The Vicar of Dibley meets BLM: is Richard Curtis trying to atone for Notting Hill?
In next Monday’s episode of The Vicar of Dibley, Dawn French’s affable Geraldine Granger will take the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. It has proved immediately controversial.
Cries of #DefundTheBBC erupted in some corners of Twitter last night, with claims that the overtly political segment compromises the broadcaster’s impartiality guidelines. Others expressed disappointment that The Vicar of Dibley in Lockdown would offer no lighthearted escapism from the year’s public health crisis and political turmoil.
Three ten-minute specials of the beloved sitcom about village life, starring Dawn French as affable vicar Geraldine Kennedy, to be broadcast over the festive period, are packed with Zoom sermons, virtual quizzes and design-your-own face mask contests. The pandemic has not left Dibley untouched – and neither has Black Lives Matter.
In the second episode, the Rev spends a few minutes telling a parishioner that the residents of Dibley need to focus on justice for their black countrymen and women in the wake of George Floyd’s murder; then she pins a Black Lives Matter poster to the village notice board and takes a knee.
The earnest two-minute segment feels like something of a personal mea culpa from its writer Richard Curtis, whose record when it comes to portraying black lives onscreen is problematic.
Historically, he simply hasn’t. Best known for writing and directing such iconic Nineties romcoms as Four Weddings and Funeral, and Notting Hill, Curtis has been criticised in recent years for the noticeable lack of significant black characters in his films by critics and viewers alike.
Notting Hill in particular, which is set in one of the most diverse areas of London – it is also the setting for Steve McQueen’s Small Axe films about London’s West Indian communities in the Sixties and Seventies currently showing on the BBC – is whitewashed.
Hugh Grant stars as a floppy-haired owner of a travel bookshop off Portobello road, the dire financial straits of which are constantly alluded to but don’t seem to have any serious effects beyond necessitating that its young owner to share his three-storey town house with another bloke. Presumably, after his marriage to the international film star played by Julia Roberts, financial worries will take something of a backseat.
The only black character in the film with a speaking part is a security guard. This proved painfully prophetic: the gentrification caused by the arrival in Notting Hill of just the kind of residents that the film is about – white, wealthy and bohemian – has by now gradually edged out much of the area’s historic black population.
SimiLarly in 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, there’s hardly a non-white face to be seen, although it’s worth remembering that Curtis was hardly the only filmmaker of the Nineties with a diversity problem. By the time he made Love Actually in 2003, Curtis seems to have woken up to the fact that it might be desirable to at least give some black characters names. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Peter, the unwitting apex of a love triangle involving his best friend Mark (Andrew Lincoln) and Juliet (Keira Knightley), with whom he walks down the aisle at the opening of the film to a gospel version of All You Need is Love.
Tony, sceptical best friend of Kris Marshall’s Yankophile Colin, and Annie, personal aid to Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister, are also played by actors of colour. But as many have since pointed out – and as the impossibility of describing who they are without reference to white characters attests to – the mere presence of named black characters is not enough. Peter is the only black character to be part of a major storyline and his role in the love triangle is by far the least interesting of the three people involved: he’s on the sofa munching takeaway as one of the most famous film scenes of the Noughties plays out on his doorstep.
Offscreen too, the issue of race has come up in Curtis's career. He has made headlines for his work with Comic Relief, the Africa-focussed anti-poverty charity that he set up in 1985 with comedian Lenny Henry (who is also Dawn French’s ex-husband). Its annual Red Nose Day telethons, broadcast live on the BBC, used skits, sketches and emotional clips of UK celebrities doing aid work to raise millions in donations.
However in 2019, it came under public fire after BBC presenter Stacey Dooley posted a picture of herself on Instagram with a young Ugandan child with the caption “OB.SESSSSSSSSSSED.” Labour MP David Lammy said that in sending celebrities abroad as “white saviours”, Comic Relief was “perpetuating tired and unhelpful stereotypes.” The show suffered an ￡8 million fall in donations that year and Curtis had to testify before MPs that the charity would stop sending celebrities abroad.
Since then, Curtis has taken pains to acknowledge that the whiteness of his films has aged badly. Reflecting on his Nineties work on Newsnight this summer, he said “I think I would write different movies now. Things do change and that is what is exciting about a moment like this.” His 2019 film Yesterday, in which a young man discovers that the entire world has forgotten the music of the Beatles, stars British actor Himesh Patel, whose parents are African-born Gujarati.
Some will feel that Dibley’s BLM segment has more to do with Curtis rehabilitating his own image than combating racism. There is a cringiness to the sight of Geraldine kneeling silently on an empty village green, as organ music plays in the background, before nipping off for an afternoon sherry, that feels at odds with a global movement committing to dismantling systemic racism.
It is possible, of course, that Curtis has one eye on his legacy. As the films that made him famous prove increasingly dated – recall Daniel Cleaver emailing an employee about her tits in Bridget Jones’s Diary – perhaps he is feeling the pressure to produce more future-proof content. Will Dawn French kneeling on a village green make its way into telly canon? Better ask the Vicar.
