SHE may not have had a six million dollar price tag, but there was something exceptional about Jaime Sommers - aka The Bionic Woman.

Maybe it was the music, which always accompanied her slow-motion escapades.

Whatever it was, it made her an enormous hit with TV audiences in the 70s, running for three seasons on ITV after transferring from first ABC and then NBC in America. In all it aired 58 hour-long episodes.

Viewers got their first introduction to Jaime, played by Lindsay Wagner, in a two-part episode of The Six Million Dollar Man in 1975 entitled - appropriately enough - The Bionic Woman.

In it, Steve Austin (Lee Majors) rekindled an old relationship with Jaime, one of America's top tennis players. Their romance progressed so rapidly that Austin proposed, but during an outing he and Jaime went skydiving and her parachute malfunctioned.

She plummeted through a clump of trees and hit the ground, suffering injuries to her legs, arm and head and it was then that Austin begged his boss Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson) to "rebuild her".

In fact, Jaime's body was reconstructed with parts similar to Austin's, but smaller. The actual cost of her reconstruction was never revealed, but it was apparently less than her fiance's.

The results were no less spectacular, though: two bionic legs allowing her to run faster than a speeding car, a replacement right arm and a bionic device in her ear giving her the ability to hear a whisper from a mile away.

Unfortunately, suffering from amnesia, she could not remember her love for Austin, although she did land a new job as an agent for the fictitious US government agency the OSI.

This saw her kidnapped on a regular basis and facing a host of enemies, most notably the Fembots, a line of powerful androids whom she fought twice.

The spin-off role earned Lindsay Wagner an Emmy award in 1976, but the original TV series came to an end just two years later.

Still popular with fans, Jaime was resurrected three times in made-for-TV movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had her romance with Steve Austin rekindled.

However, in the final reunion film Bionic Ever After in 1994, a computer virus corrupted Jaime's bionic systems and Austin was informed "she may never be bionic again." She underwent a major upgrade, though, and eventually the bionic pair said "I do".

In August 2002, it was announced that the show was to be remade, but after an initial flurry of excitement it never made it out of pre-production at that time.

However, in March this year a new series of The Bionic Woman hit the screens.

Former EastEnder Michelle Ryan, 23, who played Zoe Slater, took the role of Jaime Sommers in the updated series, which went out on ITV2.

Lindsay Wagner failed to top the success of The Bionic Woman with subsequent roles, but she did find time to marry four times between 1971 and 1990 - including second husband, actor Michael Brandon - and she has two grown-up sons.