These are the film notes for our final screening of the 2009/2010 season:
UK 2009 (135 minutes)
Director: Richard Curtis
Starring: Tom Sturridge, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, Nick Frost and Kenneth
Branagh
Following his expulsion from school Carl (Tom Sturridge) arrives on Radio Rock, a pirate radio ship, to stay with the ship’s Captain Quentin (Bill Nighy) who is also his godfather and meets the disc jockeys who crew the ship. A government minister (Kenneth Branagh) takes offence at the ship’s output and creates the Marine Offences Act in order to close the station down. Quentin and the crew decide to defy the ban, but an attempt to move the ship causes its engines to explode and the ship sinks, but without any loss of life.
The story is based on the real life pirate radio station named Radio Caroline, which broadcast from international waters off the coast of South East England in the 1960s, although Richard Curtis (as both writer and director) was keen to point out that he did not intend to depict the real story of offshore broadcasting; rather he wrote the film solely for entertainment purposes.
Richard Curtis started his career as one of the writers on Not The Nine O’Clock News before creating the Blackadder series with Rowan Atkinson. He made his film breakthrough with his screenplay for Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) which became the highest grossing British film to date and which made Hugh Grant a global superstar. Curtis followed this with the screenplay for Notting Hill (1999) as well as collaborating with Helen Fielding on the screenplays for Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), all of which starred Hugh Grant. In 2003 Curtis directed Love Actually from his own screenplay, once again starring Hugh Grant, and this time in a strangely prophetic role as a “posh boy” Prime Minister. In addition to Grant all the films included a regular group of British actors including Colin Firth, Rowan Atkinson and Bill Nighy in their casts.
In parallel with this successful film career Curtis also created The Vicar of Dibley, which ran from 1994 to 2007, as a vehicle for Dawn French. He followed this with the screenplay of the TV version of The No. 1 Ladies Detection Agency which he co-wrote with Anthony Minghella (who also acted as director) before returning to film with The Boat That Rocked in 2009. His most recent project is a story – Vincent and the Doctor - for the current series of Doctor Who which despite an amusing cameo role for Bill Nighy as an art critic lecturing on Van Gogh failed to reach the standards of recent stories about historical characters such as The Unquiet Dead (Dickens), The Shakespeare Code (Shakespeare – inevitably) or even The Unicorn and the Wasp (Agatha Christie).
