Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.
• Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert… who accidentally cost Britons billions• The American woman who ripped the heart out of Cadbury• The TV genius who turbocharged Trump – and accidentally wrecked Britain
Anyone who only wrote Blackadder, or Mr Bean, or Four Weddings and a Funeral could die knowing that they had had an unusually successful life. To have written, or co-written, them all — as well as Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary (the film, that is) and The Vicar of Dibley — makes for an exceptional creative life.
Yes, Richard Curtis has been massively successful, and he is both talented and industrious. To claim that Blackadder is not funny, or that Four Weddings and a Funeral is not moving, would be downright dishonest.
But one almost has to be talented to have an impact on the national psyche – whether or not it is actually positive. It would take a lot of luck to be that influential without being gifted. Curtis, more than any other filmmaker, helped to shape the British sense of itself between the 1980s and the 2010s. His influence, alas, has been a profoundly annoying one.
