Richard Curtis

Richard Curtis's winsome romcom seems to be becoming a Christmas staple. Featuring a host of Britain's favourite actors including Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman and Bill Nighy, it delves into the personal lives of 10 very different individuals whose lives become loosely entangled in the run-up to the holiday.

Backlash over Richard Curtis's 10:10 climate film

Short movie backing CO2 campaign is pulled after Four Weddings writer's joke backfires.

Frolics, romance and a VERY frothy farce

Thomas Hardy was not exactly a merry old soul, but this film turns his period romance Far From The Madding Crowd into a sexy frolic that's like a frenzied coupling of Richard Curtis and Jilly Cooper.

When Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews created Father Ted in 1995, they breathed new life into the stereotype of the comedy vicar, a character that for too long had been suffocated by the tyrannical stranglehold of Derek Nimmo. Unfortunately Richard Curtis simultaneously came up with The Vicar of Dibley, a programme as twee and mediocre as any number of Nimmo's cassock-based comedies.

Perhaps realising that the realm of the ecclesiastical sitcom hasn't been successfully exploited in a while, acclaimed comic actor Tom Hollander has co-created Rev, in which he plays a harassed vicar at a struggling inner city London church.

Sadly, despite the talent involved - the cast also includes Alexander Armstrong, Finding Eric's Steve Evets, Peep Show's Olivia Colman and comedian Miles Jupp - this low-key comedy is a disappointment. The blame must lie with writer James Wood, who also wrote the similarly underwhelming media satire Freezing, in which Hollander's ferocious comic performance was the sole highlight.

The jokes in Rev are sparse, weak and principally based around the supposedly amusing conceit of a vicar acting in ways you wouldn't expect. So, the Reverend Adam Smallbone, played with amiable anxiety by the always watchable Hollander, smokes, drinks, swears and enjoys sex with his wife.

So, I imagine, do a lot of modern priests - indeed, a group of them are credited as technical advisors - but that doesn't mean the concept is funny in itself. Father Ted admittedly employed similar material, albeit far more inventively than Wood does.

The opening episode takes underpowered swipes at middle-class pretentions and hypocrisies when Smallbone faces a moral dilemma over the sudden rise in church attendance due to a glowing Ofsted report on a local church school. But the episode just dawdles along and not even Hollander's bumbling charm can save it. Rev, like many sitcoms before, may improve as it goes on, but there's precious little here to encourage you to find out.

Richard Curtis told to redraft Doctor Who script

Four Weddings And A Funeral writer Richard Curtis was told to redraft his Doctor Who episode because the Time Lord talked too much, he has revealed.

Married, Single, Other is more obsessed with matrimony than even Iain Duncan Smith. ITV's new six-part comedy drama asks us to consider which is the most natural state for a grown-up - marriage, being single or living together. It is already hurtling towards the conclusion "none of the above". We refer first to Lillie and Eddie, not only because the actors Lucy Davis and Shaun Dooley make them the far most compelling characters, but because they appear to be content, and have been, so we are told several times, for 16 happily unmarried years.

The only tension in the relationship is Eddie's determination to marry Lillie, a desire that manifests itself in ludicrous romantic gestures on her birthdays, on one of which we join them. "May I refer you to the window?" asks Eddie, opening the curtain on a collage of post-it notes that spell "Will You Marry Me?" Eddie, a blameless paramedic and all round good sort, is a sentimentalist, so soppy you hardly realise that towards the end of the episode he has entered the euthanasia debate on the side of do-not-revive.

He is further goaded toward the altar by the neuroses of his 11-year-old son, who in an embellishment the writer Peter Souter should have thought better of, is a child prodigy and speaks in sitcom clever-clever. Joe (Jack Scanlon) is so anxious that his parents do the proper thing he scripts his father's proposal speeches in a scrapbook. Lillie is having none of it, not merely because she is happily in love as she is (which would have done for me) but because she works at a refuge for battered wives. By the end of last night's opener, rather than book Joe into therapy with her mate Babs, she has relented, however. In the Richard Curtis moment we all feared, she proposes to Eddie at her birthday party.

Among the guests are, of course, Babs who is married to a loser called Dickie, although you might want to abbreviate the name. Dickie, an all-night online gambler, get-rich-quick fantasist and biker, is so broadly written that Dean Lennox Kelly does well to make any sense of him at all in his performance. If only Amanda Abbington could have made us see what he sees in the dreary child shrink she plays. Meanwhile, the inveterate Lothario Clint, played by Ralf Little, has fallen for a blonde model called Abbey, played by Miranda Raison who, natch, is not a bimbo after all but well on to him. Clint: "You have only just met me" Abbey: "I have met you a thousand times before."

Where Souter and his executive producer Andy Harries are going dramatically rather than thematically with all this, I am not sure, and maybe that is a good thing. Souter has mentioned Richard Curtis's name and Andy Harries made Cold Feet, still the gold standard for this kind of post-watershed soap. The programme's titles carry the words "married", "single", "other" with boxes next to them and there is more than an element of box ticking in both the piece's premise and execution. The dialogue needs to unclench and the story needs to be given time to grow organically as the characters, one prays, deepen.

A painfully revealing episode of Radio 4's The Reunion in 2005 shed a bright light on some of the darker recesses of one of television's best-loved topical comedy shows. In this look back, producer and driving force John Lloyd talks again of the backbreaking effort that went into Not the Nine O'Clock News, first shown 30 years ago: "My memory was that it was a nightmare of overwork. I mean, everything was stressful. We used to be green with exhaustion." Not Again looks at a show that launched some great British comic performers, and also Richard Curtis, Clive Anderson and Andy Hamilton, who contributed to the scripts.

The most obvious point about a Richard Curtis comedy is that everybody is quite likeable. This seems pretty basic to me. If you think Bridget Jones has a face like a slapped backside, and a personality to boot, you don't care whether she ends up with Mr Darcy or is left to endure an unhappy marriage with, say, a second-hand car dealer from South Norwood. This was the big problem with Mister Eleven. The heroine, the Bridget Jones of this particular romcom, was absolutely ghastly in every way. She was spoilt, silly, self-absorbed and seemed to be a bit thick, despite being a maths whiz. About 10 minutes into the action, she whipped out her mobile phone and called a convenient shoulder to cry on. "Just this once," said her chosen shoulder, "get over yourself." In our house, there was cheering and high-fiving.

Here is the plot. Saz Paley is a maths teacher who has been obsessed by numbers from a very early age. We know she's a maths teacher because she says "quadratic equations" every so often, and is keen on prob­ability. She tells us, for example, that most women marry the 11th man they sleep with. So Saz, for reasons best known to herself, but essential to getting the show on the road, marries a doctor called Dan for that reason. But, wouldn't you know it, she discovers at the reception that he's not Mister Eleven after all. Mr Nine shows up unexpectedly (as somebody's boyfriend) and reveals that she was too drunk to do anything worthwhile on their one-night stand. Cue collapse of marriage.

What Sazza should probably do next is consult her GP and get something done about her obsessive personality. What she does instead is try to rekindle her relationship with nice Mr Four, who turns out to be married with twins. "Twins?" Saz says. "You must have fantastic sperm." Frankly, it's astonishing that Saz has managed to sleep with four men, let alone 10.

Am I being harsh? Perhaps so, but I suspect that the director also worried about the thin thread on which the plot was attempting to balance. The script works very, very hard to keep us interested. Everything moves quickly, and the action switches every so often to a classroom, which is possibly also Saz's imagination.

Anyway, eventually the inevitable happens. Mr Nine (alias Alex the Australian) meets Saz in a hospital, to which location the plot has inevitably propelled her. You remember, of course, that Saz's husband, Dan, is a doctor. So you'll know what happens next. Alex and Saz embrace passionately. Enter Dan. With non-hilarious consequences.

In the interests of balance, I should warn you that my view of Mister Eleven might possibly be the result of bitterness and middle age. It seems only yesterday that I went to see the film Local Hero and emerged from the cinema as the women in our party swore undying devotion to Denis Lawson, that film's official love interest. In Mister Eleven, he plays an old bloke who is clearly going to have a heart attack or somesuch in episode two. What you have been reading so far could well be a midlife crisis.

Shown on Christmas Day last year, this 60-minute documentary was made to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the sitcom. Rowan Atkinson talks about the development of his character, Edmund Blackadder, plus there are interviews with the core cast (Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Tony Robinson) and writing team (Ben Elton and Richard Curtis).

First shown last Christmas, this tremendous documentary tells the Blackadder story, describing the evolution of the main characters, not least Blackadder's transition from nerdy idiot to suave Elizabethan courtier. Tribute is paid to the vital contribution made by Miranda Richardson in her role as Queenie. Hugh Laurie acknowledges his high levels of stress. Then there are all the tensions that came from having so many creative people fighting their corner. "I remember it like a heart attack," Richard Curtis says.