Richard Curtis: Sunny side up

Yesterday, I was watching a DVD of Love Actually - written and directed by Richard Curtis - and my thoughts turned to Iris Murdoch.

Yesterday, I was watching a DVD of Love Actually - written and directed by Richard Curtis - and my thoughts turned to Iris Murdoch.

Superficially, Murdoch and Curtis have a surprising amount in common: her novels, like the films he has had a hand in (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's Diary), tend to take place in a narrow, upper-middle-class segment of London society, and involve a large cast of somewhat cardboard characters having a lot of sex. In particular, though, I found myself thinking of Murdoch's 1968 novel The Nice and the Good, which as the title suggests revolves around the distinction between those two concepts.

The films Curtis has written (and, in the case of Love Actually, directed) are, undeniably, nice - they feature pleasant, decent people in comfortable circumstances finding true love and happiness, plus some decent jokes. Sometimes the niceness is made even more explicit, as in the opening moments of Love Actually, when Hugh Grant in voiceover argues that love actually is everywhere and makes the world go round.

Audiences are meant to leave the cinema feeling that life is not so bad after all, and by and large, they probably do.

So, nice, yes: but good? Good is not the word. It's hard to know where to begin: the bit where Hugh Grant's shy, bumbling prime minister decides to end publicly the special relationship, on account of how the American president has been groping the potty-mouthed tea lady he fancies? Oof. Or the bit where Grant starts singing carols for three of the most adorable little girls in party dresses? Ouch.

The bit where the adorable little boy sprints past airport security to plight his troth with the most popular girl in the school before she departs for America? Jesus wip-wippety-wept.

Sometimes it's not the moment itself so much as the uncanny familiarity: the touching speech at the funeral by the loved one - John Hannah in Four Weddings, Liam Neeson in Love Actually; the last-minute dash for the airport; the declarations of love; Hugh Grant's very English bumbling; the very unEnglish snow; the swearing.

Curtis himself has said: "The worst moment of my life was when I watched Notting Hill and thought: 'Oh, God, it's exactly the same as Four Weddings and a Funeral.' I'd been working on it for four years and it never occurred to me..."

This is barely credible: the similarities certainly struck everyone who saw both films, including, surely, the executives who financed it and saw no harm in repeating a formula that had worked so well before.

Four Weddings and a Funeral had been the most successful British film ever; Notting Hill overtook it. And sometimes the formulae are repeated within films, not just between them: when Neeson's funeral oration culminates in a rendition of "Bye Bye Baby", the comic-sentimental impact is somewhat diminished by the fact that we've only just seen a wedding culminate with a performance of "All You Need Is Love". Must every formal occasion be enlivened by a semi-appropriate pop song?

Still, as I say, the sunniness of the Weltanschauung on display is indisputable. According to the Freudian logic to which we still all tend to subscribe, all this light ought to conceal some darkness.

As it happens, Curtis's best work - by which I mean principally Blackadder, but also parts of Four Weddings... - does have a darker side: death and sarcasm obtrude on every side, and the attainment of happiness seems to involve a certain amount of trampling on the feelings of others. But in Curtis's private life, darkness seems to have been very effectively banished: he is, by all accounts, both extremely nice, and rather good.

He was brought up in cosseted circumstances. His father, an executive at Unilever, followed his job to postings around the world; so that the young Richard, after spending his earliest days in New Zealand, lived in Manila and Stockholm before attending prep school in England, followed by Harrow and Oxford. Perhaps the insularity of the social world of his films has its roots in that upbringing: expatriate families can be very close knit and inward-looking, as can public schools and Oxbridge colleges. That's not to say that Curtis has never seen the world outside, or has a naive ignorance of its nasty side, but it wouldn't be surprising if he felt at home inside a comfy bubble.

Reading between the lines, it is possible to gather that success did not come easily. One of his favourite anecdotes concerns his first attempt at a film script, when he was in his 20s, and got a commission from an American producer; after two and a half years' writing, he flew out to Hollywood to meet a plainly uninterested director, and a panel of studio people who told him that they loved everything about the film except the leads, the plot, and the too-British dialogue. That only leaves the title, Curtis said. Ah, they said, they didn't like that either. So he flew back to Britain, and got sued for non-completion.

He tells this now as a good gag; but it's hard to imagine that the rejection of more than two years' work was anything other than devastating to a young man. Critics have pointed out, too, that while his films have happy endings, they usually start in love lost or rejected; and it has been suggested that this trope has its roots in some early amour fou - Anne Jenkin, wife of the MP Bernard, has been touted as Curtis's "Rosebud".

These days, though, he seems to have created a comfort zone, which even extends into the fabric of his films. Notoriously, his front door was used extensively in Notting Hill, which may well have bumped up the asking price when he sold the house shortly afterwards, while the bookshop where Hugh Grant worked was downstairs from his office.

Keeping things close to home, he employs his long-term partner, Emma Freud, as script editor - he has spoken of the dread he feels at seeing CDB, her acronym for "Could Do Better", scrawled next to a scene.

He has said: "I like to work with people who are fond of me, who really know me." And his CV bears that out. The same names crop up over and over: Hugh Grant, of course, Emma Thompson, Rowan Atkinson. The partnership with Atkinson goes back the furthest: the pair performed together in revue at Oxford, where Atkinson's effortless hogging of the laughs persuaded Curtis that he was not cut out for a career on stage.

He turned to writing the gags, and rode Atkinson's coat-tails - as he himself has put it - into Not the Nine O'Clock News, where he wrote a number of the most fondly remembered sketches, including most of the funny songs and the one where Atkinson walks into a lamp post.

Blackadder followed, and cameos for Atkinson in all the romantic comedies, not to mention Mr Bean. (A new Bean film is in the pipeline - in an intriguing development, this one is to be directed by Simon McBurney of Theatre de Complicite). Other long-term collaborators include Dawn French, for whom he created The Vicar of Dibley, Helen Fielding, a girlfriend at Oxford, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay for Bridget Jones, and Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, of Working Title, who have produced all his films.

One side effect of this loyalty is that, pleasingly, nobody has a bad word to say about him. He seems to have no vices - doesn't smoke, doesn't get drunk. One profile, a few years ago, managed to dig up the information that he once got in trouble for taking the colour supplement out of a Sunday paper at a newsstand; otherwise, no breath of scandal attaches to his name.

But as I say, the remarkable thing about Curtis is that he is not only nice, but good. In 1985, in the wake of Live Aid, he was invited by Oxfam to visit Ethiopia, and see the results of famine for himself. He left convinced that he had to do whatever was in his power towards solving the problems of poverty and debt in the developing world.

The result was Comic Relief, which Curtis co-founded and of which he has been vice-chairman for the past 18 years, which has raised more than £337m since its inception. He has said: "I think it's a responsibility of people who have had very lucky lives indeed to try to spread some of that around. And why would I not be positive about people?"

In the past few months, he has pinned his colours more firmly to the mast than before, publicly declaring that he would be taking the whole of 2005 off to concentrate on charity work.

He started the year as he meant to go on, with a New Year's Day edition of The Vicar of Dibley that ended with shots of starving women in Africa, followed by a gag-free tableau in which French and her sitcom parishioners displayed their "Make Poverty History" wristbands for the cameras.

And tonight, in the run-up to the G8 summit at Gleneagles, the BBC will be broadcasting a new film he has written to mark the occasion.

The Girl in the Café is, once more, a romantic comedy about a shy bachelor finding true love, but with the added difficulty that our hero - played by the ever-lovely Bill Nighy - is a senior Treasury civil servant whose responsibilities include debt relief for the developing world.

The quiet girl he falls in love with - Kelly Macdonald - accompanies him to a G8 summit at Reykjavik (a location chosen, apparently, purely for its remoteness from Africa), where she proceeds to embarrass the leaders of the industrialised world by pointing out the human consequences of their neglect of Africa.

In interviews, Curtis has spoken about wanting to "engage" with an issue of the moment. In all honesty, this is rather a grand word for what The Girl in the Café does - a couple of impassioned speeches does not an engagement make - and a little plausibility wouldn't have done any harm. But as directed by David Yates, who made the political thriller State of Play, it has a bleak visual beauty that suits the themes.

There is also, towards the end, a twist that not only explains the diffidence of Macdonald's character but also gives the whole film a grim thematic coherence - not a phrase anybody has ever had to use in connection with Richard Curtis before. For once, a film by Curtis shows signs of being not only nice but, in more ways than one, good.

A Life in Brief

BORN 8 November 1956 in New Zealand.

FAMILY Two sons and one daughter with partner Emma Freud.

EDUCATION Papplewick School; Harrow School; Christ Church, Oxford (BA).

CAREER Began writing comedy after leaving Oxford University in 1978. First job in television screenwriting was Not the Nine O'Clock News (four series), 1979-83; followed by Blackadder (co-written with Ben Elton); Mr Bean, and The Vicar of Dibley. Films include The Tall Guy, 1988; Four Weddings and a Funeral, 1994; Bean, 1997; Notting Hill, 1999; Bridget Jones's Diary, 2001 (jointly with Helen Fielding and Andrew Davies); and Love Actually, 2003 (writer and director). Appointed an MBE in 1995 and a CBE in 2000.

HE SAYS "People think the G8 is a vegetable drink. We'll be trying to make the G8 a less frightening thing for people."

THEY SAY "Richard has the rare gift of being able to mingle comedy with tragedy. Hardly anyone else can do that."
Actor Bill Nighy