The idea of saying ‘look-at-me’ was anathema to me

The idea of saying ‘look-at-me’ was anathema to me.”Usually, Dineen sticks to more innocuous subjects, such as London’s Angel Tube station and her Bafta-winning documentary about London Zoo, The Ark. Dineen filmed Tony Blair for a party political broadcast, too. She specialises in allowing the viewer to sympathise with characters who can be hard to warm to.Which may be one reason why Geri chose her She bent over backwards to be sympathetic. Dineen recalls, “There was one point when she was talking about how she developed from wearing platform boots to lower-heeled shoes I couldn’t put it in It could have made her look moronic. It’s unfair to put some things in – she is so many different things.”You can’t help feeling Dineen over-compensates on film for the less generous thoughts she had in private. She seems visibly worried that Geri may not come across as likeable. I mention one moment where she fluffs her lines just before her UN press conference “There are so many terms,” she panics “Pro-abortion, pro-life Now pro-life – apparently that means you’re anti- abortion I didn’t know that,” she says wide-eyed Molly still has mixed feelings about that scene.

“You don’t think that’s too mean do you?”They’re still in touch, though. Geri recently bought Dineen’s daughter a pair of high-heeled slingbacks and a pink fairy outfit. “Every time I see her staggering across the kitchen in all of that I think of Geri.” The film is peppered with Dineen’s off-camera encouraging comments and at some points you wish she’d prod her subject for more of a reaction Perhaps she doesn’t need to. What comes across – and maybe this is what “gutted” her subject so – is that the main person in Geri’s life is Geri. You see that her raison d’etre is publicity; she defines herself in the eyes of others, mainly strangers At one point, she hangs out of a loo window of a theatre.

“Hope you don’t get too cold down there,” she shouts to adoring weepy fans. Dineen asks her what she makes of the girls crying over a stranger they feel they know. “Perhaps they like me for myself,” says Geri sweetly – with total self-belief.’Geri’ is on Wednesday 5 May, 9pm, on Channel 4.. On a crisp April weekend in 1948, Arthur Miller, then only 33 and enjoying the first flush of fame after the Broadway success the previous year of All My Sons, waved goodbye to his first wife, Mary, and their two young kids, in Brooklyn, and set off for Roxbury, Connecticut. There, he intended to build a cabin on a hillock just behind a Colonial house he had recently purchased for the family, which stood at the aptly named crossroads of Tophet (another name for Hell) and Gold Mine. “It was a purely instinctive act,” Miller, who long ago traded up from that first 44-acre property to a 400-acre spread on Painter Hill, a few miles down the road, told me recently.