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For years I turned down every biopic I was offered the chance to write because I hated the idea of telling a story the audience already knew. Most biographical dramas tell the tale of someone famous, and the odds are that we already know an awful lot about them.

The big or small screen biopics I’ve most enjoyed – like The Elephant Man with John Hurt playing John Merrick, or the BBC dramas Eric And Ernie from 2011 and Burton And Taylor from 2013 starring Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter – have all given me a real insight into the celebrities concerned. Similarly, ITV’s Mrs Biggs with Sheridan Smith tackled a story we all knew very well – that of train robber Ronnie Biggs – from the angle of his wife, which made it fresh.

In contrast, the BBC’s 2006 Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa! might have starred the brilliant Michael Sheen but didn’t really tell me anything new. The same went for ITV’s Cilla from 2014, also starring Sheridan Smith. I already knew that husband Bobby was her ‘rock’ – I wanted to learn something I didn’t know!

So when I took on the job of writing the recent 90-minute BBC biopic about Barbara Windsor, Babs – starring Jaime Winstone and Samantha Spiro as the actress at different times in her life – I wanted to surprise people. I could have simply told an episodic story of her life, homing in on the famous bra scene from Carry On Camping, her affair with Sid James and her time on EastEnders, but that would have been lazy, because those parts of her life have already been lived out in the press. So I dug down, covering topics such as her difficult relationship with her father, and didn’t cover EastEnders at all.

Some people got what I was doing, and were happy that they knew a whole lot more about Barbara after watching Babs than they did before. The people who didn’t, asked, ‘Where was the bit where the bra falls off? What about Sid?’ But that was my point: there’s so much more to Barbara than the ‘chirpy Cockney’ of legend. It’s also been suggested that I went softly-softly on some parts in Barbara’s life because we’re friends, but that’s nonsense. I told her I was going to tell the truth, and the whole truth. There’s no point in writing a biopic without that integrity to the story.

In the end, a biopic’s job is to get to the essence of the person you’re telling the story about, and make a drama that’s not quite what people expect – and I think I achieved that with Babs. As a writer, you just have to accept that a biopic which doesn’t reinforce the stereotypical view of the subject is always going to divide opinion.

Babs is out now on DVD.