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.