Carrie Fisher: A Life in Ten Pictures, review: the light and dark side of a Hollywood great

It’s churlish to quibble, I know, but A Life in Ten Pictures is not a life in 10 pictures. This hour spent in the company of the late Carrie Fisher was first rate, because in everything she said and did Carrie Fisher was always “full of piss and vinegar” (as one friend so delightfully put it). But it was the moving pictures and the audio that provided the vinegar.

Previous episodes of A Life in Ten Pictures (subjects include Freddie Mercury, Tupac Shakur and Muhammad Ali) have shown that poring over 10 iconic shots or private snaps can indeed unlock their story.

In the case of Carrie Fisher you just have to watch her, listen to people talk about her or best, read her novel Postcards from the Edge. Most viewers will, quite rightly, discount all that as Prince Persnickety splitting hairs, and if you took this first episode of a new series of A Life in Ten Pictures simply as a biopic you would have come away as happy as a clam.

To those who only know Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in Star Wars, it will have been a quiet revelation. To those who know her as one of the first celebrities to confront publicly both her bi-polar disorder and struggles with addiction, it will have been a salve.

Fisher, photo number one showed, was born into Hollywood royalty, the daughter of Singin’ in the Rain’s Debbie Reynolds and the singer Eddie Fisher. Naturally, this messed her up – her father ran off with Elizabeth Taylor and her mother took her and her little brother Todd to Las Vegas to play Von Trapps as part of the Debbie stage show. This further messed her up.

Then there was the move to New York, the immersion in the Saturday Night Live comedy/drug culture, youthful dabbling in the club/drug scene and then sudden fame when Star Wars blew up. None of these, we now know, are ideal foundations for emotional stability or good mental health. All of them together, we now know, created Carrie Fisher, a lovely woman with a withering sense of humour founded on a deep-seated belief that the world was insane.

Charting her path from the highs to the lows and back to reprising Princess Leia in 2015 in The Force Awakens, the year before she died, aged 60, makes for a pleasing redemption arc. It is also one that Fisher would have scoffed at as pietistic phooey. The programme made this amply clear. The only shame is that she isn’t here to offer up her own photo from her collection. I bet it would have been previously unseen, hugely unflattering and screamingly funny.

All episodes of A Life in Ten Pictures are available now on BBC iPlayer

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 3 months with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.