Barbara Windsor

Radio Times review

Peter Capaldi plays it straight as a film buff and devotee of the now defunct Cricklewood Studios. Pure fiction, of course, but pinning spoofs of cheap British movies and even cheaper British movie stars onto a made-up studio lets Capaldi and co-writer Tony Roche have some arch fun.

Capaldi presents this "documentary" celebrating the output of his beloved Cricklewood Studios (now a DIY superstore). He recalls Florrie Fontaine (Lindsay Marshal), a terrifyingly cheerful Gracie Fields-type singer whose career died when she became friendly with Nazi high command: "I speak as I find, and they were grand company."

Watch out for Hustle's Kelly Adams as a Barbara Windsor-ish bimbette, star of the Thumbs Up series. But the show is stolen by Terry Gilliam, playing himself, a profligate director who brought the studio to its knees.

You have been watching... Barbara Windsor! Great fun to see "Babs" guest-starring in this 1968 parade for the Walmington-on-Sea platoon. She plays the exotically named Laura la Plaz, a stage crack-shot whose help is covertly needed in a spot of Home Guard target practice. But first she has to drag up in army fatigues, pebble glasses and moustache.

Look out, too, for a cameo from Dad's Army co-writer Jimmy Perry as an awful, "My wife is so fat" comedian. Six episodes in and the friction between Mainwaring and Wilson - one of the show's comedy keystones - is in full flow. The humour even extends to the unintentionally hilarious end credits.

The first episode of Little Crackers offered an object lesson in sharp storytelling. My First Brassiere was a pithy love letter to Barbara Windsor's bosom that offered the surreal sight of the older Babs being confronted with her own burgeoning teenage breasts - she played a shop assistant measuring up her younger self.

Weird, huh? Perky and engaging, with Samantha White striking as the young Babs and Sally Hawkins and Neil Jackson a joy as her parents, this short film played like a trailer for a feature-length story. Someone really should make it.

Next up was Jack Whitehall's bash at his Little Cracker, as Archie Lyndhurst starred as a 10-year-old version of the camp comedian, with Inbetweeners mum Belinda Stewart-Wilson in another 'MILF' role and Whitehall himself as a chap called Robin Hood.

Like Babs' offering, this was another enjoyable little comedy and although Whitehall's idea and execution were spot-on, it's obvious that it's Sky 1's Little Crackers concept that is to thank for the consistent high standard of these yuletide treats.

Sheridan Smith, Jane Horrocks, John Bishop and Johnny Vegas are among the stars appearing in a week-long series of short autobiographical comedies. The season opens with Barbara Windsor, who recalls an embarrassing teenage encounter with a wardrobe mistress and a subsequent trip to buy her first bra. Also tonight, Jack Whitehall's story tells of a flamboyant 10 year-old who liked to dress up.

How Barbara Windsor became a Little Cracker

The much-loved former Carry On and EastEnders star tells how she came to make a short film about the day she bought her first bra.

Barbara Windsor winds down her series celebrating female giants of American comedy with the inimitably outrageous Phyllis Diller, now 94 and still living in her glamorous Los Angeles home. Roseanne Barr, Ruby Wax and writer David Sedaris all contribute to a profile of the woman credited as America's first stand-up, whose exhaustive CV also includes film, stage and record performances.

At least Downton Abbey gives you laughs, which is more than you can say for The Comic Strip Presents - The Hunt for Tony Blair. Family loyalty would explain the commissioning of this "satire", since Comic Strip helped launch the channel, but I'm not sure anything can explain its transmission. The pastiche was undisciplined (what was Barbara Windsor doing in a 39 Steps parody, other than showing that Ronni Ancona can do the voice?), the script flabby and seemingly unedited ("Here, I was back in the city. Anonymous... apart from my sack-cloth toga") and the plot utterly devoid of satirical bite. It should have been cordoned off with crime-scene tape, not broadcast.

We see so little of The Comic Strip ensemble these days that it's easy to forget how long they've been in the trenches of British spoof, tossing out a grenade every now and then, as if cursed to spend the rest of their days striving to match the perfection of their hilarious first episode, "Five Go Mad in Dorset", which introduced high jinks to Channel 4's inaugural broadcast in 1982 and the term "lashings of ginger beer" to the cultural memory.

"The Hunt for Tony Blair" - a parodic splicing of noughties politics and 1950s British film noir (though what Herman's Hermits were doing on the soundtrack I don't know) - wasn't uproariously funny but it was handsomely made, with melodramatic shadows and enough money for fog, flat-footed policemen and steam trains. The plot, such as it was - a madcap chase across country, with the PM on the run for murder - threw up knockabout humour and vignettes from Blair's WMD fiasco, featuring a cast of the usual suspects: a languid Nigel Planer as Mandelson; Harry Enfield in East End shout mode as "Alastair"; the excellent Jennifer Saunders as Thatcher in her dotage (and full Barbara Cartland drag), watching footage of her Falklands triumphs from a chaise longue.

Director Peter Richardson, whose comic talents aren't seen enough on screen, played George Bush as a rasping B-movie Italian mobster ("I'm gonna get straight to the crotch of the matter here"). With the exception of impressionist Ronni Ancona (whose 10 seconds as Barbara Windsor seemed puzzlingly extraneous), no one went for a direct impersonation. Stephen Mangan didn't make a bad Blair, though he could have worked on the grin, and he couldn't quite make his mind up between feckless and reckless as he capered from one mishap to the next leaving a trail of bodies. Did Blair's moral insouciance ("Yet another unavoidable death, but, hey, shit happens") call for a look of idiocy or slipperiness?

The comedy had mischief at its heart in mooting that Blair had bumped off his predecessor, John Smith, and accidentally pushed Robin Cook off a Scottish mountain, while Robbie Coltrane's Inspector Hutton (aha!) tacitly invoked the spectre of Dr David Kelly (we never found out who Blair was charged with murdering). But it was hard to squeeze fresh satire from the overfamiliar stodge of the politics ("Tell Gordon to run the country and trust the bankers"). Mangan was at his funniest hiding among sheep in the back of a truck or kicking Ross Noble (playing an old socialist) off a speeding train, though there was amusement elsewhere. I had to laugh at variety theatre act Professor Predictor, shoehorned into the story to enable Rik Mayall in a bald wig and boffin glasses to answer questions from the audience. Would the Beatles still be at No 1 in 50 years' time?

"No. The Beatles will no longer exist. But Paul McCartney will marry a woman with one leg."

How the audience roared. "Pull the other one," someone shouted. Arf, arf.

Barbara Windsor: I hated my breasts

Telly legend Barbara Windsor has told how she used to hate her famous boobs.