Babs (2017)

I’m afraid that the way this story is structured wasn’t my favourite, but it is still quite an engaging look at not just the life of Barbara Windsor but also at just how the film industry was being gradually replaced in the popular psyche by television after the war. There are three actors charged with depicting the various stages of her career, and my favourite was probably Honour Kneafsey as the younger, impressionable and determined young woman growing up in a fairly poverty-stricken East London that was largely in the pocket of the legendary Kray twins. Thereafter it’s an underwhelming and remarkably un-similar Jaime Winstone and then finally a competent Samantha Spiro who, to be fair, probably had the more difficult job of telling her own story and juggling the retrospective threads in a fashion that reminded me of “Scrooge” with his Christmas ghosts. Of course, to try to do justice to all the elements of this woman’s colourful life was never going to be on the cards, even if there were to have been a mini-series, and so some elements - like her “Carry On” fame suffered on the sidelines a little curiously, as do many of her celebrated affairs. The supporting cast do just about enough, except perhaps for Zoë Wanamaker’s portrayal of innovative producer Joan Littlewood which did, I felt, resonate well but otherwise it tries to squeeze too much about this enigmatic, flawed and hugely charismatic woman into what I thought was an increasingly sterile ninety minutes that simply didn’t illustrate just why us Brits took her to our hearts for almost all of her professional lifetime. The production looks good but it’s just all a bit too superficial.