That sinking feeling

The Boat That Rocked
15, Nationwide

Now, although it has always been fashionable to take a bit of a pop at Richard Curtis and his ‘feel good’ movies (Four Weddings, Notting Hill, Love Actually) and I’ve been as guilty as anyone — I am just naturally bitchy, I’m afraid — I do think it is perhaps time to move on and take it up a gear: this man has to be stopped.

Pallid I can take, and unchallenging I can take, happily — in fact, there is no one who likes less of a challenge at the cinema than me — but I could not take The Boat That Rocked, an embarrassing shambles and boring in a way I’ve rarely been bored before. I felt it in the very marrow of my bones. I felt it in the way I looked at my watch every five minutes (had it actually stopped?). Oh, it’s all right for you, but this is 130 minutes I’m never going to get back, and think of all the bitching I could have got done. As it is, I wanted to bitch about your hair style and how it’s never suited you, but when am I going to get the time for that now?

This is set in 1966 on board a pirate radio ship anchored in the North Sea and broadcasting to the UK at a time when the BBC was playing less than 45 minutes of pop and rock music a day. It is apparently Curtis’s love letter to Radio Caroline, which, as a young boy, he adored and it’s meant, I think, to be an ensemble comedy, like Robert Altman’s Mash, but as it never gels coherently and also features many gratuitous glimpses of people on the toilet, I’m thinking: no.