Who needs Tarzan when you have a jungle star like Jane?
When wildlife filmmaker Baron hugo van Lawick wed pioneering chimpanzee conservationist Jane Goodall, the english rose he discovered in the African jungle, one headline told the tale: ‘Me hugo, You Jane.’
The couple fell in love in the early Sixties, at the chimp observation station she had set up in Gombe, Tanzania.
On location for national Geographic magazine, hugo shot more than 100 hours of footage, though his lens lingered longest on the girl who captivated him.
Rediscovered in 2014, a dozen years after hugo’s death, that film supplied almost all the material for Jane (national Geographic Channel), a superlative study of the woman herself and her work.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Dame Jane Goodall rewrote the way scientists perceive animals. She proved that wild chimpanzees make and use tools, and provided compelling evidence that their personalities are as diverse, and their emotions as deep, as our own.
She supplied the voiceover for the documentary herself, evoking her own innocence when she first arrived in Gombe in 1960 to study chimps, with no degree or formal training, and only her mother for a companion. ‘ Suddenly I found I
FIDDLE OF THE NIGHT: A battered violin that had survived Auschwitz concentration camp looked beyond saving on The Repair Shop (BBC2). But when it was restored, the tune it played made the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.
was living my childhood dream,’ she said, describing how nothing, not even the poisonous snakes, frightened her. ‘I had this probably crazy feeling: nothing’s going to hurt me, I’m meant to be here.’
Jane was the first naturalist to understand how chimps live in extended hierarchies, and to observe them raising young.
The animals treated her as part of the group, even playing and letting her groom them. She began to call herself ‘a strange white ape’, and gave her friends decidedly Beatrix Potter-type names — David Greybeard, Mr MacGregor, Flo and her babies, Fifi and Flint.
Fascinating as their behaviour was to see, Jane was the star. The change in her features as she gradually fell for the man filming her was magical: the pensive, introverted young woman began to glow and sparkle when she felt hugo watching her.
his photography was breathtaking, and the Sixties film stock yielded colours that digital video simply can’t reproduce. We saw Africa drenched in blues and greens, with yellow dust rising like burning smoke from the plains. The couple’s later film work was done on the Serengeti, in an era when the wilderness still teemed with life: elephants, wildebeest, cheetahs, giraffes, zebras and antelope numerous as ants.
Jane was one of the first to see that this wild world was threatened, and has fought hardest to save it. It’s frustrating that this magnificent programme was locked away on the national Geographic channel, which isn’t automatically available on the Freeview menu.
By comparison, the BBC’s big documentary was tawdry and sad, inspiring little hope for the future of multi-cultural Britain.
Being Blacker (BBC2) spent three years with fiftysomething Brixton character Steve ‘Blacker Dread’ Martin, who divided his time between his reggae record shop and a scattered family.
he was amiable, much-liked, frequently stoned and infuriatingly irresponsible — facing a prison sentence for money laundering, more or less (so he claimed) by accident.
his best friend, a reformed bank robber, waxed indignant about society’s failure to give him a well-paying job, now that he was going straight.
This would have been comical, if not for the undercurrent of violence and tragedy. Blacker’s son was murdered in a gang war. We ended at a vigil for another dead youth. It all felt very bleak.