The Real Catherine Cookson (C4)

The word "real" in the title suggests that what we know already about the subject is false. The Real Catherine Cookson tried hard to peel off the layers, separate fact from fiction, about the millionaire Tyneside author who sold 100m books in her lifetime.

If the real truth eluded the makers, it wasn't for want of trying. The conclusion was that Cookson "created the figure she wanted to be, almost as if she was a character in one of her own novels".

She was born in 1906, the illegitimate daughter of a woman she believed was her older sister for the first years of her life. She blamed her childhood misery on being a bastard. Rejected by others because she'd "got no da", she was determined to make something of herself. She took comfort in writing, but the rejection of a play deterred her from trying again for 20 years.

The documentary followed her to Hastings, where she became manageress of a workhouse laundry at the age of 22. She played a part, letting people believe she was from a better-off background than she was.

She began a long friendship with an older woman, Nan Smith. "Nothing odd" happened, we were assured although she lived with Cookson and her alcoholic mother Kate, with whom she had a love-hate relationship. Nan's devotion was obsessive, threatening to kill herself if Cookson continued seeing the grammar school teacher she'd befriended. She gave him up for several years, but eventually married Tom Cookson.A hereditary blood disease, of which she was unaware at the time, caused four miscarriages. She had a breakdown and had mental shock therapy in a mental asylum.

At 46, she wrote her first novel. Her stories about harsh Tyneside life were, the experts told us, an attempt to exorcise the anguish of her early years.

She also wrote an autobiography Our Kate, finally published in 1969 after she had rewritten it ten or 12 times. From that moment, she clung to that version of her own life. The programme suggested it wasn't the entire truth. She admitted herself by declaring, in her later years, that she was working on a fuller account of her life. Nothing was ever found of this work after her death in 1998