Who’d have thought that a quiz show about cardboard boxes with numbers sellotaped to their lids could ever be a hit?  Yet somehow, the bearded one made it so.  Does Noel Edmonds have the golden touch when it comes to conceiving new prime-time quiz material?  Feel Good Television put the great face-fuzzed one on the case and asked him to think, and think hard.

And what sprung forth from this incomparable mind as sure-fire gameshow hit?  Beat The Monkey (working title, I hope) in which the master of ceremonies is… a monkey.

So, my agent is just getting my CV together, and I’ve had a few new studio portraits done, and hopefully I’ll have a meeting with Noel before too long…

Story from The Guardian.  (Oh, yes – you didn’t think I was making this up, did you?)

Monkey answers the most recent round of questions received on Ask Monkey. If you have your own question that you’d like to seek answers on, pop over to this page where you can request answers to your queries from all subjects from dragonfly lie expectancy to glass blowing.

A Model Monkey
Patience Ann asks:

This one is actually from me, not Mister G this time. So, Monkey, have you ever done any modeling? Because the monkey on Tufty Mitten’s bed in Petville looks awfully familiar:

Monkey answers:
Well, that’s just strange! I mean, it’s definitely me, but I have never posed for a live portrait – it must have been done from one of my modelling shots. The artist has my wonky-foot down perfectly! Thankyou for sending me the link to this picture – it has made my day (though I am a bit scared of that chainsaw!)

Monkey on the Move
Craig asks:

Dear Monkey, What is your favourite way of getting about? Do you have a Monkey Mobile our do you use public transport? Love, Craigy Ranger.

Monkey answers:
I tend to use the MTS (Monkey Tube System), constructed for high-speed monkey transportation. It’s a bit like a cross between the London underground and one of hose vacuum-tubes they used for moving bundles of money around in supermarkets, but it is a bit more luxurious than either.

Here is one of the terminals of the MTS.

This happens to be the stop in Morecambe, but they are all basically the same. As you can see, you are whisked along on a feather bed with mood lighting, though your enjoyment is only fleeting as the journey is all but instantaneous. I don’t know why you humans don’t get together and construct a similar system for yourselves… you do insist on your slow and polluting methods – you seem to enjoy the stress.

The MTS doesn’t yet extend to all destinations, but covers all of the major places of interest: Morecambe, Neasden and the like, but the system is always expanding, and soon we hope to have the network expand to such locations as Frumpton on Sea and Abergavenny.

Monkey has been busy answering the first few questions to the all-new and refurbished Ask Monkey service. Here he gives answers to some pressing questions:

Sociable Monk
Patience Ann asks:

Actually, Mister Gorilla has a question. He wants to know if you would like to hang out sometime. He says to give him a ring on the bananaphone if you would?

Monkey answers:

Ice like the Olympics
Metalouise asks:

Dear Monkey, are you watching the Olympics? If so, what is your favourite event?

Monkey answers: Ooh, yes! I am watching as much Olympic coverage as I can find spread across the various channels. I sit and watch the ice-skating with Mimi, as that’s her favourite event, but I really like the ski-jumping myself. Sometimes I like to slide down one of Mimi’s outstretched legs and leap off of her foot for practice, but that has almost ended up with me breaking a leg, and has already been the cause of a spilled glass of Orangina, so it’s been suggested that I have a go at the more sedate sport of curling, and get practising on the kitchen floor. Hold on a second!

Regular bananas
Paddington Bumblewax (I believe this may be an alias) asks:

See how bananas are full of fibre & fibre makes you poo, how come they can constipate you?

Monkey answers: Bananas are a very healthy and tasty treat for most people, and they do indeed contain good levels of fibre to keep your tummy healthy and happy. Indeed, it is believed that bananas serve as a good treatment for constipation. But as you probably know, bananas ripen in the home quite quickly, and it is believed that this is the key to how bananas affect digestion.

As a banana ripens, the high levels of fibre in the banana can help lead to a healthy tummy environment. An enzyme that stops ripening bananas from fermenting is also believed to help with your, erm, ‘movements’.

Unripe bananas, however, are high in starch (which later turns to sugar as the banana ripens, hence the sweetening of the banana as it turns from slightly green to bright yellow) and this is thought to be the cause of constipation.

You should eat bananas when they are nicely ripened, anyway, because that is when they are at their sweetest. Nom nom nom.

A long time ago, on my old site, I used to have a section called ‘Ask Monkey’, where people would fill in a web form and ask me questions about everything from sea-monsters to peanut butter, but a while ago the form stopped working and I couldn’t fix it, and so there were no more questions for me and my monkey-chums to research and report back to people with.

Well, Ask Monkey is back! and we have a new working form and everything! So, if you want to know if an Aardvark can sit in an armchair, or discover the aerodynamic properties of the average geography textbook, my team of monkeys and I will get researching, experimenting and otherwise getting to the bottom of all the things that make you go ‘hmmmmm?’.

You can Ask Monkey using this simple and quick to fill out web form, so drop me and my monkey-chums a line, and we’ll get our brains working on the matter as soon as we can.

Now that the first few questions have been sent, Monkey Answers! is online.

Hello there, friends of monkeys everywhere.

World of Monkey is six years old now, and the internet has changed a lot since the first time I fired up the old steam-powered monkey laptop and started this website, and to be honest things have moved on since the days when my new learn-as-you-go approach to basic HTML could make this site look OK.  Well, OK-ish.  So, welcome to the brand new, completely refurbished, World of Monkey.

As you can see, there are a few tweaks that need to be made, but hopefully the new interface will mean that I can update the site much more frequently now, because I have to admit that I have been neglecting it for a while, as it became so difficult to navigate and organise, and so now there will be much more opportunity for all friends of Monkey to comment and join in.

Ask Monkey, Friends of Monkey and all of the other interactive Monkey fun will be back as me and my Monkey chums fill the site with new content.  In the meantime, why not add us to your bookmarks, or grab the snazzy RSS feed to keep up to date with what is happening in the World of Monkey.