Morris fronted several hundred hours of television, beginning his television career with the Granada children's weekly programme Zoo Time from 1956. The show was broadcast from a special residential television studio built within the grounds of London Zoo. This early exposure helped establish him as an encyclopedic observer of human behaviour.
Alongside his scientific work, Morris maintained a separate and distinguished career as an artist. His painting career began long before his first London exhibition in 1950. He took over the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in Pall Mall, though the details of his tenure there are not provided.
Morris's career as an impresario of the modern arts was interrupted by the success of his 1967 book The Naked Ape, which became one of the world's bestselling titles. The book sold an estimated 18 million copies, and Morris moved to Malta for a few years following its success. The exact date of his death has not been specified, nor has the cause been mentioned.
The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal 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. Morris addressed the detailed intimacies of the human animal as 'the sexiest primate alive', including considerations of arousal, copulation and falling in love. He argued that the hairless primate is a social carnivore pulled one way by hunter-gatherer instincts and another by culture.
I tried to create a private world in which my own, in
The book's controversial nature led to its placement 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. According to The Guardian - Science, Desmond Morris described attempting to create a private world in which his own artistic and scientific interests could coexist.
Morris's book was not the first popular work that decade to treat human society as shaped by evolution. Most popular science theses are overturned or overtaken sooner or later, and some of the text of The Naked Ape now seems obvious, some contentious and some just daft. Yet in 1967, Morris struck a note that chimed perfectly with the febrile mood of the times, creating a literary template that later generations of popular science writers could only hope to match.
His literary output spanned decades, beginning with a 1958 study of the ten-spined stickleback and concluding with 101 Surrealists in 2024. The specific titles of his other books beyond these three are not listed.
Morris continued his artistic pursuits into later life, holding a solo show at Farleys House & Gallery in Chiddingly, East Sussex in 2019. Farleys House & Gallery 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. He once stated, 'It is the biological nature of the beast that has moulded the social structure of civilisation, rather than the other way round.'