Is Richard Curtis having a laugh?

So surprising, the little news items which crop up in our daily papers. One which recently caught my eye was a piece about the British film-maker Richard Curtis. The famously left-wing luvvie, doyen of the faux-bohemian chattering class, was deeply worried about Netflix. He is quoted as saying, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, that the US streaming giant might buy up British talent but then produce only ‘sanitised, cleaned-up and commercialised’ versions of British life. Not ‘authentic’ stuff like him: “The reason my films are so British is because I’m writing about the things I know about.”

Is he having a laugh? Curtis’s speciality – his oeuvre of rom-coms incudes Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually and the Bridget Jones films – is to present the most sanitised versions imaginable of British life, and especially of London. These are chocolate-box, fairy-tale portraits of our contemporary existence. Pretty-pretty, saccharine crowd-pleasers.   

So what is he really anxious about, I wonder. Could it be that Netflix is actually better at producing the kind of lightweight films he has been making, thus rendering him obsolete? Or is it that, with an annual production budget £10.3 billion, Netflix can afford to go one better and hire the best actors, writers and directors to create superior movies and TV series which really are worth seeing? They made the series The Crown, after all, to the chagrin of the BBC, so they can clearly ‘do British’ very well. 

Don’t get me wrong. I have no objection to entertainments of the Curtis kind, which present a charming picture of our country and our capital, where there are no traffic jams and the streets are litter-free, nobody is obese, there are no moped muggers or women roaming around in niqabs…in other words, a sort of quaint 1950s theme park England to delight Yank audiences (let’s not forget UK film-makers are reliant on US money and distribution companies). After all, it would be ghastly if our screens showed only the opposite. By which I mean miserabilist offerings from the likes of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, designed to make viewers go home afterwards and drink themselves into a stupor, films in which the virtuous, golden-hearted working classes are perpetually oppressed by villainous posh people of the Establishment (boo-hiss). 

I only object to Curtis pretending that his goal is to be ‘authentic’, rather than merely to make commercial products with the aim of doing well at the box office. If viewers want to play along with his comical candy-floss scenarios, that’s fine. It’s a harmless enough pastime. So sure, our Prime Ministers are loveable floppy-haired chaps who have affairs with Cockney assistant housekeepers, dance around Number 10 to pop songs on the radio and tell the US President where to get off (Love Actually). And yes, Hollywood A-listers do indeed up sticks from LA to live happily ever after with humble London bookshop owners (Notting Hill). Happens all the time.

But fantasy is one thing, outright lies are something else. In The Boat that Rocked, his take on the real life tale of the 1960s pirate station Radio Caroline, Richard Curtis deliberately distorted historical facts to fit his wearisome political agenda. In the film the pirate radio stations are abolished by a public-school-educated Tory prime minister, while in reality the deed was done by Labour PM Harold Wilson, a grammar school boy, aided and abetted by the government minister in charge of the airwaves, namely diehard socialist Tony Benn. But I guess Curtis didn’t like that story-line. Maybe he reckons a successful ‘auteur’ such as himself is above minor considerations such as the truth. So much for ‘writing about the things he knows about’. 

He is right to worry about Netflix, though, with its vast shadow looming over him. No matter how critical he is of the monolith today, he might well be begging it to fund some new project tomorrow.