Oh, sweet, sweet Jane!
Today’s curio pick is an obscure British live-action/animated hybrid which aired two series in 1982 and 1984, titled Jane and Jane in the Desert, respectively. Starring the winsome Glynis Barber as the titular Jane Gay, the series were set during World War II and based on the adult UK comic strip Jane, created by Norman Pett and first published in the Daily Mail in 1932. Jane followed the naive, titular ingenue’s misadventures across a series of farcical, ten-minute installments, during which one could always count on Jane to strip off her clothes early on and spend most of the running time in her lingerie, stockings, suspenders, and of course those omnipresent high heels—she even wore heels while tromping through the desert! As IMDb states, it’s basically the story of a pin-up babe doing “her best to foil enemy agents as well as lose clothing.” A winning combination!
Like the comic that inspired it, the show was delightfully risqué. I can’t stress enough the real appeal of the show, but it’s obviously that Jane continuously strips down to her unmentionables. At the end of the second series’ closing episode she even appeared topless, albeit briefly. Going out with a bang!
Glynis Barber is absolutely beautiful and certainly looks spectacularly sexy in her nylons and garter belts. She’s delightfully ditzy as Jane and really commits to the silliness of it all. See what I mean:
Jane Gay was a bit like the later US comic strip character Sally Forth, created by the great comic book artist Wally Wood. Both were war-era bimbos (Jane: WWII, Sally: Vietnam) blithely bumbling through various misadventures while showing copious amounts of thigh high stockings and skin. If their nations needed them to distract the enemies with their plentiful natural assets, well then Jane and Sally did so without reservation. There was something about these airheads that united each of their nations in solidarity during those difficult war years—a confident, hot blonde heroine with a penchant for cavorting around in her lingerie will always bring people together. That’s just one of life’s immutable facts.
Jane can be found streaming on YouTube.
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