Having watched his talks as well, and having dealt with news media, I'm hoping that there's a bit of a lens being applied by the author. In my head as I was reading this, I paraphrased the main point of this to read that there was a pessimistic bias amongst British respondents which caused most of them to answer fewer than 25% of questions correctly (the most likely score to achieve by random choice).

His message is astoundingly positive. Admittedly he does like to poke at the western world a bit, but I doubt he was throwing as strong of a jab at Great Britain as the author would like you to believe.

Edit: Nevermind. I just read it again. The chimpanzee comparison is really obnoxiously contrived. We don't know what the full conversation was, but it certainly looks like the author is pulling the conversation back toward sanity. Regarding Brits answering worse than randomly, the author says:

    To be fair, so did the Swedes, the only other nation to have
    been polled so far. In a speech to TED downloaded almost six
    million times, he points out that he also put the questions
    to some fellow professors, and they were on a par with
    chimpanzees, too.

I still like the overall message, however. As a whole the world is in a golden age of prosperity right now. Yes, there are awful, horrible atrocities happening on a daily basis, but on a global scale the quality of life of the average person is improving year over year at a very fast pace.