Dir. Richard Curtis, UK/Germany, 2009, 135 mins
Cast: Bill Nighy, Tom Sturridge, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Review by Carol Allen
Richard Curtis's film about the heady days of the pop pirates in the sixties is very entertaining and charming with good funny dialogue and engaging characters.
Most of it takes place on a rusting tub in the North Sea, from where the fictional Radio Rock broadcasts 24-hour-a-day pop music to the youth of Britain, who are rationed by the BBC to just two hours of rock and roll a week. Its motley crew of DJs, who have a few passing resemblances to some of the real life pirates of the time such as Tony Blackburn, Johnny Walker and Kenny Everett, include Nick Frost as cruelly funny Dave; Rhys Ifans the big-headed Gavin; Ralph Brown as Wee Small Hours Bob, a drugged up wrinklie, who loves his vinyl and shuns conversation; Chris O'Dowd (The IT Crowd ), sweet and touching as Simon, who's looking for true love and loses it the minute he gets it and Katherine Parkinson (also IT Crowd ) as the ship's cook Felicity, the only woman allowed to live on board because she's a lesbian. Hoffman strikes the right "wild man" note as The Count and while he's also perhaps the lure for American audiences, the actor is still a team player. Into this motley crowd comes the likeable and virginal Carl (Sturridge), godson to the station boss Quentin (Nighy), who's been sent by his mum for a visit to find some direction in his life, which is a bit of an odd choice by her, when you think about it.
The real life pirates were a thorn in the side of the establishment of the day, which was determined to get them off the air, and the baddies in this scenario are former leading men now seen as too old to play cool Kenneth Branagh as the minister who's out to get them made illegal and Jack Davenport as his sidekick Twatt – bit of a bad schoolboy joke that. Not much for the girls in this world, not even Felicity, though when the dolly birds are let on board once a month to give the guys a bit of a roll in the hay, Gemma Arterton makes an impression.
However, despite the accurate "dolly bird" look of the female characters, this film does not capture the real sixties. It's played fair and square for today's 20-something audiences in its language – "shagging" for example didn't come into use in that meaning until much later – and in it's attitudes – condoms were way out of fashion by 1966 with guys like this, who assumed every girl was on the pill. More importantly though the older characters – Quentin, Carl's mum and particularly Bob come over as the sort of ageing hippy types, whose own youth was in the sixties. There is no way these characters convince as people, who spent their formative years in the post-war dourness of Britain in the forties. And the maths of Bob's devotion to Muddy Waters doesn't add up either. The film's depiction of a nation devoted to the pirates is fun, though the truth is that the radio signal was so weak that a lot of us got bored with hanging out of the window waving a piece of wire and just put another 45 rpm vinyl on the "record player”.
Not that any of that will worry today's audiences. What might though is the film's climax. Whereas the bulk of the film rings true within the world it creates, without giving too much away, when the rusty old tub starts sinking, it becomes a bit of a Hollywood style fantasy with an unbelievable underwater sequence and a neglect as to the fate of one DJ, which introduces a falsely callous note to the proceedings. The film overall is also a bit short of plot, being more a series of incidents with little narrative drive. Despite that though, it still keeps the attention with its entertainment value.
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