Animals humanise people... and they make them more decent humans to each other

PENGUINS are funny little creatures, flapping but flightless, surfing waves and chowing down on fish.

- ELLA WALKER

Most of us only ever get to watch them from a distance at the zoo, or on TV documentaries where their habitats are being snuffed out.

But author Tom Michell is not most of us. In the 1970s, while living in South America, the then 20-something rescued a stubborn little Magellanic penguin coated in oil from a beach in Uruguay.

He cleaned him up, named him Juan Salvador, and was forced to sneak the little guy across the border and into the British boarding school he was teaching at in the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires.

Now his story is getting the Steve Coogan treatment in The Penguin Lessons, based on Tom's 2015 memoir of the same name.

"The key difference between Tom's book and the film is that Steve Coogan's Tom Michell is twice the age of the young Tom Michell," says two-time Oscar-nominated director Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty).

"Tom was fairly innocent. A guy in his early 20s who wanted to see Latin America, just got a job over in Buenos Aires in this school, naively going into a civil war situation.

"Steve's [version of Tom] is older. He's cynical, he's running away from life. He's running away from his feelings. He's completely disengaged in teaching."

It's watching a tiny penguin crack him open that gives the film its soul.

BAFTA-winning Manchester-born actor Steve, 59, says crotchety Tom's cynicism and disillusionment are understandable.

"People are products of their environment," says the Alan Partridge star. "But just the same way that you can be damaged by the people around you if they have this toxicity, the reverse is true.

"If you engage with people, or people are supportive or kind, that can have the reverse effect and make you more open minded and able to communicate better.