You are right, I am not keen on animals being dressed up, though if it is equally pleasurable to animal and best friend, it can be enjoyable for both. But never where money and deadlines get involved.
Anyway this card is very apt for this week because this is a still from the first ever television advert featuring the Brooke Bond Chimps. Now you might say adverts and the BBC have nothing in common, but look at the back of the card and you will see that it mentions Peter Sellers, who voiced the chimp shown here,
Peter Sellers started out in the theatre, but when the Second World War broke out he joined ENSA and was one of the performers who toured the bases and battlefields bringing a spot of entertainment into the lives of the war weary troops. Or so you will often read, but n fact he was conscripted into the Royal Air Force, and had dreams of becoming a pilot, until he failed the flying requirements through defective vision. This put his feet firmly down as ground crew, where he was quite bored. His solution was to entertain himself, with funny stories and actions. Somehow this came to the attention of the highers up and they recommended him to ENSA.
After the War, like many of his tour mates, he found work on the radio with the BBC. Then he teamed up with a few fellow comedians to write a new form of entertainment,, based on the ENSA concert parties, fun and frenetic and mildly controversial, and this took off, almost certainly because its target listening audience was the young people who had just returned from the War where they had heard it ; and it brought back the memories of comradeship, which, now they were back home struggling with lack of work and too many responsibilities, they missed.
In the 1950s Peter Sellers started making films. He was popular, and appeared in the Pink Panther films, but there was always a sad and otherwordliness to his performances. His off screen life was never very happy and he was frequently disappointed by people he thought would be good friends or partners. He died very young, aged just fifty four, in 1980.
It appears that this is the only British trade card of him. There are some from Belgium, issued in the late 1960s early 1970s by Victoria Chocolate of Belgium in the series called "Vedetten Parade". More recently cards have been issued for his more popular films, including The Pink Panther. I will look those up and add them later.