BABS: THE GIRL BEHIND THE GIGGLE (AND THE WIGGLE)!
From jazz singer to Broadway starlet, a new drama reveals the Barbara Windsor you never knew. Here the cast – and Babs herself – tell of her very colourful life.
When actress Jaime Winstone was a teenager she attended a theatre performance at which she found herself sitting behind Dame Barbara Windsor. ‘When she heard me laugh, she turned around and said, “You should play me”,’ Jaime recalls now.
Fast forward 15 years or so and Dame Barbara’s suggestion has come good: next month Jaime, now 31, will play the young Barbara in a new BBC1 drama, called Babs, deploying the chuckle for which the former Carry On and latterly EastEnders star is famous. Written by Tony Jordan, a former EastEnders scriptwriter who created last year’s Dickensian and is a close friend of the star, the one-off 90-minute show takes us on a journey through the people and events that have shaped the actress and singer’s long career. And while the throaty laugh is much in evidence, it is, Tony believes, a chance for the viewer to ‘get behind the giggle and the wiggle’ of this much-loved performer. ‘Everybody knows the public persona of Barbara Windsor, so I was keen to show the Barbara that perhaps people don’t know because I think that’s more interesting,’ he says.
He’s certainly done that: in turn joyful, cheeky and poignant, it’s a fittingly rounded tribute for a woman who started performing aged 13 and this year celebrates her 80th birthday. It’s a more unconventional take on the traditional biopic though, owing more than a passing nod to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Set in 1993, it starts with the then fifty-something Babs – Samantha Spiro plays her in her middle years – in a reflective mood and looking back on her life with her current husband Scott Mitchell, who she’d just met. ‘The drama takes place when she was at a bit of low ebb professionally,’ explains Samantha. ‘She’s doing an end-ofthe-pier show, An Evening With Barbara Windsor. She’s done the matinée and she’s having a bit of a kip when Scott comes into the dressing room and she starts to reminisce.
‘So it’s really her going on a journey back through her life. People from her past come and see her and take her on that journey. It’s very much like A Christmas Carol because my Barbara is watching her younger self making decisions at various crossroads in her life and she obviously knows what the outcome is at each of those moments.’
The action takes place both on the stage of the theatre where various people come to visit her, and in a series of flashbacks. The inspiration, says Tony, owes something to the one-man play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, in which Peter O’Toole portrayed real-life journalist Bernard looking back on key moments in his life. ‘I sat Barbara and Scott in front of this old DVD of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, and essentially it’s this one guy in a pub for the whole play,’ Jordan explains. ‘His life just kind of swirled around him and he worked out who he was. I said, “If we can do something like this, I think I can write it.” Luckily Barbara got it.’
The script does not shy away from portraying some of the trickier episodes in Barbara’s colourful life – as well as reminding the viewer of the many layers behind the blonde Carry On bombshell façade. Born plain Barbara Deeks in Shoreditch in 1937, Barbara made her stage debut aged just 13 and by the age of 17 had her first film role in The Belles Of St Trinian’s. By 1964 when she joined the Carry On franchise, the films with which she would forever be associated, she’d performed cabaret sessions singing blues songs at legendary jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, been taken under the wing of theatrical impresario Joan Littlewood – played by Zoë Wanamaker – and under her guidance went on to become the toast of Broadway. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance there in the musical Oh What A Lovely War!, while in Britain she was nominated for a BAFTA for her role in Littlewood’s 1963 film Sparrows Can’t Sing and starred in a number of West End shows including Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be and The Threepenny Opera with Vanessa Redgrave.
Yet Dame Barbara would be the first to admit she’s known as much for her colourful personal life as she is for her professional CV. By her late twenties she’d become involved with Ronnie Knight, a small-time crook who would go on to become her first husband and who would later be jailed for his involvement in the 1983 £6 million armed robbery at a Security Express depot in Shoreditch. Before their marriage, Barbara had a one-night stand with none other than Reggie Kray, although the biopic only shows her meeting the infamous gangster twins. She’d had five abortions before her marriage to Knight was over.
By the mid-80s Knight was on the run and had fled to the Costa del Sol. The couple divorced and Barbara married restaurateur Stephen Hollings before, in the mid-90s – the point at which we meet her in the opening scenes of Babs, she met Scott.
The drama certainly touches on some of these more controversial elements of Barbara’s past – showing the aftermath of her first abortion and her flirtation with the Krays, much of which was covered in her warts-and-all autobiographies back in 1990 and 2000.
But it does not dwell on them. ‘The books are out there and everybody knows a lot of that stuff about Ronnie Knight and the Krays anyway,’ says Jordan. ‘So I really didn’t want to do this thing and make it about that as you’re not going to learn anything.‘
‘I’m ashamed of some of my mistakes, but I’m a nice lady’ BARBARA WINDSOR
Jaime Winstone – who plays Barbara between the ages of 20 and 30 – found it illuminating to discover the breadth of Dame Barbara’s professional CV. ‘My generation doesn’t know she was a singer at Ronnie Scott’s, that she went to Broadway and was a massive theatre star so that was a huge thing for me,’ she says. As a result, she felt it was important to avoid resorting to stereotypes. ‘It would be easy to camp it up but I tried to keep it toned down to keep it as true to the real Barbara as possible.’
Perhaps with Barbara’s words to her as a teenager ringing in her ears, Jaime confides that from the moment she heard about plans for the drama she was so determined to get the job that she went all out for the audition, dying her naturally brunette locks blonde and turning up in a full Barbara-circa1958 outfit. ‘I know with casting directors you’ve got to spell it out,’ she smiles. ‘So I just kind of went in as Barbara – I did the big hair, I did boobs, pedal-pushers and just told them that this is my job really. I was a bit forward.’
It was worth it: stepping into Dame Barbara’s ‘beautiful, tiny, size two-and-a-half iconic shoes’ has been joyful, especially getting to spend time with a woman she describes as an icon. ‘From the moment I hung out with Barbara I was thinking “You know what, we’re not that far apart in terms of where we come from and on a moral ground”,’ she reflects. ‘She’s very humble. She’ll walk into a room and connect with everybody and make sure you feel comfortable; it’s just this warmth she generates. She’s probably been a bit naughty in her time, but she always managed to keep it classy, which I love about her.’
And while Barbara did not interfere in filming, Jaime says simply observing her around the set was enough to underpin her performance. ‘When we were doing the singing stuff I was just watching her, observing all these hand gestures and the body language. It was an education.’ To Jaime’s relief, while her ‘era’ does cover the Carry On years, when Barbara had a well-publicised affair with Sid James – who it’s said was obsessed with her – there was no reprise of the iconic Carry On Camping scene with its famous flying bra. ‘We didn’t do that, thank God,’ she laughs. ‘I was skipping through the script thinking, “Right, when are my boobs coming out?” But we didn’t.’
For Samantha Spiro meanwhile – also a natural brunette – the biopic took her back to familiar territory: she first played Barbara on the London stage in the late 90s in the play Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle And Dick and once again in the 2000 TV film Cor, Blimey! And while she jokes that you can ‘stick a blonde wig on anyone’ and they look like Dame Barbara, she admits there’s a natural resemblance too. ‘My mum was very much like Barbara in the 60s, although she was dark too. She had a similar figure. Then when I was at drama school I was nicknamed Babs because people thought I looked like her, so it seemed playing her on the stage was my destiny. But I didn’t know I’d be coming back again to play her. Last time I was playing her during the Carry On period so it felt much more giggles and boobs, but this is a more emotional journey.’