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.”