Entertainment

Cult Movie: Barbara Windsor an east ender who embodied working class survival

Barbara Windsor in Sparrows Can’t Sing
Barbara Windsor in Sparrows Can’t Sing Barbara Windsor in Sparrows Can’t Sing

Barbara Windsor

DEPENDING on your vintage, Barbara Windsor carved her name into our collective pop cultural heart for one of two reasons.

To millions she was the giggling 'sex bomb' that graced a total of nine Carry On films through the 60s and 70s, batting off the endless advances of Sid James and pinging her bra off while exercising in one of the most iconic scenes in British comedy history.

It was a thankless task in many ways but she played it to perfection, creating a comic archetype the public fully fell for in the process.

To just about anybody else with access to a TV screen in the past two decades she was Peggy Mitchell, the tough-as-old-leather pub landlady of the Queen Vic in Eastenders, wringing an almost Shakespearean level of hysteria out of family drama and guldering “Get out of my pub!” with impressive regularity.

Most actors would kill for one such iconic role – that Barbara bagged two is a sign of just how good she really was.

There was, unsurprisingly, much more to her than that brace of effortlessly iconic performances, though. Should you wish to sample just one other side of Windsor’s career on camera, Sparrows Can’t Sing is as good a place to start as any. Adapted from Joan Littlewood’s groundbreaking stage show of 1960, the 1963 movie version, also directed by Littlewood, offers up a more nuanced take on the Cockney survivor persona that the actress knew inside out.

As the little Cockney Sparra of the title, Windsor is abandoned by her husband Charlie (James Booth) and shacks up instead with a bus driver called Bert (played by the great George Sewell). When Charlie returns he seeks her out and tries to reconcile their relationship.

As black and white British comedies of the early 60s go, it’s edgier and the use of areas like Limehouse, Stepney and the Isle of Dogs for filming add an air of authenticity rarely seen on cinema screens even if American audiences, presumably bemused by the dialogue, were given subtitles to follow the story.

Windsor was, unlike most cinematic and TV 'cockney characters', a genuine east ender having been born in Shoreditch and brought up in a proudly working class environment, and her ability to nail that indefatigable fight and spirit of the much put upon survivor allowed her to inhabit the character of Maggie with an intensity few others could have managed.

Transferring her Bafta-nominated stage performance to the screen, she holds your attention throughout and even gets to belt out the heartbreaking theme tune which only adds to her ownership of the whole film.

The script from Stephen Lewis, later to find small screen fame himself as Blakey from On The Buses, may lack the game-changing improvisational elements that made Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop so groundbreaking but it allows Windsor to explore that conflicted character made up of sexual attraction and oddly innocent charm that she would continue to tackle in later life.

A story of working class survival against all the odds it feels like the perfect way to remember the woman in all her positive power and glory.