London,

The Boat That Rocked

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Cert: 15

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Dir: Richard Curtis. Cast: Bill Nighy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nick Frost, Rhys Ifans, Tom Wisdom, Rhys Darby, Gemma Arterton, Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh, Jack Davenport, January Jones

 

Description: Nostalgic tale of friendship between the members of a pirate radio station, broadcasting from the relative safety of the North Sea in 1966. Unlike the BBC which broadcasts only 45 minutes of rock 'n' roll a week, Radio Rock devotes every minute of every day to music, drawing in around 25 million listeners under the leadership of Quentin. His godson Carl, who has recently been expelled from school, joins Radio Rock for the summer in the hope that he might mend his ways. Instead, the youngster embarks on a quest to track down his biological father, who could be one of the DJs. Meanwhile, back in London, government minister Dormandy and his eager-to-please protege explore every legal loophole to shut down the pirate radio stations.

Country: UK. 2009. 135mins

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What a carry on, Curtis

 

Leading a merry dance: Bill Nighy does his shtick as the louche boss of the pirate station

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Do you remember the joys of Radio Caroline and the way the then Labour government strove to invent a reason for making the perfectly law-abiding offshore DJs and their music illegal? If you do, you’ll take Richard Curtis’s entertaining but overlong approximation of a Sixties phenomenon with a decided pinch of salt.

This is history dressed up for the purposes of simplistic fun, and wilfully wrong about the facts as often as it is right. Dramatic licence, perhaps. But the story is good enough to be told a bit straighter — it doesn’t need to be re-invented as a comedy that appeals to the lowest common denominator.

We are asked, for instance, to believe that many millions gathered around their radios to listen avidly to the pop that a fuddy-duddy BBC refused to allow for more than 45 minutes a day, and frequently stopped work to dance happily to the forbidden music. What’s more, they loved the various DJs so much that they knew everything about them, down to the details of their randy sex lives.

Well, maybe a lot of people did, and maybe the government (whose relevant ministry was headed by Anthony Wedgwood Benn, hardly a diehard anti-libertarian) did search for ways to stop the rot, especially when fishermen’s SOS calls were drowned out by the noise. But there was a good reason, never stated in The Boat That Rocked, why the BBC was unable to broadcast what the public demanded. It was not because it didn’t want to but because the Musicians’ Union was adamant that the public broadcaster should not supply too much music, particularly American, that was not their own, thus attempting to ensure work for their members. Which was why classical music was not allowed too often either, except when recorded or performed by the BBC’s own orchestras.

What Curtis gives us in place of the true story is a kind of free spirits versus anti-libertarians comic farrago in which the government of the day and the BBC are the villains and the heroes are fighting for everyone’s right to enjoy themselves. Instead of an approximation of Tony Benn, we get a daftly parodic government monster played by Kenneth Branagh straight from the far reaches of Yes, Minister. He regards the music the pirates played as “filth” and is aided and abetted, believe it or not, by an ambitious civil servant called Twat. Dear, oh dear!

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We are also given a crew of DJs and their mates whose sexual appetites render the women in the film willing groupies rather than flesh and blood, except for the lesbian affectionately ribbed by all. All this often seems like a contemporary Carry On without the great comic timing and characterisation that rendered politically incorrect lines uproarious in the best of that series.

There’s one scene in particular which may get some frowns, in which Nick Frost’s tubby and sexually successful DJ arranges for the girl he’s brought aboard for the purposes of seduction to have sex in a darkened room with Tom Sturridge’s handsome young virgin, hoping she’ll think it’s him. Not exactly a charming interlude.

Our improbable virgin eventually gets his oats elsewhere and finds out from his visiting mum (a cameo from Emma Thompson in dark glasses) who his father is.

A benison for viewers will be Bill Nighy as the station’s smartly louche boss, though his performance is no different from his familiar airy, impeccably timed shtick. Then there is a rumbustious, bearded Philip Seymour Hoffman, who succeeds an eccentric American (Rhys Ifans) as the station’s star turn and is momentarily disgruntled when the popular DJ returns.

The frolics encourage laughs most of the way, sometimes at and sometimes with the characters (though it was not getting too many when I watched it), and ends with a Dunkirk-like conclusion that has no basis in fact but is intended to make for a cheerfully feelgood and suitably dramatic denouement. It might have worked better if it hadn’t come at the end of a very long movie.

On the credit side, apart from the lively playing of a cast going through the Curtis lines with more gusto than conviction, there is the music. Original tracks by Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Yardbirds and all summon up the era better than anything else.

The soundtrack is the saving grace of a film that doesn’t cut it in any other direction and often gets irritatingly full of boyish rudery and sentimentality.

Listen to Richard Curtis and the cast talk about the film

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