An airport complaints manager hit with an unflattering edit when she appeared on a fly-on-the-wall TV show has been hailed an "icon" by TikTok users 20 years on.
Jane Lee was portrayed as "such a cow" when she appeared on reality ITV show Airline in 1998, when she was known as Jane Boulton. She had been working on the Easyjet desk at Luton Airport, dealing with customer complaints, and quickly became known for her no-nonsense attitude.
But the South London mum said the show failed to portray her good actions, such as the time she allowed an elderly woman who had missed her flight to stay the night at her home.
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She was amazed when, around four months ago, one of her teenage children told her mum that footage of her was "all over TikTok".
Jane, who now lives in South London and runs her own cake-making business, told the Metro she was "shocked" to see that she'd gone viral for a new generation of fans. Videos of Jane in her previous career tend to revolve around her dealing with stressed-out customers in a stern manner, leaving users in stitches.
One such video is entitled "Jane Boulton from Airline is an absolute icon. Putting people in their place since 2004". The clip, which has clocked up more than 101.4K likes and counting, shows Jane dealing with a panicked woman who'd missed her flight and begins with the voiceover deadpanning: "Susie has tried to find a more sympathetic ear, instead she'd found Jane Boulton".
Later in the clip, Jane can be seen losing her patience with frantic Susie, telling her: "With all due respect 138 other passengers managed to get on the flight that have probably never been here before."
Former TV star Jane, who doesn't know how to use TikTok herself, says that people now recognise her when out and about, and will even shout out her name when they see her. The mum-of-three will try and respond to many of the "sweet comments" she receives, and said: "90% of them are lovely".
Although she's happy to be considered an "icon", she was not pleased about the way she was portrayed on Airline at the time, and doesn't feel the show reflects the person she really is.
She said: "They made me look like such a cow. The programme was edited to show the passengers missing flights and not having the best time because obviously, everything going smoothly was never good TV.
"A lot of those passengers I was with for hours, and they will cut it down to 30 seconds. They had usually spoken to around three people before me too, who'd say the exact things. People didn't get that the departed planes weren't attached to a string, and I couldn't just pull them back."
"Viewers often didn't get to see how much I helped people. There was one time an elderly lady missed her flight. I let her stay in the spare bedroom of my flat, and then drove her back to the airport the next day.
"I'm very empathetic and sympathetic – that was rarely shown. It feels like an unfair portrayal of who I really am. However, it was getting 10 million viewers on a Friday night, so clearly the producers knew what they were doing."
Jane loved her airport job, which she left in 2018, and says her colleagues were like "family". If the show was ever brought back, Jane would "strongly consider" being a part of it once more, but reckons she'd approach things a little differently this time around.
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