More than Mere Ornament: Reclaiming 'Jane' (4 of 4) by Adam Twycross

Nudity was not the only development for Jane during the period of the Bartholomew revolution; as Rothermere’s influence receded and the Mirror increasingly aimed itself at working girls, the previous emphasis on Jane’s elevated social position was gradually replaced by a more down-to-earth characterisation that saw her take on a raft of paid employment. Between February and May 1936  alone, Jane tried her hand as a chorus girl, nurse, publican, rent collector, artists’ model, laundress, driving instructor and teacher.

A clear break with the past occurred on April 1st 1938, when a number of contemporaneous developments occurred for Jane. Behind the scenes, Don Freeman had been drafted in to help Norman Pett devise Jane’s scripts, and a young model named Chrystabel Leighton-Porter had become one of the series’ regular models (Fletcher 2011, p.84). Together the new creative team ushered in a raft of changes.

Pett 1938

Visually, Jane was remodelled, her bobbed hair becoming longer and fuller, and her silhouette becoming less angular and austere than had previously been the case. The series’ title was shortened to simply Jane…, the ellipsis introduced to indicate the intentional omission of the Bright Young Things reference that no longer reflected the character or social positioning of the strip’s star now that Rothermere’s influence was in the past. The format of the series also dramatically changed; gone was the diary format and the self-contained daily ‘gag’, replaced instead with an ongoing continuity format that saw the storyline unfold day after day. Each episode was also now clearly broken into panels, and the first person narration that had been one of the hallmarks of the series was replaced with direct speech, although it took a further two weeks for Pett to settle into a full use of speech balloons. Finally, within the fictional world of the strip, Jane herself underwent a transformation; ignoring previous continuity, expository dialogue in the opening episodes established that Jane lived in a northern town, where a private fortune had inured her to a life without the need for paid employment. A serious stock market crash, however, necessitated a fresh start, and Jane travelled south the start a new life in London. Over the following weeks, a new supporting cast was established, and Jane was remodelled as a continuity romance series, enlivened with plenty of comedy and regular nude and semi-nude appearances by its female cast.

Elsewhere, the storm clouds of war were brewing; in the world of Jane, all the elements that would make the series one of the great icons of the war were already in place.

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