Jane Goodall has inspired animal lovers all over the world through her innovative work with primates. Now her work has sparked a television series, “Jane,” for Apple TV+. The series is about a 9-year-old girl who is inspired by the works and words of Goodall. Along with her good friends, David and Graybeard the chimpanzee, she launches a series of flamboyant adventures to help save a Noah’s Ark assembly of wild creatures.
The 10-episode series, aimed at families, premieres on Friday and is graced by Goodall’s approval via Jane Goodall Institute’s Andria Teather.
When we spoke some months ago, Goodall told me it was when she was a little girl that she first became entranced with the wild kingdom. “Tarzan and Dr. Doolittle fascinated me, and ‘The Jungle Book,’ ‘Call of the Wild,’ every book I had was about animals,” she recalled.
“I had a nanny, I was about 6 at the time, she stayed on when my sister was born, and she saved up coupons. Those days you really got things free if you cut coupons off the packet of something. You didn’t also have to send a check for 50 pounds as you do today. They say ‘free’ and it’s not free at all. The prize was a hefty book, heavy, dense, with photographs called ‘The Miracle of Life.’ It was not for children. It went into the history of medicine and the discovery of anesthetics, and I can still see the pictures, and I loved it. I read it; I drew it. I drew the insect mandibles. I really was a naturalist from the time I was born.”
While the world knows of Goodall’s achievements, it’s hard to believe that she had a tough time getting started. Before she met and was encouraged by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey in Africa, she worked as a waitress and a typist and at a zoo. “I was a 26-year-old and had saved up money working as a waitress; that’s how I got my money,” she said.
“Once I got invited by a school friend, heard about Louis Leakey and went to see him at the museum. I said, ‘I’ve saved up, am staying with a friend, and I had a temporary job, and I really want to work with animals, and could he help me?
“He asked me lots and lots of questions, it was a natural history museum because I'd learned so much about animals, and in spite of having no degree, I could answer most of the questions. And he gave me a job as his assistant.”
Her first visit to Africa was simply as a tourist. “I stayed with my friend for a while, but we’d always been firmly told you mustn’t overstay your welcome, sponge off people. So my uncle, who knew people in Kenya, had arranged for a firm to give me a temporary job. He knew the head in England, and they had a branch in Nairobi. So I got a temporary typing job and then heard about Louis Leakey and met him in Kenya,” she recalled.
Leakey thought Goodall would be perfect for animal studies but had no money to pay her. “I was in Nairobi with Louis for a year and then I went back (to England) while he tried to get money for me to go, and I got a job working with television — actually at the zoo — and also learning more about chimps,” she recalled.
“Because he’d offered me this opportunity, ... he had to find the money, and that wasn’t easy. He got that from an American businessman who said, ‘All right, Louis, we’ll give you money for six months.’”
At that time it wasn’t de rigueur for young women to travel solo. “The authorities said, ‘Well, she can’t go alone.’ So Mom volunteered for four of those six months.”
While on her quest, both Goodall and her mother contracted malaria. “In Gombe we were told there was no malaria, and Mom and I didn’t have any medication and she nearly died, very nearly. I don’t know why she didn’t actually. We lay side-by-side with just the energy to pass the thermometer back and forth. And our cook, he was the only person there. He said, ‘You must go into Kigoma.’ And we said, ‘We can’t.’ Eventually we got better.
Goodall reports that she’s had attacks of malaria at least 30 times. “It used to come back when I got worn out.”
After 60 years of studying primates, Goodall is considered the ultimate expert on chimpanzees. She’s learned a lot from them, she says. “The most valuable thing I’ve learned from the chimps is helping us to understand that we’re not so different. We’re not as different as we used to think. We’re not the only beings with personalities, minds and feelings – above all feelings. We’ve blurred the line that science has always tried to make so hard between us and them. And, of course, drawing a sharp line between us and them is the same thing that happens with civil war – the in-group, the out-group,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter what we do to the out-group. We shut them up, do experimentation, we can slaughter them in unspeakable ways, we can fasten them in intensive cages, it doesn’t matter because we’re different. Just like we can go kill those people because they’re different from us.”
Ray Romano goes 'Somewhere'
Ray Romano proves once again that you can’t keep a good man down – for long. Romano, best known as the ever-compromising husband in “Everybody Loves Raymond,” has written, directed and stars in “Somewhere in Queens,” arriving in theaters April 21.
In this warm and funny saga Romano plays a dad who will stop at almost nothing to see that his athletic son scores a deal as a college basketball player.
Romano actually started as a stand-up. He says he finds a commonality among stand-up comedians. “The common denominator is they need what they get onstage, something that was missing from them,” he says.
“I don’t want to criticize or blame anyone, but my father happened to be a guy who grew up without a father of his own. He had a hard time expressing himself. He was very undemonstrative. My one joke is if my father hugged me once I’d be an accountant right now. I wouldn’t have needed what I did. There seems to be that there’s some need for validation, some need for attention that maybe they were lacking. But that’s not a rule. There are many great comics who came from very functional families, but there is a little bit of a trend there,” he nods.
“They need that warmth and affection they get from the audience, I guess. You get a little high. There’s a buzz you also have a creative side of you that you satisfy with the writing and creating of material, and strangers are laughing at it. I still do it. I love when I come up with new material. It gets me going. It’s part of what I do.”
Higgins orchestrates 'Split Second'
People probably know John Michael Higgins best for his roles in films like “Pitch Perfect,” “The Break-Up” and “Best In Show,” but he’s better occupied now as host of the Game Show Network’s new quizzer, “Split Second,” premiering next Monday.
Based on a format from game-show legend Monty Hall, “Split Second” challenges three contestants to answer trivia questions in a split second, and the fastest finger on the buzzer works his way up to a possible $10,000.
This is Higgins’ second job hosting a game show, and he seems to the manner born. Higgins started as a child actor, but the luster on that world has dimmed for him. “As I have aged the good news is for me, I went out of an obsessional phase with acting in film and theater and all that stuff – because I’d done it so long – I started looking around and saying there are other subjects that interest me. I'm not an actor who gets lost in my job or anything like that. I leave work behind, go home, have a great family life, and almost never consume entertainment products, just never do it. I don’t watch film, don’t watch television, I try not to,” he says.
And it was a real shocker when he went from the stage, where he’d done all his work, to film. “The difference between acting on stage and acting on film became very different to me,” he says.
“Playing a lead role was a very different thing. ... (I)t was a totally different thing on screen. It was out of my hands. It was all up to the director. That was shocking. It was removing powers that I’d used all my life to tell stories, to control the audience behavior and attention, and all those things were removed. I wondered is this worth doing? Is this what I am? I’m not sure this is what I am. This is not like when I was on stage. This is not like that at all. It’s not acting, it’s behavior. The camera likes behavior. It doesn’t like acting so much.”
Garner stars in domestic thriller
How much do we really know about those closest to us? Drama has been asking that question since Lady Macbeth prowled the halls of Inverness. Now the corrosive query arrives with “The Last Thing He Told Me,” a series based on the best-selling thriller by Laura Dave and starring Jennifer Garner.
Garner plays the wife whose husband disappears on the Apple TV+ miniseries premiering Friday. She has no clue what happened to him and must ally herself with her reluctant stepdaughter to find him. Garner says she’s intrigued by characters who discover courage they didn’t know they had.
“I'm drawn to women who learn their own strength in spite of themselves, but I'm drawn to Laura Dave's writing is really what this is all about,” she says.
“There were a million different reasons to be drawn to this project and the character is definitely one, and who she learns that she CAN be is definitely part of that, as well. I mean, more interesting to me in this case was (my character) Hannah learning that she actually could be and was a mother. And that is what I got to do with (costar) Angourie Rice — uncover that strength that Hannah absolutely did not know that she had. And that's really where the fun was for me here.”
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