If there is anything more boring than actors saying nice things about other actors, I have yet to be subjected to it. There was quite a lot of that in Channel 4’s There’s Something About Rom-Coms .
There is a definitive documentary to be made on the history and development of romcoms – and what they say about the relationships of their eras – but, like a disappointing love affair, this was not The One. There were brief mentions of films such as Bringing Up Baby and Some Like It Hot, before heading straight to When Harry Met Sally. Annie Hall was dumped.
Our journey through depictions of straight, white people falling in love fizzled out towards the end with the inexplicable inclusion of the Inbetweeners Movie – a com, but a hardly a rom, particularly for the young women involved – and there was a mishmash of films, seemingly based on the interviewees that were available. So we finish with the so-so divorce comedy I Give It a Year only because, as far as I can tell, they got Stephen Merchant to talk about it (also, the film was scheduled for right after this programme).
There was some familiar stuff (please can we agree never to go over Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm scene or Bridget Jones’s big pants or Cameron Diaz using semen as hair gel again?) but the talking heads made up for it. Richard Curtis was excellent, and I liked PJ Hogan, the director of Muriel’s Wedding. The story, told by Tom Hanks, of how My Big Fat Greek Wedding was made, was as serendipitous and heartwarming as any good romcom plot.
The highlight, though, had to be Hugh Grant. He also says nice things about other actors, but always with an acidic tone. He loves Colin Firth, but only because he’s “just about the only actor I like in the whole world as a human being”. Martine McCutcheon, his Love Actually match, is “brilliant, a natural”, but also “a useful grounding presence among all these Oxbridge ponces who make these films”.
Someone needs to make him do a one-man show, An Audience With type-affair in which Grant, a self-confessed “angry middle-aged man” gets increasingly, wittily vitriolic and ends the night high on temazepam and whisky (the secret ingredient in his singing scenes in the film Music and Lyrics, he informs us).
The real-life romcom in this programme is playing out between Grant and Curtis. Curtis didn’t want the actor for Four Weddings and a Funeral. “I kept saying he won’t be right, he’ll ruin the film,” he says. Grant was too handsome and too posh. He didn’t really want him for Notting Hill either, because, thanks to Four Weddings, he was now too famous. Curtis must be a very good actor, because when he says that in Bridget Jones’s Diary, Grant played “an absolute bastard, which is, of course, the [role] that he had to do the least acting for”, he looks like he really means it.
Grant goes off with someone else – namely, American director Marc Lawrence, during which they make the grammar-pedant nightmare that is Two Weeks Notice, followed by several more romcoms (Lawrence’s description of how he almost got Grant eaten by a bear injects a bit of drama into this cosy relationship).
The programme says all romantic comedies need three elements: a meet, a lose and a get. So will Curtis and Grant ever get back together?
Posh Pawn (Channel 4), returning for its fifth series, followed the fortunes of Prestige, a small chain of high-end pawn shops. They deal in vintage cars, jewellery, lifesize sculptures of David Beckham – that sort of thing. “He looks so sexy,” says one of the women who works there, before installing the footballer’s torso – curiously missing the legs that made him famous – in the shop window. He looks, I think, like Beckham will when we eventually embalm him and lay him in state. Pale and a bit emaciated. Not all that sexy.
Worse is the feeling we’re being invited to smirk at Keeley, who is delightfully eccentric and trying to pawn a couple of designer handbags to build a house in her garden for her hairless cat, Cedric. It will be fancy – there will be chandeliers and a chaise longue. “My poor cat’s going to be so upset if I can’t get my £2,000 to build his mansion,” she says.
Luckily for Cedric, she gets the cash – as does everyone else. One woman, dreaming of chart success and pawning her mother’s jewellery to record an album, is offered three times what she asked for; a man is offered double the £250,000 he wanted for his 1973 Porsche. And the legless Beckham went for £10,000. Where was the drama? Even Antiques Roadshow has a good quota of dashed dreams.
