Given the sad timing of their deaths in December, a documentary exploring the relationship between Carrie Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds was inevitable, but Bright Lights (Sky Atlantic) has long been in the works. Filming began back in April 2014, and it is transparently a work of great patience. The only thing rushed about it is the air date, which has been moved forward a few months.
Unflinchingly honest (although I flinched a few times) and unbearably poignant, Bright Lights doesn’t just trump future documentaries about Fisher and Reynolds; it precludes the need for them. It is as comprehensive a portrait of mother and daughter as you are ever likely to see.
Apparently the film was Fisher’s idea – she wanted to document her mother’s relentless determination to perform. At the start, Reynolds, in her 80s and in frail health, is about to do a show at a casino complex. “She loves doing it when she’s doing it,” says Fisher. “But afterwards she’s laying on the floor. But in a good, dignified, movie-star way.”
Fisher and Reynolds lived next door to each other, in what Fisher called “the compound”. Debbie’s house was tidy and old-fashioned; Carrie’s was exuberantly weird, full of creepy portraits and scavenged oddities. She had a player piano in her bathroom and bloody palm prints on her shower curtain. As parent and child, they had their share of mutually inflicted trauma, but as neighbours they had reached a peaceful accommodation. They were, essentially, best friends. “To a great degree,” says Fisher, “sometimes more than I would ever want to, I know what my mother feels and wants.” They made a formidable double act, with Fisher’s scissoring wit fended off by Reynolds’ straight-man impression of indulgent bewilderment. Their relationship was deeply affectionate, but Fisher’s blunt honesty was always to the fore. “Everything in me demands that my mother be as she always was,” she says early on. “Even if that way is irritating. She just can’t change – that’s the rule.”
As Hollywood royalty, their lives were comprehensively filmed and photographed, enabling the documentary to zip back and forth across decades: mother and daughter singing together on stage when Carrie was still a teenager, and again just last year. It could revisit Debbie’s divorce from Eddie Fisher, or glimpse at the earliest incarnation of Princess Leia, then skip forward to Fisher signing posters at a sci-fi convention (“lap dances”, she called them). Some of the human frailty on display is raw – in particular home video of a younger Fisher exhibiting manic behaviour on the Great Wall of China, or visiting her dying father back in 1995 – but it is never gratuitous.
It is probable that Brights Lights was always intended as a sort of valediction – it revolves around Reynolds’ approaching retirement, and the final auction of her impressive collection of Hollywood memorabilia. And if that is all it ends up being – a testament to showbiz grit – it will have succeeded. But it is really about two people looking after one another. “If my mother’s unhappy, it lives on my grid,” says Fisher. You don’t have to care about Hollywood, or Star Wars, or be a particular fan of Fisher or Reynolds, for Bright Lights to break your heart.
I would not be surprised if the initial proposal for Our Dancing Town (BBC2) was a single sheet of A4 with the words: “Like Gareth Malone’s Choir, but with dancing.” It’s none the worse for the striking resemblance, except in the sense that you can see everything coming a mile down the road.
Choreographer Steve Elias heads to Yorkshire to get the locals hoofing – he wants to put on a huge, flashmob-style parade through the streets of Barnsley. There is some predictable – if perfectly understandable – scepticism from former coal miners about the idea of restoring the town’s dented civic pride through the medium of dance. But there are also some closet hoofers out there. Joan, 72, missed out on her chance to be a Bluebell Girl, but she can still tap. Twenty-year-old Mick used to win dancing competitions, but now he works in his parents’ chippy.
Elias, who is built like a prop and comes from south Wales, has an exuberance that seems capable of awakening Billy-Elliot-style stirrings in almost anyone (apart from ex-miners – they’ll march, but not dance, and they don’t need no trial run). The people of Barnsley are, if anything, too cooperative for this sort of show – a little more resistance might have made it more dramatic – but the final dance sequence, featuring cops, kids, old people, baton twirlers, northern soul devotees, glass blowers and a brass band, still brings a lump to the throat. It’s a formula because it works.
