Nepo-narcissism has plunged new depths. Scarlett Curtis, the mauve-haired social justice activist and daughter of filmmaker Richard, has been grilling her hapless father about his wicked pre-cultural revolutionary past.
During a creepy Soviet-style cross-examination in front of a crowd at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Scarlett harangued the creator of Blackadder for failing to include a single black person in his film Notting Hill. Rather than telling his daughter to check her thinking – duh, the film came out in 1999, long before it became mandatory to patronise people of colour – Richard made the fatal error of trying to excuse his problematic past.
Everyone knows that self-flagellating in public won’t let you off the hook when activists come knocking, even when the activist in question emerged from your loins.
What about the adorable Gareth, he pleaded, you know, the gay one from Four Weddings and a Funeral, played by an actual homosexual called Simon Callow? Surely including a genuine queer person counts as a box well ticked? Well, not according to our Scarlett, who turned on her poor papa for the fatal error of turning Gareth into a tragic figure who dies of a heart attack. Didn’t her fuddy-duddy father realise back in the 1990s that only heteronormative patriarchs die of cardiac arrests? Presumably, in Scarlett’s rainbow-coloured world, minority characters must only ever die heroically while preaching about the wonders of antiracism.
Just as well Richard didn’t bring up the wheelchair-bound character in Notting Hill played by that able-bodied disability-appropriator Gina McKee.
But Scarlett wasn’t finished with her dad yet. How would he explain all those fat-shaming jokes in Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually? Well, by shaming himself, of course: ‘I remember how shocked I was five years ago when Scarlett said to me, “You can never use the word ‘fat’ again.” Wow, you were right. In my generation calling someone chubby [was funny] – in Love Actually there were jokes about that. Those jokes aren’t any longer funny.’
By which he meant ‘those jokes aren’t allowed to be funny any longer’. Richard had finally twigged that the only way to atone for his outrage was to fess up and own his white male privilege. And so he succumbed by revealing what everyone at the festival, many of whom were likely Oxford contemporaries, already knew: ‘I think because I came from a very un-diverse school and bunch of university friends, I think that I hung on to the feeling that I wouldn’t know how to write those parts. I think I was just stupid and wrong about that. I felt as though me, my casting director, my producers just didn’t look outwards.’ ‘Those parts?’ what, those strange foreign types with funny accents, the ones who aren’t like ‘us’?
Admitting you were ‘stupid and wrong’ may sound stunning and brave but everyone knows that self-flagellating in public won’t let you off the hook when activists come knocking, even when the activist in question emerged from your loins.
Besides, I’m not buying his oh-so-humble, I-didn’t-realise-at-the-time humbuggery. Why couldn’t he just admit that he was doing what most writers do, which is to write about what he knew? And where’s the shame in that? Yes, he could have included a few token Caribbean extras in Notting Hill, but by the late 1990s most of the second-generation Windrushers had already been edged out of Notting Hill by the likes of Richard Curtis.
The truth is, people like Curtis and his floppy-haired chums live in ever-increasing circles of exclusivity, drifting from public school through Oxbridge and on to glittering careers at the BBC and beyond. It’s a well-worn path that few people of colour get to tread, so why would they feature in Richard’s films, which are essentially autobiographical comedies about his delightfully dotty university chums?
Rather than berating her dad for ancient casting decisions, perhaps Scarlett should think about activating her activism by doing something useful like setting up a film school for disadvantaged kids in Harlesden, where many of the black residents of Notting Hill ended up.
We have arrived at a strangely duplicitous moment in the increasingly unhinged era of social justice where skinny white Scarletts venerate fat women and people of colour simply for being fat and of colour, while ordering the rest of us to stay in our lanes. She then has the audacity to force her already progressive dad into making a grovelling, inauthentic apology in front of a paying audience, for the crime of writing from the heart.
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