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<\/p>\nThis must qualify as the most lily-livered, disloyal, censorious interview of the year. Yes, we have officially reached a peak of preachy hand-wringing.<\/p>\n
Director, writer and Comic Relief creator Richard Curtis was self-flagellating on stage at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last weekend while under fire from questions from his daughter, 28-year-old Scarlett (not exactly Ludovic Kennedy, but we are where we are).<\/p>\n
In an exchange that at times had the air of a show trial, she berated every one of her old dad’s hugely popular films, at one point saying: ‘In the last few years there has been a growing criticism from a lot of people about the ways your films in particular treated women.’<\/p>\n
Has there, really? In most normal households, when Love Actually is on, it’s more likely to be cries of: ‘Oooh, Mum! It’s the bit where Hugh Grant is disco dancing down the stairs at No 10! Quick!’ Or, on Christmas morning as we settle in front of Bridget Jones’s Diary, word-for-word impressions by every family member, young and old, of ‘Pam, the gravy needs sieving!’ to howls of side-splitting laughter. Or, on the phone to a girlfriend who has just been dumped: ‘He’s just a big knobhead with no knob.’<\/p>\n
With a level of ingratitude that seems somewhat staggering, given the success of her father’s films was doubtless what paid for a West London roof over her head, her education, and gave her a leg up in the world of journalism (note to Richard Curtis: if you really want to be more diverse, how about giving this Cheltenham gig to someone who isn’t a family member?) Scarlett added: ‘There were multiple accounts of inappropriate boss behaviour in Love Actually… in general the women are visions of unattainable loveliness.’<\/p>\n
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Director, writer and Comic Relief creator Richard Curtis was self-flagellating on stage at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last weekend while under fire from questions from his daughter, 28-year-old Scarlett (not exactly Ludovic Kennedy, but we are where we are)<\/p>\n
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When it comes to addressing the so-called fat-phobic content in Curtis’s films, his daughter entirely misses the point. Bridget Jones, for example, whose huge pants feature prominently in the film, feels that she is flawed, unlovable<\/p>\n
This, apparently, is a terrible thing for everyone’s self-esteem. Curtis, sounding like a whipped schoolboy, admitted he was ‘stupid and wrong’, also recounting: ‘I remember how shocked I was five years ago when Scarlett said to me, ‘You can never use the word fat again.’ And, wow, you were right.’<\/p>\n
I cringed to hear his many mea culpas, and longed for him \u2014 as the co-writer of the Bridget screenplay \u2014 to channel that particular heroine instead and reply: ‘Gaahahahahah!’ Followed by: ‘Darling. Poppet. Sweetie. Workplace groping happened. Just pretending it didn’t doesn’t change that fact.<\/p>\n
‘And movie stars, both male and female, do tend to look rather lovely. Should I call Brad Pitt or Florence Pugh and ask them to dial it down a notch? As for using the word fat, well, some people are. And acknowledging it isn’t automatically an insult.’<\/p>\n
To which I would add please, Richard, do not, under any circumstances, ruin my rom coms!<\/p>\n
It’s staggering that a man of intelligence and talent can be made to swiftly abandon works of art that the rest of us so deeply relate to, use to self-medicate, or simply find so funny that tea snorts out of our nostrils as we watch them.<\/p>\n
It felt as though Scarlett had brought on to the Cheltenham stage a giant-sized eraser and begun to rub out the faces of characters we love more than we love ourselves \u2014 and that’s no overstatement.<\/p>\n
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I treasure Notting Hill, even though I can’t afford to live in the real place. It’s Roman Holiday, but the boy gets the girl in the end<\/p>\n
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Love Actually is one of my top three films of all time (along with Bridget and Four Weddings And A Funeral, another Richard Curtis masterpiece). It’s a chiaroscuro of light and dark, with so many deeply poignant moments<\/p>\n
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In an exchange that at times had the air of a show trial,\u00a0Scarlett berated every one of her old dad’s hugely popular films, at one point saying: ‘In the last few years there has been a growing criticism from a lot of people about the ways your films in particular treated women’<\/p>\n
Scarlett takes issue with the phrases such as ‘tree trunk thighs’, which Martine McCutcheon’s character Natalie in the film Love Actually uses to describe herself, even though she ‘has a normal figure’.<\/p>\n
But when it comes to addressing the so-called fat-phobic content in Curtis’s films, his daughter entirely misses the point. Bridget Jones, for example, whose huge pants feature prominently in the film, feels that she is flawed, unlovable.<\/p>\n
It’s her vulnerability, her striving to be better via self-help books, dieting, gym membership and blue string soup that makes her so relatable (unlike many young women of Gen Z who believe they’re fine as they are, thank you, and don’t need to work hard, improve themselves, be shy or nervous, or have self-doubt).<\/p>\n
Personally, I find over-confidence far less appealing than a spot of celluloid cellulite. I was at the first screening of Bridget Jones’s Diary, in a roomful of women, and the moment B strains to get into her shapewear was met with cheers, applause and sobbing. In that moment, and many others in the film, we felt seen \u2014 we felt we were Bridget \u2014 and that is why she has entered the lexicon, and our DNA.<\/p>\n
As someone who has been on a diet from the age of 11, I don’t find Bridget’s hatred of her own body triggering or enabling. I find her reassuring. I think: I’ve been there. I do that. I’m no longer alone.<\/p>\n
We Bridget fans know she wasn’t real, we’re not dim \u2014 we know Renee Zellweger had to wear prosthetic breasts and pile on pounds to play the lovable singleton. But we also understand Richard Curtis (and the original creator, Helen Fielding) were not mocking her.<\/p>\n
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Scarlett takes issue with the phrases such as ‘tree trunk thighs’, which Martine McCutcheon ‘s character Natalie in the film Love Actually uses to describe herself, even though she ‘has a normal figure’\u00a0<\/p>\n
They were celebrating her. Scarlett would prefer it if characters weren’t labelled ‘fat’, but that doesn’t eradicate the fact women can be unhappy with their bodies.<\/p>\n
The way Bridget wriggled out of bed with a man, covering her body with a sheet… that is me! No man has ever seen me naked. But seeing B do it, I was able to laugh at myself, to be lifted out of the idea women need to be perfect. To think that fat wasn’t a dirty word.<\/p>\n
It is, however, something that many of us sometimes feel. Not all women think that we are all fine as we are. We don’t buy into the body positive movement. Should we be ashamed of that, beat ourselves up over it? I don’t believe we should \u2014 after all, we’re only human.<\/p>\n
Bridget is so beloved by women precisely because she makes mistakes. Like B, I’ve dated men clearly wrong for me. I can’t cook. I’ve drunk too much. I’ve written in way too much detail, as B did, in a diary that the man in question later reads (B’s was left open, mine is published weekly in the Mail on Sunday). Like B, discovering another woman in Daniel’s bathroom, I’ve been cheated on. B makes our weaknesses OK, because she has them, too.<\/p>\n
Yes, of course, in retrospect, some lines grate, a bit like B’s thighs. Bridget’s mother, Pam, says of Mr Darcy’s Japanese ex-wife: ‘Very cruel race.’ But this line doesn’t render the film racist. It’s cleverly showing the progress between one generation \u2014 Bridget’s \u2014 and a previous one that lived through different times.<\/p>\n
In that moment of the first Bridget film, I thought of my mum. There’s an innocence about the part played so beautifully by Gemma Jones. ‘Oh, there you are, Dumpling,’ she says, and it is not fattist but loving. Because these decidedly un-woke lines are the ones that make us honk with laughter and recognition the most. Because they are real \u2014 and they make us think.<\/p>\n
Love Actually is one of my top three films of all time (along with Bridget and Four Weddings And A Funeral, another Richard Curtis masterpiece). It’s a chiaroscuro of light and dark, with so many deeply poignant moments. The woman who has to care for her mentally unwell brother. Emma Thompson, weeping silently when she realises her husband has bought jewellery for his mistress. The unrequited love of Andrew Lincoln for Keira Knightley.<\/p>\n
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Personally, I find over-confidence far less appealing than a spot of celluloid cellulite. I was at the first screening of Bridget Jones’s Diary, in a roomful of women, and the moment B strains to get into her shapewear was met with cheers, applause and sobbing. In that moment, and many others in the film, we felt seen \u2014 we felt we were Bridget \u2014 and that is why she has entered the lexicon, and our DNA<\/p>\n
Scarlett thinks her dad’s jokes about the size of women’s thighs and bottoms are deliberately shaming. His response? ‘In my generation calling someone chubby [was funny] \u2014 in Love Actually there were jokes about that. Those jokes aren’t any longer funny.’<\/p>\n
But the thing is, Curtis family, they bloody well are. I’m beginning to wonder if Scarlett has ever, actually, watched the film.<\/p>\n
Natalie is radiant, sweet, working-class and decidedly not chubby \u2014 which is the whole point. The joke is not on her, but those who criticise her. She shines with optimism and goodness and all being right with the world \u2014 the scene where she kisses Grant’s Prime Minister at the school Christmas concert never fails to have me in bits.<\/p>\n
She doesn’t crumble in the face of what the world throws at her \u2014 groping presidents, an emotionally abusive boyfriend \u2014 because she is more than her physical beauty.<\/p>\n
We should all be more Natalie. Say we love someone, put ourselves out there, ignore a man’s reticence and just go for it.<\/p>\n
I’ve never had the courage to ask a man out, yet she sends a very forward Christmas card to the Prime Minister!<\/p>\n
Notting Hill came in for some stick, too. Scarlett says: ‘There was a notable lack of people of colour in a film called Notting Hill \u2014 one of the birthplaces of the British black civil rights movement.’<\/p>\n
But the whole film is a fantasy. Movie stars do not marry bookshop owners. And, no small thing for its time, it wasn’t utterly without diversity, as evidenced by one character being a wheelchair user.<\/p>\n
I treasure Notting Hill, even though I can’t afford to live in the real place. It’s Roman Holiday, but the boy gets the girl in the end.<\/p>\n
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Richard Curtis has reportedly tied the knot with his partner of 33 years Emma Freud, following two failed proposals (pictured together in 2022)<\/p>\n
They live in an idyllic London garden square, when we all know these places are infected with draconian rules, dog poo and oligarchs. It’s fiction. Curtis’s films were fun and clever, but above all \u2014 like all the best rom coms \u2014 they were wonderful, escapist entertainment, never made to carry the weight of political meaning. You laugh, you cry, you forget for a couple of hours. You care about each and every character because they are not tokens or box tickers.<\/p>\n
Similar criticisms have been levelled at the sitcom Friends. There have been calls for the episodes featuring a teenage ‘Fat Monica’ (Monica: ‘The camera adds ten pounds.’ Chandler: ‘Just how many cameras were on you?’) to be banned. I don’t pretend the show is perfect, but those episodes are among my favourites.<\/p>\n
I’m a recovering anorexic, but I don’t find fat Monica ugly or sad \u2014 she is sweet, funny and, importantly, happier than the OCD stick insect she would later become.<\/p>\n
What next, bleep the lines where Eric Morecambe references Ernie Wise’s short, fat, hairy legs? Or how about Four Weddings And A Funeral, a film Curtis finally sticks up for in his interview with his daughter, saying that Simon Callow, who played Gareth, had told him it was the first time he had been offered the part of a gay man who did not die of Aids.<\/p>\n
Scarlett, a modern-day Mary Whitehouse, isn’t to be appeased, retorting with the fact Gareth dies of a heart attack. I’m sorry, but death doesn’t discriminate. (I wish Curtis had mentioned The Vicar Of Dibley in his defence, entirely centred on a big woman with conker hair who is both beautiful and strong.)<\/p>\n
Comedy stems from all the bad stuff, the mess of life, the disappointment. Should Rebecca be banned, say, as Max is far too old for his new wife, and Manderley is triggering as there aren’t enough homes for locals in Cornwall?<\/p>\n
I’m going to sum up Richard Curtis’s oeuvre: women who have wobbly bits can snare Colin Firth.<\/p>\n
And I say, hurrah! Yes, they come with a touch of fantasy, but are hugely reassuring in a world that isn’t always fantastic. Richard \u2014 your films have been a raft in a storm. You weren’t stupid or wrong. You were a life-saver.<\/p>\n