Boat on the Rocks

Sometimes, you have all the ingredients needed to bake a cake, but the cake turns out disappointing. In the case of “The Boat That Rocked” there were plenty of first-rate ingredients – interesting story, talented writer, a whole cast of seasoned players. Alas, the movie they made is a tedious mess with the inclusion of a few unpalatable bits you would prefer not to swallow.

The story is loosely based on the unlicensed commercial radio station ‘Radio Caroline’ which for a period in the swinging 60′s broadcast for a few hours a day to a UK audience hungry for pop music.

The government were determined to take action against Radio Caroline which cheekily broadcast from ships moored just outside territorial waters. In fact, so incensed were the authorities that they dubbed it a pirate radio station.

Compared with actual pirates their activities seem today rather innocuous, but apart from the output of the BBC, whose ‘Light Programme’ did not include anything so exciting, at that time listeners had only Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg which broadcast every evening in English, to the UK. Operating as it did from a sovereign European country, the British government were powerless to stop Radio Luxembourg. But they were not going to tolerate a ship-based unregulated commercial radio station.

Writer Richard Curtis has generalised this story around the fictional Radio Rock and attempted to graft on a romantic comedy of sorts. On paper, I bet a lot of the gags and setups in the script looked promising. But with films, the audience need to quickly settle in so that momentum can develop and carry them along. If it falters early on, then the audience is less receptive and it’s an uphill struggle to get laughs.

For example, the junior minister charged with finding a way to shut them down is called ‘Twatt’. Embedded in a Blackadder script this surname would, no doubt, have been side-splitting. Here it just seems puerile.

Curtis isn’t overly careful with anachronisms, either. The Beatles are entirely absent from the soundtrack. Some of the music is later than 1966, and I am willing to bet that ‘condom’, ‘think outside the box’, ‘I’m a lesbian’ and ‘big time’ would not often have been heard in the mid-sixties.

As the credits finally roll, the audience is reminded that the UK now has hundreds of commercial 24 hour music stations, and a flourishing music industry. As if all this is thanks to the brave idealistic pioneering outlaws who ran Radio Caroline.

Well, shortly after it was shut down (by Tony Benn in actual fact), as a direct result we did get the newly-created BBC Radio One which employed some of Caroline’s former disc jockeys. Funded by the licence fee, there were none of the adverts which were the real raison d’etre of Radio Caroline. But neither Caroline nor Radio One have ever been subversive or revolutionary, and by the time commercial radio was introduced in the UK, Caroline was a distant memory.

There is an assumption that this broadcasting metamorphosis has been beneficial, that freedom fighters suffered at the hand of an oppressive establishment so that we may enjoy the commercial radio we have today. But what does that amount to, really? Smashy and Nicey 24 hours a day.