Was Carrie Fisher really ‘a genius’?

‘People throw the word “genius” around a lot,’ said a talking head on BBC2 this week, ‘but she was a genius, truly.’ If it wasn’t for the heading on this column, I suspect it might have taken you a while to guess the unquestionable genius being referred to here. But then again, for Carrie Fisher: A Life in Ten Pictures, considered analysis and fear of hyperbole would only have got in the way.

Not that this prevented the programme from being inadvertently revealing. Granted, if you wanted to know the full story of Fisher’s life – including the fact that she married Paul Simon – you’d have been better off with Wikipedia. If, however, you wanted to learn how today’s TV biographies work – especially those of ‘iconic’ women – you couldn’t have had a handier primer.

There was, for example, the opening promise that what we were about to see would show us a very different Fisher from the received version. This was then followed by a scrupulous recitation of the received version: the child of ‘Hollywood royalty’, who conquered the world as Princess Leia – particularly in That Bikini – battled her demons and became a champion of those suffering from mental illness. Some of this might even have been accurate as far as it went; the trouble being that it was never allowed to go any further.

That’s because (another familiar characteristic, this) the documentary always preferred to make ringing declarations that it wished were true than to explore the story in any potentially awkward depth. Nor did it matter if these ringing declarations contradicted one other, just as long as their rhetoric sounded convincing enough when each of them was uttered.

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Gareth Roberts

Have I Got News for You is a sad, unfunny spectacle

The ten pictures of the title also provided a chance for the contributors to perform the same trick as graphologists and body-language experts in the tabloids: to find, with suspicious precision, evidence of what had much later turned out to be the case.