ABSTRACT
For good or ill, Richard Curtis has been one of the most influential, profitable, and talked about figures in British comedy. As the scriptwriter of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), he helped to inaugurate a cycle – some might say a brand – of British romantic comedies with aspiration for an international audience that included his own Notting Hill (1999) and the self-directed Love Actually (2003). Yet his writing and co-writing credits also include Bean (1997), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), as well as the enduringly popular television comedies Blackadder (1983–9), Mr. Bean (1990–95) and The Vicar of Dibley (1994–2007). And few overviews of Curtis and his standing within British culture go without reference to his charitable work as founder of the Comic Relief and Make Poverty History campaigns, not least because a campaigning impulse has evidently driven some of his writing, most notably the telefilm The Girl in the Café (tx BBC 2005). Curtis’s projects are always deemed newsworthy, from the controversy over the violence and alleged poor taste of his short campaigning film No Pressure (2010) about climate change, to discussion of whether his script for a 2010 episode of the television series Doctor Who had given his career a much needed ‘shot in the arm’ (Bradshaw, 2010). 1
