Richard Curtis

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Richard Curtis: Comedy's saint
The founder of Comic Relief and the writer of 'Four Weddings' and 'Notting Hill' is everybody's Mr Nice. Can he really be that good?
7 March 2009
independent.co.uk

It was in the Philippines that the young Richard Curtis had his first charitable impulse. His father was a businessman working for Unilever and the family home in Manila ran to a swimming pool and a chauffeur. As Richard was being driven home from school, he used to watch through the car window as the massive slums unfolded, and saw people under corrugated iron roofs, living on nothing. His parents, however, showed him how some people responded to the existence of poverty. "My mother cancelled Christmas in 1968. No presents. No special food. We gave all the money to the Biafra appeal. I was thrilled because it meant I could watch Top of the Pops, which was normally spoiled by Christmas lunch lasting for ever."

In its combination of charity, television, pop and domestic humour, this is a very Richard Curtis story of heroic altruism 17 years before he launched Comic Relief in response to famine in Ethiopia in 1985. To date, the comic-sketches-and-tragic-footage charity has raised upwards of £600m and lifted the spirits of the nation by such stratagems as having Tony Blair (in 2007) utter the catchphrase "Am I bovvered?" in a riotous exchange with Catherine Tate's motor-mouthed teenager Lauren.

Comic Relief's 2009 Red Nose Day (it's been going since 1988) takes over the BBC airwaves next Friday. You cannot have missed its imminence. There have been comic plugs on the radio, urgings to "Do something funny for money", plastic red noses in Sainsbury's, celebrities climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and the insistence everywhere that you "Get involved". Millions of people will do so. Others will find the emphatic, all-join-in tone of Curtis's charity a tad too strident, just as many people carp at the bourgeois sweetness of his romantic movies. But what problem do they have with a man whose life seems dedicated to charity, humour, decency, truth, friendship, joy and delight? What's not to like about Richard Curtis?

He is, after all, a god-like figure in the British film, TV and light entertainment industry as well as the charity world. Or, if not a god, a king – namely Midas. Every film he scripted since Four Weddings and a Funeral has made more than $200m. Four Weddings (1994) became the biggest-grossing British film in history, until it was eclipsed in that title by his Notting Hill, five years later. He has never had a flop. His directorial debut, Love Actually, with its multiple storylines and Christmas setting, made for $45m, took $247m worldwide.

The secret of his success as a writer seems simple: keep it positive, light, enthusiastic, romantic. The world of Curtis's imagination is a fine place to be. Its middle-class inhabitants aren't exactly young or old, but exude an age-less friendliness and wry amusement towards each other. They fall in love awkwardly, unexpectedly or inconveniently and their paths to bliss are strewn with easily solvable muddles involving other people. There's always a plucky invalid, a subtitled conversation, a cabal of jolly, supportive pals, someone dashing to the airport to declare their love for someone else, and a rosy, cosy glow that everything will work out fine.

It's the upbeat niceness, the cute Englishness of its set-ups and assumptions, that gets up the nose of some of the more po-faced critics. "The film's governing idea of love is both shallow and dishonest," wrote A O Scott of Love Actually in The New York Times, "and its sweet, chipper demeanour masks a sour cynicism about human emotions that is all the more sleazy for remaining unacknowledged. It has the calloused, leering soul of an early-60s Rat Pack comedy, but without the suave, seductive bravado," while Variety judged it, "a package that feels as luxuriously appointed and expertly tooled as a Rolls-Royce."

Curtis is conscious that he works unfashionable seams of virtue. "I really do believe that there is a tremendous amount of optimism, goodness and love in the world," he told New Humanist magazine last year, "and that it is under-represented. The dark side is always dominant ...You write a play about a soldier going Awol and stabbing a single mother and they say it is a searing indictment of modern British society. Whereas you write a play about a guy falling in love with a girl, which happens a million times a day in every corner of the world, and it's called blazingly unrealistic sentimental rubbish."

His new movie, The Boat That Rocked, is set in 1966, when Curtis was 10 and pirate radio ruled the wavelengths, blasting 24-hour rock'n'roll and Tamla Motown into British transistors at a time when the BBC Light Programme preferred jazz or novelty songs. The titular boat is Radio Rock, a version of the key pirate ship Radio Caroline, and the DJs spinning the subversive vinyl are a bunch of zany funsters played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nick Frost, Rhys Ifans, Chris O'Dowd and Rhys Darby. Bill Nighy, who shone as the re-tooled rocker in Love Actually, plays Quentin, the boat's languid owner, and among the perky love-interest dollies are January Jones (from Mad Men) and Gemma Arterton and Tallulah Riley (from St Trinian's.)

Curtis admits that gritty realism about the radio ships wasn't his chief preoccupation. His main concern wasn't the boat at all. "I think I'm trying to reproduce the feelings I had while listening to Madness or Abba or the Beatles or the Kinks," he says in the April issue of Empire. "That sense you get in pop music of high spirits and elevation and joy and things working out."

Essentially it's a film about friendship. The film pits the pirates against the politicians who want to close them down (especially Kenneth Branagh) by means of the hastily drafted Marine Offences Act, and is full of laddish jokes. Rather than a rom-com, it's a mates-com: the DJs are like a bunch of noisy teenage pals, luxuriating in youth, freedom and the advent of drugs and sex. There's notably more sex in the new movie than in Curtis's others. "I don't avoid nudity," he says, "because I remember how much it mattered to me when I was 15, how utterly thrilled I was when a person in the movies took their clothes off."

He was born in New Zealand in 1956 and schooled in several countries. Arriving in England, he won a scholarship to Harrow and picked up a first in English at Christ Church, Oxford. There he met Rowan Atkinson, with whom he started writing sketches for Not the Nine O'Clock News, displaying a flair for comic songs. He and Atkinson collaborated on Blackadder (Curtis worked on every episode), on Bean, and Curtis's first movie script, The Tall Guy, in which Atkinson played a nasty comedian and Jeff Goldblum romanced Emma Thompson. The film was produced by Working Title, with whom Curtis has remained as its star performer. Today he lives in Suffolk and London with the broadcaster Emma Freud and their four children.

Curtis tends to bring up his father's name when talking about virtue or sentimentality. "What is wrong with being touched by what goes on around you?" he asks. "I am very touched by what is good and true. It's a family characteristic. It was very true of my dad in his final years. Whenever he talked of an act of kindness, I can remember the tears in his eyes." Such invocations of decency infuriate his critics, who refer to Comic Relief as "St Richard Curtis and his millionaire disciples", and complain about his political naivety, as if the act of raising millions for a malaria charity was merely a believer's way of salving a guilty conscience.

Saint Richard, however, isn't at all religious: he stopped believing in God before going to Oxford. ("I thought, well, either God doesn't exist or he is thoroughly nasty, in which case I am not interested in worshipping him.") About those who think this talented, funny, hard-working, money-spinning and amazingly effective man is driven by impulses of image-making or greed, he is equally brisk. "I believe that cynical people believe that everyone else is cynical. They regard non-cynical people as simply ultra-cynical. So cynics who watch Love Actually think it is a cynical attempt to make money. No amount of evidence could prove to them that it ever had anything to do with goodwill." And anyway, he points out with a touch of asperity, "Cynics Nose Day hasn't raised any money yet."

A life in brief

Born: Richard Whalley Anthony Curtis, 8 November 1956, in New Zealand.

Early life: As a child Curtis lived in New Zealand, the Philippines, and Sweden. Graduated from Oxford University with a first-class degree in English.

Family Life: Son of Anthony, a Unilever executive and Glyness. He lives in London and Suffolk with Emma Freud, and their four children.

Career: Started as the chief writer on Not the Nine O'Clock News before writing Mr Bean and The Vicar of Dibley. Rose to fame with his scripts for Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Notting Hill (1999). He founded Comic Relief and Make Poverty History.

He says: "I think it's a responsibility of people who have had very lucky lives to try to spread some of that around."

They say: "Richard has the rare gift of being able to mingle comedy with tragedy. Hardly anyone else can do that." Bill Nighy

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Richard Curtis: Captain comedy
IT'S all aboard the love boat in Richard Curtis's latest film, a tribute to pirate radio in the 1960s. The creator of Comic Relief tells Aidan Smith why he makes no apology for returning to the cosy warmth of his boyhood bedroom
22 March 2009
scotsman.com

RICHARD Curtis doesn't like personal questions, says the PR, and I'll have a much more enjoyable chat with him if I steer clear of them. But it seems like a dereliction of duty not to ask HM Impresario of Comedy the first one instinctively scribbled on my notepad while watching his new film: did he, as a young boy, bid his mother and father goodnight then rush upstairs and dive under the covers for a secret fumble?

"Yes, that lad at the start is me," he says, sipping tea in a Glasgow hotel. "Pop music is absolutely my most favourite thing and I used to listen to the radio all the time, even in bed when my parents forbade it." It's tempting to think that when Curtis makes a film – most obviously, Four Weddings And A Funeral or Love Actually – he tries to envelop the whole country in a big, snuggly, 15-tog duvet of love and friendship and politeness and poshness and floppy hair, but most of all love, absolutely his second most favourite thing. The Boat That Rocked, though, is different.

Here Curtis pushes off from the shores of a blanketed Britain to plouter about in the North Sea with a bunch of comedy chums which doesn't include Hugh Grant. For the first time in a while, 'Love Is All Around' doesn't feature on a Curtis soundtrack. Of course, The Boat That Rocked isn't that different. It's still got Bill Nighy and Rhys Ifans and Emma Thompson. There's a wedding scene and a Christmas scene.

This is Curtis's tribute to the pirate radio of his boyhood and 62 other late-1960s ditties enhance the snugly nostalgia. There's a race against time, another Curtis staple, and one of those classic Curtis endings where the music swells and this time the waves swell too, and emotion is piled on top of emotion, and sweet resolution on top of sweet resolution, like so much bedding.

We're all boarding-school pupils when we watch a Curtis film and he's the kindly matron ensuring that fleece is all around. Aptly, his next music-related memory concerns his own schooldays. "I used to skip chapel so I could listen to Pick Of The Pops," he says, "and when I found out that the Beatles' White Album was to be broadcast in its entirety, I stood against a radiator to fake a hot flush so the nurse would send me to the sanatorium where I could hear 'Piggies' and 'Revolution No 9' and all that wonderful strangeness."

That record was released in 1968, the year after Radio 1 hit the airwaves with some of the shipwrecked pirate jocks from Radio Caroline, one of the stations scuppered by the hastily drafted Marine Offences Act. In the film, Kenneth Branagh plays the Government's Minister for Fun Reduction and Jack Davenport his assistant, a man called Twatt. If you're Curtis's age – he's 52 – Philip Seymour Hoffman's DJ may remind you of Emperor Rosko, while the ghosts of the young, not-yet-megalomaniacal Kenny Everett and Tony Blackburn dart in and out of the cramped booths, developing their bonkers craft.

"I liked you calling it 'in mild defiance…'," says Curtis, who's come to these promo duties direct from Comic Relief, of which he's co-founder. (I wasn't aware I had.) "I was only acting in mild defiance of my parents when I listened to the pirates. They were very tolerant, as I hope I am with my children." Was he excited by the pirates' daring? "Of course. I knew they were on my side." Did he like that they were anti-establishment? The mildly defiant Curtis considers the question carefully. "Well," he says, "my parents only owned eight records, including 'Unforgettable' by Nat King Cole, Mantovani Does Theatreland and My Fair Lady, the Australian version. But our babysitters would arrive with their little boxes of singles and play us the Supremes, so it was music which marked out the differences between our generations."

It is through music, too, that Curtis can delineate his journey from boy to man, revealing some of the personal stuff that's supposed to stay well hidden. "1965, my first Top Of The Pops, tremendously exciting, the Hollies sang 'I'm Alive' – that's in the film… 1968, my first Christmas Top Of The Pops, and all because my mother – we were living in the Philippines at the time – cancelled lunch to give the money to Biafra… Philippines to Sweden, a TV pop show called Op Op Opa!, and a boy was dragged from the front row to be laughed at by 3,000 people – that was me, dressed in my school uniform as usual, even though it was the holidays.

"I'd love to have been a DJ, but then I've always wanted to be someone more interesting than I actually am ... I tried to be in a pop band at school but we only got as far as choosing a name: Versus. I still like it… Posters on my wall? I wrote off for one of The Who, allegedly scarlet, and was hugely disappointed it was orange… My emotional education came from Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt and Kate Bush; they were my only girlfriends in my teens… For my 21st birthday Rowan Atkinson took me to see Abba play Wembley."

Young kids can like Abba, and so can menopausal women – but 21-year-old heterosexual men? "I know," says Curtis gleefully. He admits he never really made the leap from unselfconsciously loving pop to self-consciously stroking his chin to rock. "I've never been a snob about music, or hopefully, anything."

It's pointless trying to convince Curtis that DJs have got smaller and so has music's importance. "To me it's omnipresent. On Comic Relief we got all our money from four extraordinary songs – Elbow performing 'Puncture Repair' raised £2.1m in 100 seconds."

And mention of Atkinson brings us to Edinburgh, where the university friends performed on the Festival Fringe four years running. "I was always heartbroken in Edinburgh," says Curtis. "One time Rowan turned up and I wasn't able to talk to him because I was so in love with a girl doing Shakespeare at the Freemasons' Hall. I was always heartbroken in my 20s." Still, this hasn't put him off the city: his next film, about time travel, will be set there.

Love, it was bound to crop up sooner or later. Curtis's films are criticised for being gloopily sentimental, with Love Actually being dubbed an "indigestible Christmas pudding" while another reviewer wailed: "If movie theatres had windows I'd have jumped out before the end." He sighs when I bring this up.

"It's bizarre. If Britain had as many serial killers as we see portrayed on our screens, then you and I would be the last two people alive and I would be on the point of murdering you. Yet these films are acclaimed for their brilliant realism while I get slagged off for writing about the major experiences affecting millions and millions of us, love and friendship. I bet that outside this hotel we'd find plenty of laughing and smiling and holding of hands." You may not like Curtis's films but you've got to admire his optimism, here in Glasgow today.

Spurned in Edinburgh, ridiculed in Sweden, reduced to transatlantic pining for beautiful songstresses – you can see how Curtis ended up making the films he does. And in each of them there's a character called Bernard, after the man who stole his first true love. I thought he'd broken with tradition for The Boat That Rocked until he says: "Wait for the DVD extras – James Corden is Bernard."

The stars of Curtis's latest leap to his defence. Tom Sturridge, who plays a younger version of Hugh Grant, romantically bumbling, fringe all over the place, says: "Richard genuinely believes that love and friendship are the most important things, and thank God." Chris (The IT Crowd) O'Dowd says: "Of course there's sentimentality in Richard's films but it's not manipulative. He has a huge heart." And Nick (Hot Fuzz) Frost adds: "Richard is our Woody Allen and he loves weddings – he even came to mine." Was he invited? "Of course, and he told me my speech was the best he'd ever heard – high praise because he's such an authority."

So that's Richard Curtis: film-maker, fundraiser, professional wedding guest, jolly nice chap – and he likes personal questions after all. He talks about his father, who died last year, and how he hopes that a highly emotional visit the pair made to the old man's home village near Venice might one day inspire a film. Then, returning to music, he talks about how his partner Emma Freud wants the church at her funeral to echo to every song there's ever been with the word "angel" in the title.
And him? "'Across the Universe' by the Beatles, that'll do nicely." v

• The Boat That Rocked opens April 3

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Could Mr Bean wheel back to our TV screens as a bumbling resident of a nursing home?
By Liz Thomas
13th September 2010

He will forever be a child at heart, but it seems even Mr Bean cannot escape the ravages of time. The bumbling comedy icon could return to television screens as an ageing resident of a nursing home. Writer Richard Curtis, who worked on the 1990s ITV series before going on to create hit films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, has said he is 'tempted' to return to Mr Bean.

However, he may have a hard time persuading Rowan Atkinson who has said he is 'very unlikely' to play the character he created 20 years ago again. The closest Atkinson has come to Mr Bean recently is his accident prone spy Johnny English. He was spotted in London in a wheelchair at the weekend filming a scene for the sequel to the 2003 film. But Curtis said he was hopeful the actor would come back to Mr Bean.

He said: 'I think Mr Bean in 2010 would be obsessed by his Sky box and having access to everyone and endlessly going on YouTube. I am tempted by the idea or Mr Bean in an old people's home, so Rowan doesn't have to go on dying his hair. Mr Bean does behave with all the selfishness of a child and I think a lot of childish traits remain in people as they grow up – though of course they try to hide them.'

The character originated from sketches for Atkinson's stage show in the 80s, which were moulded into Mr Bean for television. It was one of ITV's most popular series running from 1990 -1995 and at its peak had audiences in excess of 18million. It also spawned two films, one in 1997 and one in 2007. The series still pulls in millions on ITV3 and one sketch has 57million hits on YouTube.

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That could be a great idea, though the character must be a good 10-20 years too young for an old folk's home...