Stick to making your schmaltzy films, Mr Curtis

Richard Curtis’s films — rose-tinted, upper-middle-class parodies of modern Britain — are bad enough, says Stephen Pollard. But his politics are even worse

There are few film-makers whose name instantly conjures up a style, an atmosphere, a set of recognisable characters, even a plot. Richard Curtis is one of them. From Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill to Love Actually and Bridget Jones’s Diary, the label ‘Richard Curtis’ on a film tells you straightaway pretty much all you need to know.

For myself, I’d rather boil my eyeballs than spend another second of my life being sucked in to his film-making-by-numbers Disney-Britain. Curtisland might be framed as a rose-tinted, upper-middle-class paradise where the men are all Hugh Grant and the women look like Julia Roberts, Renee Zellweger and Kristin Scott-Thomas, but to me it is a dystopian nightmare worse even than A Clockwork Orange. Clearly, however, I’m not the audience for whom Mr Curtis writes his films and, annoying as I find them, it’s a free country. Each to their own.

Would, however, that the man himself were as laissez-faire in his own attitudes. Richard Curtis is not simply the writer and director of some of the most self-satisfied films ever made. He is also, far more significantly, a political agitator of the most dangerous type; a man whose agenda is all the more pernicious for being promoted using the very techniques which he has perfected in his films. He is, if you like, a Leni Riefenstahl for the soggy left — a film-maker who has learned, and relentlessly exploits, every available trick for planting his message in the minds of his audience.

It’s been difficult in recent days to miss his latest work, on behalf of the ‘Robin Hood Tax’ scheme. ‘A tiny tax on bankers that would raise billions to tackle poverty and climate change, at home and abroad’, is how the umbrella organisation behind the campaign described its scheme.