Truly Awful

Rating: 4/10 (22 October 2010)

Richard Curtis seems to have has lost his mojo. I loved Four Weddings and Love Actually, both films were clever and well written. Pirate Radio was just awful it was hard to believe it was written by the same person. The one redeeming feature is the music of the 1960s, which still sounds great. There has never been anything to touch it and the film is almost worth watching for the soundtrack.
The main problem is that the characters are just cartoons. Kenneth Branagh plays a government minister obsessed with killing off pirate radio. He's like Dick Dastardly in Wacky Races he pops up every few minutes demanding that his flunkies devise a cunning new plan to stop the pirates. The Branagh thing goes on too long and isn't very funny. The real government minister who killed off the pirates was Tony Benn who later reinvented himself as a left wing hero.Like the comrades in Eastern Europe, Benn didn't approve of pop music or independent, commercial radio.
The radio station is loosely based on Radio Caroline, whose DJs like Tony Blackburn mostly ended up on BBC Radio One. The tone of Caroline reflected the music of the day which was brash,fun and optimistic. The real DJs were young men in their early twenties. In this film they just looked too old and middle aged. English girls in the mid-sixties were also relatively chaste by today's standards so the emphasis on sex was a little over done.
The dialogue wasn't what you would expect from a Curtis film it didn't have his usual wit and sparkle. The characters were not very well developed and you didn't really care about any of them. The idea that people in Britain sat around in groups listening to the radio was just daft. I was really disappointed I expected more.