MISS ANGELA LLOYD is 21, has big, blue eyes and blonde hair that curls perkily at shoulder length.

She has rather unusual playmates, too, like Denise, a rheumatic Muscovy duck that can’t swim; Rebel, a rabbit that’s always on the run; and a gaggle of tame, baby sparrows that peck the grit from the soles of your shoes.

We all shared an interview in a backyard of the staff quarters at the Children’s Zoo, London, where Angela works and her off-beat animal chums live.

You can see Angela talking about rats and mice as pets on Zoo Time, on Wednesday. She is something of an expert on pet rodents, having kept and bred them since she was six years old. She talked to me about life in the Children’s Zoo … and the sort of things youngsters say and do when visiting this miniature Disneyland.

First, let’s introduce Denise and Rebel. Poor old Denise, aged about five — which I am assured is elderly for a Muscovy duck — has rheumatism in her webbed feet. As the affliction has dried out her feathers, it has upset her buoyancy and she can’t swim any more. A disastrous state of affairs for a duck.

But the girl helpers at the Children’s Zoo have adopted Denise as their personal pet. They even bath the old girl. She lives cosily in a bale of straw behind the staff quarters, growing old gracefully.

Rebel, the rabbit, is her bale-mate and keeps escaping from his pen in the Zoo. So he has been posted to the rear of the staff quarters, which are adequately enclosed but where he can roam freely.

“I’ve been working here for nearly three years,” said Angela. “Although I appeared in several TV plays and stage productions as a juvenile, animals have always been my first love.

“I adore the work. It gives me a chance to be near all the animals I’m interested in, mice and rats particularly.

“I look after and study rodents in the mornings. In the afternoons I take the children on pony rides. The children fail into two categories — the very shy ones and the super-confident, leave-me-alone-I’m-all-right ones.

“In fact, one little boy once told me: ‘Leave me alone. I know what to do. I’ve watched Rawhide!’ And he dug in his heels and almost managed to get a normally placid Shetland pony to break into a gallop.

“Hamsters, too, amuse the children. One day, two little boys watched fascinated for hours while a hamster chewed his way patiently through his hutch.

“Once he had escaped, they came and told me. ‘He’s super,’ they said. ‘Will you ask him to do it again?’

“And there was a sad scene when a little girl fed Hector, one of our mischievous goats, with a fresh loaf of bread.

“Hector left the bread … and gobbled the wax-paper wrapping. He loves that, although it’s bad for his digestion.

“But the little girl cried because she thought Hector didn’t want her loaf.

“I reassured her and told her he was a special goat who liked to eat paper and rags. Next time I looked around, sure enough, the little girl was feeding Hector her frilly handkerchief.”

Then Angela prepared to go and feed her mice. Mice? Weren’t girls supposed to be terrified of mice? “That’s silly,” said Angela. “They’re lovable little things.

“But I can’t stand spiders. Ugh. Even a tiny one sends me scampering away screaming.”

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JERROLD ZACHARIAS, brilliant scientist, invented an atomic clock so accurate that in 2,000 years it will not be more than half a second wrong.

Yet he said to me: “My watch runs a little fast. This I like because I know it will never be slow, and I would rather be early than late for an appointment.”

This exemplifies the realism of Professor Zacharias in his two fold approach to the timeless problems of science and the day-to-day problems of life as we live it.

Prof. Zacharias, who is, among other things, a military adviser to the U.S. Government, is here in Britain to give the last of the Granada Lectures on Wednesday. His subject is “Teaching and Machines.”

He is a short, rather stubby Bostonian with iron-grey hair and dark bushy eyebrows. He is well-dressed. He deliberates deeply before talking and underlines his points with careful movements of his hands.

Listen to his comments:

On teaching: “If I cannot make people understand a subject then I don’t understand it myself.”

On nuclear weapons: “They have reached such a stupid stage that the human race can no longer continue to play with them. They must learn to live with them.”

On physicists: “He is a kind of chemist, only he doesn’t smell so bad.”

He told me, in a quiet voice with clipped American accent: “I am here to lecture because I feel I have something to say about what we are doing in the United States to make our schools good.

“There is a difference in making schools good, rather than just making them better. This applies to the whole world, not only America. This is why I feel what I have to say will particularly interest the British public.”

Dr. Zacharias first began to study physics at Columbia University.

During the war, he worked at the radiation laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on radar development. In 1944, he directed the engineering work on the atomic bomb, and later established a laboratory of nuclear science, studying nuclear-powered flights, undersea warfare, air defence, and the Distant Early Warning Line.

For his brilliant technical services, Dr. Zacharias was awarded the U.S. President’s Certificate of Merit in 1948 and in 1955 received the Department of Defence Certificate of Appreciation — its highest honour.

I asked him, as one of the leading boffins working on the A-Bomb, if he has conscientious qualms about the horrific effects the weapon has had on mankind. His reply: “No. People were killing themselves wholesale for hundreds of years before I was born.”

In 1956, Dr. Zacharias, with a number of other professional physicists, switched his attention to improving the teaching of physics in American secondary schools. Why?

“Because we realised the most important thing we could achieve was educating the young,” he said. “We wanted to raise the quality of science education, and, at the same time, try to stop the wave of anti-intellectualism that had sprung up in the post-war world.

“If humanity is not educated it is exposed to every evil that besets mankind. I trust an educated person. I do not trust an uneducated person. Why? Because an educated person has the power to react properly. He has the power to reason. Without this power, he can be swayed by demogogues and glib leadership.”

As a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, Dr. Zacharias originated the idea that film aids and special texts should be used to improve physics teaching in high schools.

His ideas led to a Physics Science Study Committee in America, which conducted a crash programme to develop an entirely new high schools physics course. Within two years, 20,000 students in 600 schools were taking the course.

Said Dr. Zacharias: “My principle is that in order to learn something, you have to participate in it. I learned more about London by driving around the city than any guide book could have taught me.

“It’s the same with any subject. You want to learn about the atomic clock? Right, come to the laboratory and I will show you. I don’t think you would understand if I tried to explain verbally.”

I asked Dr. Zacharias what sort of educated world he hoped to see in, say, 25 years time? He replied: “My aim is a world in which men are men and not mice. My world is a world of independent thinkers.” Now what of Dr. Zacharias, the man? “I am,” he admitted, with a quiet smile, “a very impersonal man. I have so many interests, so much work to do. I enjoy coming to Britain because it gives me the opportunity to argue with friends here. What do we argue about? The same as everyone: beliefs, science, humanity.”

Finally, how did Dr. Zacharias wish to be remembered — as an atomic physicist or pioneering educator? The reply typifies the man. He said: “I never worry how I might be remembered. There is a saying that you get some thing done or you get credit for it. I want no credit for what I can do, even from the eye of eternity.”

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IT’S a full-time job keeping pace with the Sixties — but it’s made easier with Granada’s Comedy Four, the Thursday replacement for Bootsie and Snudge.

Many people are always a step behind … and can never understand why. Still, they cling to their own ideas. Old fashioned … certainly. Square … very possibly.

But their cheerful determination not to get with it is often very amusing.

Comedy Four didn’t set out to cash in on this situation.

The idea was simply to keep us chuckling. Four half-hourly, completely different, situation comedy stories were planned.

Every story has a different script team and cast.

Yet one theme has been unintentionally stitched through the four stories – the struggle of some people to keep up with the Sixties.

Tonight’s first episode — “Tea at the Ritz” — is a fair example.

A dithery couple run a dowdy cinema called the Ritz that was probably all the rage in Valentino’s day and which still serves tea to patrons during the interval.

Into this happy, but none-too-profitable set-up, steps a slick young salesman, with a get-rich-quick scheme to scrap the tea and show sexy films.

“Tea at the Ritz” has a definite hint of Bootsie and Snudge about it.

Producer Peter Eton and writers Peter Miller and James Kelly were members of the B & S team.

The dotty couple who run the Ritz both appeared — as dance-hall owners — in a B & S episode on December 20 last year.

Their names: Ann Lancaster and Ronnie Stevens.

Off-stage, they are old friends. Ann is god-mother to Ronnie’s three-year-old son, Paul.

On-stage, they are two of television’s most versatile characters, each with a rich repertoire of dialects.

You have heard both many times in ITV comic commercials. Ann Lancaster has been the ’voice’ of pigs, glasses, oranges — and she was the mystery caller of “Albert!” in the popular man-in-the-bath TV Times advertisement.

Ronnie has appeared recently in a toffee commercial with Arthur Haynes.

He was also in ITV’s New Look and The Peggy Mount Show.

Ronnie — quavering impressively — told me: “For ‘Tea at the Ritz’, Ann and I concentrate on our crackly, wavering elderly people-type voice.”

The salesman is played by Norman Rossington, one of the bright young men of British comedy.

He has appeared in many successful films, including Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, and many television laughter programmes … The Army Game, Our House, and ITV’s Tune On The Old Tax Fiddle.

“Tea at the Ritz”, then, has three talented and experienced mirth-makers.

But the entire series is encrusted with top-line comedy character actors and actresses.

Second show in the series is Tin Pan Alice, with Athlene Seyler, Warren Mitchell and Carole Carr.

It’s about an old dearie who runs an out-of-date music shop who suddenly has the alarming experience of having a hit record on her hands. Third of the quartet brings two great comedians together — Kenneth Connor and Deryck Guyler.

They star in Fit For Heroes, the story of a retired Army major and his faithful batman who plan revenge in the Post Office when their pensions are stopped.

Finally, Dudley Foster and Bernard Bresslaw come together in Home From Home — the story of two bewildered old lags caught up in changing conditions in one of Her Majesty’s prisons.

Comedy Four intends to be uncomplicated and amusing But watch for ironic twists in all four plots.

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