I so wanted to love Babs (7 May, 8pm, BBC1), the BBC’s biopic of Barbara Windsor, the British national treasure best known for her rocket-propelled bikini in Carry On Camping and steady stream of bitch slaps as Peggy, the brassy matriarch in EastEnders. In the end, though, I was just baffled.
What, I wondered, had happened to her mother, who is forever cheering on Barbara’s stage ambitions but then disappears just as her daughter gets famous, never to be mentioned again? What’s going on with Babs’s hairdo, which makes her look like a cross between Piella Bakewell in Wallace and Gromit and a giant loofah, and could happily house a family of badgers?
And why is the fiftysomething Windsor, played by Samantha Spiro, mooning about in an empty theatre gawping at her past selves, including the teenage Barbara taking her first steps in musicals, and the twentysomething Babs (Jaime Winstone) working her assets while hoofing away to On the Sunny Side of the Street? As plot devices go, a protagonist reflecting on their younger self seems reasonable until, after a gag about her action-packed love life, the real-life Windsor, now 79, shows up at the side of the stage to give everyone a bollocking. With three Barbara Windsors in the same room, Babs suddenly seems less like a serious biopic than the round in Never Mind the Buzzcocks in which guests pick the star from a lineup of impersonators.
Much like Cilla Black and Shirley Bassey, whose lives have undergone similar TV treatments, Windsor’s story has the ingredients of a solid drama: there’s her marriage to jailbird philanderer Ronnie Knight, the forays into serious acting, the affairs, the divorces and the abortions. But rather than tell Windsor’s tale chronologically, writer Tony Jordan, known for his work on EastEnders, gets her to move among the ghosts of her showbiz past like a winsome Scrooge alongside her late father, played by Nick Moran.
Thus we speed from her childhood as a precocious little tyke caught in the middle of her parents’ divorce through to the late 80s and early 90s career trough that preceded her arrival in Albert Square. Over and again, the young Babs is told “You’ve got something”, though no one ever tells her what that is, not even her agent whose hair seems to have been drawn on with a marker pen. And so she stumbles from one job, and one dodgy bloke, to the next, charming all around her and longing for the love and approval that she never got from her dad. Throughout all this, assorted narrative strands are picked up and then abandoned, and famous people – actors, directors, gangsters – are wheeled on and off for no reason other than to say: “Look! Warren Beatty!” and: “Oooh, it’s the Krays!”
To give Babs its due, it does get some good performances out of its stars. Winstone is completely adorable, even when cheating on her husband with a smarmy New York jazzer; while Spiro’s impression of Windsor, complete with cartoon chuckle, is absolutely on the nose. What a shame, then, that the plot makes fractionally less sense than the episode of EastEnders where Peggy shoved Dirty Den’s second wife into his open grave so she could apologise to his corpse for murdering him. OK, so it was the second time Den had died, but at least we weren’t seeing dear old Babs in triplicate.
