SUNDAY night’s BBC 1 screening of Babs, the bio-pic of Barbara Windsor, will offer up a rewind on career that was bottle fed by the austere Fifties, moved onto solids with the advent of the Swinging Sixties, and fed foie gras at the Ritz in the glittering Seventies.

The screening of Windsor’s life and times however isn’t simply an opportunity for the BBC props department to race around enthusiastically hiring classic cars. Or for costumes and make-up to source Mary Quant frocks and re-create behives.

This new film is a chance for the viewer to wallow in, appreciate and learn from real-life episodic misery.

Yes, Line of Duty was entertaining, but it was hokum. Babs is the story of a real woman who made lots of mistakes. It’s a chance to empathise, a chance to appreciate that the story of Barbara Ann-Deeks is a tale of a very determined career woman.

Babs is also an argument for feminism; it reminds how women with brio once had to downplay their intelligence (Windsor was an 11-plus wonderkid) in order to play the bra-bustin’ roles demanded of them by men.

And her life story of highs and lows is an allegory for those determined to pursue a life in the shark pool that is showbiz, the blonde discovered by an agent when she was twelve, going on to star in a West End theatre production by the age of 15.

And of course Windsor become a Carry On star, where she was paid relatively little, despite revealing so much.

Yet, while Windsor went along with the exploitation, her pragmatism and cleverness never got in the way of her neediness. She had father issues and perhaps as a result, had only a forward gear as far the men in her life were concerned. Her love life was all too often as precarious as the heels she teetered around in.

Her story reveals a litany of bad choices which many women of the period will relate to. (Coincidentally, Shirley Valentine is playing at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow this week.)

Windsor married a gangster. The four feet ten inch pocket dynamo had sex with two Krays and had five abortions. She loved danger.

She loved the excitement of the fling with Sid James, which the BBC film will reveal, and being entertained by the likes Elton John’s Paisley-born manager, John Reid.

Hopefully, the biopic reminds fans this lady had a talent that’s seen her perform Brecht and Shakespeare in her time.

But there’s another reason for backing Babs. We need to see bio-pics because they strip away the illusion, reveal how hard the journey to find fame can be, and prove that remaining successful to be even harder.

Yes, there have been turkeys in the Brit bio-pic canon, such as Ken Stott’s very unfunny Hancock. And capturing a largely uninteresting Hattie Jacques was too much of a challenge.

But films featuring Kenneth Williams, Morecambe and Wise, Hughie Green and Tommy Cooper have all been illuminating.

Let’s have more reality television. Real reality, like Babs.