Brigands of the Air Waves

Over the weekend I finally got around to watching Richard Curtis' 2009 movie about sixties pirate radio, The Boat That Rocked. Disappointing, is probably the kindest thing I can say about it. Leaving aside the film's structural problems - a complete lack of compelling narrative, a shaky sense of period, the fact that it is little more than a series of episodes involving well-known actors mainly phoning in their performances and the fact that Portland Bay is a poor substitute for the North Sea - I just felt that it was a missed opportunity. There's a great film to be made about the pirate radio boom of the 1960s, but this wasn't it. Curtis is so keen to portray the owner of 'Radio Rock' in the film, (payed by Bill Nighy as, well, the 'Bill Nighy' character), as an iconoclastic anti-authoritarian champion of free speech and rock music, that he is forced to completely falsify the historical context in which it is set. Nighy's character is shown as opposing an apparently right-wing authoritarian government composed of upper class kill joys, determined not to let the UK's airwaves be contaminated by the evil sound of rock music.

In reality, it was a Labour government, led by railwayman's son Harold Wilson, which ultimately brought in the legislation to try and close down the pirates. Admittedly, the Minister who actually framed the Maritime Offences Act, which made their activities illegal, was Tony Benn, who was actually from an aristocratic family, but he had renounced his title to pursue his socialist political ambitions. In reality, also, the owners of the pirate radio stations tended to be pretty unpleasant characters: rapacious capitalists intent upon operating outside of the law, with a single aim of making as big a profit and paying as little tax as possible. Whilst the DJs who manned the ships and sea forts where the stations were based might have been passionate about spreading the creed of rock music to the UK, their employers really couldn't have given a toss what their stations were playing, just so long as they could make money off of it. Which they sometimes did - they carried commercials and didn't always pay royalties to the artists they played. They were also often happy to take financing from whacko US religious groups in exchange for airtime. Oh, and let's not forget the support for the Tories they broadcast in the 1970 General Election campaign.

But none of this is reflected in The Boat That Rocked, where everyone on board is devoted only to the mission of playing rock music and shagging birds. The film also fails to reflect the rivalries between the various pirate stations which sometimes erupted into violence, with thugs being sent to try and evict stations from their bases on sea forts and boats. Indeed, these rivalries culminated in one pirate radio station owner shooting dead another after an altercation. Like I said, such events would have made a great movie, but unfortunately that isn't what we got, and I fear the commercial failure of The Boat That Rocked has effectively queered the pitch for the foreseeable future as far as films about pirate radio go.