Screenwriter Russell T Davies has blamed Hugh Grant’s bumbling character in Four Weddings and a Funeral for “infecting the whole of fiction”.
Davies, the former Doctor Who showrunner about to return to Channel 4 with Cucumber (among other things), said he was determined to create the antithesis of Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings creation, Charles, as portrayed by Grant in the 1994 romantic comedy.
“It’s infected the whole of fiction, so that men in every drama you turn on are mostly playing variations of Hugh Grant in Four Weddings,” Davies told Radio Times.
“They’ve been doing this for 20 years. I absolutely wanted to stop that. Everything is written in that tone of voice now, the ironic tone of voice. The not-quite-being-honest voice.”
Davies, who also created Channel 4’s Queer As Folk, examines “the passions and pitfalls of 21st-century gay life” in Cucumber.
He insisted that he loved Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral but said of his new protagonist, Henry: “I wanted to write a man who doesn’t resort to those speech patterns. I could do that reflexive voice for Henry easily, but I just want to make him tougher and harder.”
Or, to put it less succinctly: “I really feel, ah, in short, to recap it slightly in a clearer version, the words of David Cassidy in fact, er, while he was still with the Partridge family … Is there anything decent on Channel 4 tonight?”
