If you want to make a case for Richard Curtis as the emblematic film-maker of the New Labour years, you can start with an uncanny coincidence. Four Weddings and a Funeral - a film that features a sudden Scottish heart attack and the eventual unlikely romantic triumph of a gauche former public schoolboy - was released in Britain on the day after Labour leader John Smith died, 13 May 1994. (I went to see it a couple of weeks later at the Screen on the Green in Islington, London; just up the road Blair and Brown were dividing the spoils in the restaurant Granita.) The film immediately seemed to catch a mood. Death and romance were already in the air; Major's Tories were waiting for their last rites; things could only get better.You can't separate atmospheres out, quite, or see where one begins and another ends, but certainly in that summer of its genesis you could find some of New Labour's shiny, happy geography in what we have come to know as Curtisland. Four Weddings located a different kind of Britain to any that had been filmed before. It was neither kitchen-sink gritty nor carry-on smutty. It was an apolitical place, full of can-do possibility, obsessed with the educated middle class, perfectly relaxed about the filthy rich, much more in love with sentiment than ideas, and insatiable in its optimism; it was also in thrall to the idea of happy endings. This mixing of realities seemed like a two-way process. Curtis's inspired initiative for charitable giving in Africa, Comic Relief, which had begun a decade before, could hardly have been more Blairite in its simplicity. It concerned itself not with ideology or history or politics, but made a direct emotional appeal; it was messianic about fun and celebrity: have a laugh, resurrect a career, save the world.Anti-Northern Irish hegemony:
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| Where all those fans of The Wire & Luther when you need them, eh? |
