IF you had googled him, you would have known that he is a fictional character made for the commercial.  That’s how I found you guys fighting about it.  OK, have fun with that!

HL, I wrote this entry over two years ago. The info to be found on Google was a wee bit scarcer back then. It would make you look a little less foolish if you actually checked the dates on the entries you’re commenting on.

Tony Sinclair’s life history is, as he says himself, “somewhat more unusual than the average.” He spent his early childhood in the African bush in Tanzania, around the coastal city of Dar es Salaam. He showed an early interest in his surroundings, playing with the local African kids and learning the Swahili language. He collected dung beetles to keep as pets, and his young African friends showed him where he could find chameleons, the lizard-like reptiles that can change colour to match their surroundings.

When he was ten years old, his parents sent him off to boarding school in England. He soon realized that although he liked England, he preferred Africa, and wanted to go back and work with animals. He decided to work towards a degree in zoology, and entered Oxford University in 1963.

Within three days at Oxford, he had convinced Professor Arthur Cain, an evolutionist with an interest in Africa, to include him on an expedition to the Serengeti. The trip was to take place in a year or two. In the meantime, Sinclair organized an expedition of his own, and in the summer of 1964 he and three others went to Turkey to study bird migration routes.

At the end of his second year in Oxford, he was finally able to get back to Africa where he spent four months in the Serengeti studying bird migration. He returned to England, and after graduating and getting married, he moved back to the Serengeti on a NATO Scholarship, and was handed the task of discovering why the African buffalo population was rapidly increasing. He stayed there for seven of the next eight years, returning to Oxford only to write his PhD thesis.

Living and working in the Serengeti became difficult for researchers in the early 1970s when the politics in East Africa suddenly changed. Researchers were no longer welcome or safe. Concerned for the security of his wife and young children, Sinclair accepted an offer to move to the city of Darwin on the north coast of Australia. His job there was to work on the conservation of native Australian wildlife, whose population was under pressure from introduced predators such as the red fox and feral cat.

Sinclair was in Darwin for less than a year before it was destroyed in a cyclone, and his job along with it. At about the same time though, he was offered a job as an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, which he accepted. He moved to Canada in 1975, where he has lived ever since.

He was soon able to resume his work in Africa, and since the late 1970s he has spent a few months every year in the Serengeti organizing and conducting research. He is interested in the large scale view of entire ecosystems; how they function, what keeps them from falling apart, and what causes them to fall apart.

He has played an integral role in Serengeti research over the past forty years. In early December of 1991, with funding from various agencies including Canada’s Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), he organized and conducted a workshop in Seronera, the research station located in the center of the park. The participants in the workshop, all scientists interested in different aspects of the Serengeti ecosystem, built a computerized model of the reserve. Using software developed at UBC, they included not only parameters such as rainfall levels and numbers of predators, but also the effects of human activity on the system, such as poaching, tourism, and health care levels of the local people. The resulting model was a first attempt to make predictions of the future of the Serengeti ecosystem, based on a large-scale, science-based overview of the entire park.

The process brought together a group of researchers who had for the most part been working independently of each other, and had never before collaborated with each other. They were able to start seeing their work in a new way, and to see how the whole system fit together. The model allowed them to see where more detailed work needed to be done and for many of them, it opened up new avenues of research.

Dr. Sinclair has produced three books on the Serengeti, has just finished a forth (Fall, 2006) and plans to have a fifth. Each one is a collection of papers written by various scientists, and each covers a different time period in the life of the reserve and his time there.

His work is not limited to the Serengeti. He has also worked with Charles Krebs in the Yukon doing a 20 year study of the population dynamics of the snowshoe hare, and has conducted a large amount of work in Australia and New Zealand designing conservation experiments.

Nearing the age of retirement, Sinclair has bought some land on the shore of Lake Victoria near the western boundary of the Serengeti National Park, and will be building a house there. He will be sharing it with Simon Mduma, who is the head of all Tanzanian research in the Serengeti. When he retires, Sinclair plans to live there much of the year and act as a technical advisor, with free access to the Serengeti to conduct his research, and to just be in the land he loves.

FFS - I wish someone would put a cap in Tony Sinclair’s ugly fucking mug. Socialite? Well, if he walked into one of my parties, he wouldn’t have to worry about that ugly gap in his teeth anymore - he wouldn’t have any teeth left. What a piece of shit.
A good reason NOT to drink Tanqueray, other than the fact it tastes like shit anyhow. Now, give me a good bourbon - and get these idiots off my TV set.

I can’t stand the somebitch either. I’m drinking Bombay now in protest.

Y’know who I’d like to slap the shit out of?  That megachurch douche bag, Joel Osteen.  He just has that kind of face.

While he may be a complete phony, he is unfortunately not fictional.

Hey I Love this Guys act he really makes a great spokes person for Tanger He,s got the look the whole nine for a snobbish socialite look likes he,s really enjoying himself at what he,s doing You go Boy with yo bad self. Plus this man is making money making a lot of people sick Ha Ha so just sit back and enjoy Mr TONY SINCLAIRE EXTRODINAIRE......

This simpleton looks like a goddamn fucking Stymie reject!

Honestly.. I’m a Las Vegas bartender.. I challenge anyone to rival me in spirit and wine knowledge… Tony Sinclair honestly is one of the most original and brilliant spokespersons for any alcohol brand on the planet… Heres the rub.. Gin… an alcohol in America that is mostly drunken by Blacks needs a black spokesperson… But the classic gin sale goes to the upper class white consumer… Tony alienates neither young black people nor upper class white people because A) He’s british B) he’s well spoken and C) he’s witty and clever. If you can’t sit back and laugh at Tony’s adds then you really shouldn’t be drinking gin…

I’ll give you A, but I disagree on points B and C. Good thing I don’t drink gin.

is this a racist redneck talking. before u critizie go get a new look. you know one of the 21 century.

It has nothing to do with his race and everything to do with how obnoxious the character is.

I’m not sure how having a different appearance would make my opinion any more valid. That’s a pretty stupid comment to make.

SEB...quite a thread you’ve got going here!  Kind of surprised (still, several months later) at the vitriol spewed at poor Tony...but I do enjoy the gin and Tony continues to make money.  I wonder if some of the reaction illustrated on this thread is Tanqueray-bottle green envy… regardless, I would advise all who harbor such strong negative emotion to have a Tanqueray martini, wet, up and dirty...hard to think bad thoughts when you are enjoying one of the finest libations created. Ready to Tanqueray?  Ahh Ha Ha!

Wow!  I continually impress myself with my ability to put a thread to sleep.  Is it my inarguable logic or my though provoking posits which result in absolutely no rebuttal?  Maybe too many Tanqueray Martinis can enable even Tony Sinclair to become everyone’s friend...glad to hear everyone has made nice.  Now how about a cocktail?  Anyone?

My vote was the sheer inanity of it made any response not worth the effort it would take to type.  You need to lay off the gin, it’s starting to affect your perception of reality.

What the hell did you just say?
Gin makes you see clearer ... and remember ... “always in moderation”.

sb - what point were you expecting us to rebut?

I think the commercial is classy and it’s different. It’s refreshing to see that for once they can put a black man on a commercial selling alcohol while dressed in a nice subtle suit, not surrounded by nearly naked women. That commercial makes me want to try Tanqueray and I don’t even like gin.  It also makes me want to crawl into the TV and join them because they always show a party I’d love to go to! I’d hang with Tony any day.