The drama, starring Jaime Winstone, 31, and Samantha Spiro as the veteran screen star in her twenties and fifties respectively, chronicles Windsor’s difficult relationship with her father, played by Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrell’s Nick Moran, and the explosive romance with her ex-husband Ronnie Knight, as well as her breakout role in the Carry On series.
Babs has won rave reviews from critics and, more importantly the actress herself, who assured she’s “thrilled” with the standalone masterpiece.
Though, her approval did little to squash Jordan’s biggest fears, as he told press including Express.co.uk: “She loved it, but she’s so lovely that I don’t know if that was true. She’d give the slightest flicker, and I thought, ‘She f**king hates it’. But we talked about it in depth and what I wanted to do was to give people the real Barbara and not the Barbara who’s been on screen.”
Naturally, the real-life EastEnders icon will be making a cameo in the 90-minute film of her life, which concludes just moments before she’d eventually go on to revive her career by pulling pints in the Queen Vic as Peggy Mitchell.
“I just couldn’t resist putting her in, how could you?” he chuckled. “I knew she’d be up for it and there were a couple of moments in the script where, as I wrote the stage direction, I heard her voice saying, ‘That’s not funny!’ I thought that’s brilliant so I wrote it in.”
One of the aforementioned scenes comes as Winstone’s Barbara sits with her first husband Ronnie in an East London cafe, where she’s poised with a monumental decision.
“There was a moment when I saw a fork in the road with Ronnie, when she thought, ‘Should I invest in this guy or not?’ And I knew that changed her life forever, almost,” explained Jordan. “I wanted Barbara to be there to acknowledge that moment.”
Babs has been a long time coming for Jordan, though viewers should be warned that this is no ordinary biopic, which the former EastEnders screenwriter admitted was “the last thing I wanted to do”, after having initial reservations about the project.
“You don’t want to show the Barbara that everyone else knows,” he stressed. “In chronological order, ‘Oh she did this, then this’, I just didn’t want to do that.
“What changed my mind was a Peter O’Toole performance. Essentially, this one guy, one moment in his life and everything swirls around him, and I thought, ‘If we can do something like this, it’s something I can get on board with. I think I can write that’.
“Barbara loved it and she just thought, ’Let’s do it’.”
Babs airs tonight at 8pm on BBC One.
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