Following last month’s release of Promises, Promises and The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, Odeon have more Jayne Mansfield in the shape of this 50 minute documentary that tells the rather unlikely story of the Blonde Goddess’ 1967 trip to the Yorkshire town of Batley for a week-long engagement at the Batley Variety Club. Which, to give it context, is rather like Pamela Anderson doing a run at your local discotheque. Still, at £20,000 an appearance – not bad now, and a hell of a lot more in 1967 – it was probably financially worthwhile. A couple of months after her appearance, Mansfield was killed in a car crash.

To be honest, this feels more like a DVD extra that has somehow slipped loose than a proper documentary. While there are interviews with various people who worked with, met or simply watched Jayne on her visit – all strung together by ‘celebrity interviewer’ Neil Sean (not sure if Sean is claiming to be a celeb himself or simply that he interviews celeb – there is evidence of neither here). It’s efficiently put together, but somewhat repetitive – and that’s the problem. While her visit to Batley is undoubtedly a story worth telling, it’s simply not eventful or interesting enough to justify a 50-minute documentary, especially as there are very few photographs or film clips recording the visit. So we here stories of her trip to Harry Ramsdens for fish ‘n’ chips, but see no photos of her munching away, despite being told there was a press contingent in tow; neither are there any shots of her on stage at the club. And frustratingly, the film footage of her switching on the Blackpool Illuminations is chopped into tiny snippets – I’ve seen this footage before, and it’s hardly very long, but has some amusing bits that are not shown here. It’s hard to figure why – I can’t imagine that the rights for one minute of footage would be so costly that only a few seconds could be used. Given that there is a lengthy but ultimately irrelevant clip from the fantastic A Guide for the Married Man, this omission seems odd.

The doco also has bare-breasted footage from Promises, Promises, clips from Sheriff of Fractured Jaw and the trailer for The Girl Can’t Help It to pad things out, but for the most part concentrates on interviews, which at least provide a fairly exhaustive history of her one week trip.

As a stand-alone piece, this is hard to recommend – though cheap enough to buy as a supplement to the Odeon feature releases. Ideally, I’d hope that the label will do a box set of their Mansfield classics with this included as an extra disc, where it would be more at home.

DAVID FLINT

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