could only hope to match.
Morris's writing career bookended his life. His first book in 1958 was a study of the ten-spined stickleback. His last book was 101 Surrealists in 2024, which was one of a number of surveys of surrealist artists. The exact date and cause of his death have not been specified, and beyond The Naked Ape and 101 Surrealists, the specific titles of his over 50 books are not listed.