First viewed : August 1982
This was a very innovative series that has somehow fallen into obscurity. There's an internet rumour that Glynis Barber bought the rights and had the tapes destroyed but that would have been pretty futile given the popularity of VCR machines by 1984. It's much more likely that there simply isn't enough of it to make a DVD release commercially viable.
It was an adaptation of a cartoon strip that appeared in The Daily Mirror between 1932 and 1959 whose titular heroine was brave and resourceful but plagued by a perpetual knack of losing her clothes in embarrassing situations. It was extremely popular among the troops in World War II and no doubt the TV series pleased the squaddies returning from the Falklands.
There were two stories shown in ten minute episodes over a week at 9pm on BBC2 then they were collected together in an omnibus edition the following Sunday night. It was the first TV series to make such use of blue screen technology with the actors ( including Frank Thornton, Robin Bailey, Max Wall and Suzanne Danielle ) performing on a bare stage with the cartoon strip background matched at a later stage. The scripts by Mervyn Haisman were light farce and packed with Carry On double entendres.
Jane was played by Glynis Barber , fresh from the final series of Blake's Seven and looking lovely in 1940s underwear. Although she enjoyed making it at the time, Glynis was a bit spooked by the flood of skin flick offers that came her way afterwards and insisted on a body double for her sex scene in The Wicked Lady , the film she made immediately afterwards. Tough luck on Oliver Tobias who didn't get to ruffle the Barber boobs.*
The first tale was repeated a couple of times in 1983-4 but the second ( inferior ) one, actually titled Jane in the Desert and shown in September 1984, has never been re-broadcast.
* There was the briefest of glimpses of them at the end of Jane in the Desert.
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