‘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.

I’d hoped to maintain a mild but stout southern sneer – but I kept caving

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.

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. Especially shameless was a film historian who claimed that a somewhat bland photo of Fisher, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford on a Star Wars publicity tour in 1977 was unignorable proof that Fisher a) was trying to project a confidence that she didn’t feel; and b) was obviously having an affair with Ford at the time.

Given Fisher’s life, this was never going to be a boring programme. It was, though, a frustrating one, mainly because of the constant sense that Fisher was a far more interesting, if often infuriating woman than it was letting on and that, instead, she ended up being flattened into a more palatable archetype.

In John Lanchester’s novel The Debt to Pleasure, the snooty narrator points out that ‘it can seem as if the whole of Liverpool is constantly engaged in the description, celebration and praise of Scouseness’. This remark sprang to mind watching the first episode of Rick, Sue and a Trip or Two: the latest in that ever-growing genre of shows that feature two oldies travelling around in a distinctive car while laughing a lot.

Liverpudlians Ricky Tomlinson and Sue Johnston – who played husband and wife in Brookside and The Royle Family – kicked off the series by visiting their native city. The satnav on their red Beetle set firmly for Memory Lane, they started in Brookside Close itself, now purely residential, before heading for the Cavern Club where Sue had regularly hung out with Paul McCartney. (In 1962, he gave her an advance reel-to-reel copy of ‘Love Me Do’, which she later taped over.) From there it was off to a pub where the young Ricky used to play his banjo – and where an exhilarating folk trio were
in full flow – and, naturally, on to Anfield. By now in full Darby and Joan mode, the pair sat together in an empty stand, Ricky reminiscing about being out on the Kop 70 years before, and Sue duly praising the crowd’s ‘wit’.

As a classic London-based Merseysider myself – i.e. one who regards all that glorifying of Scouseness with a mixture of semi-embarrassment and rather embarrassed pride – I had hoped to watch the programme wearing a mild but stoutly maintained southern sneer. But I’m afraid I kept caving, most of all in the final scene. This was set, unexpectedly, in a bingo hall where the 900 punters largely consisted of drunk young women – known in the trade as Scouse prinnies (as in ‘princesses’) – who danced, whooped and generally exuded the kind of performative but still genuine joy that makes a night out in Liverpool one of life’s more thrilling experiences. (Trust me.)

Which brings me to a joke that I think tells you all you need to know about how Liverpool sees itself. A Mancunian, a Brummie and a Scouser are all asked, ‘What’s Britain’s second city?’ ‘Manchester, of course,’ says the Mancunian. ‘Birmingham, obviously,’ says the Brummie. ‘That’s easy,’ says the Scouser. ‘It’s definitely London.’/>