pirate radio - Pirate Radio

Pirate Radio
Richard Curtis
Universal Pictures
2009

I doubt that there will ever be a better pirate radio film than Pump Up the Volume although the series People Just Do Nothing is a strong offering. Pirate Radio, also called The Boat that Rocked, is leagues below its predecessor (that's a pun for a boat movie). This kind of movie... well, a lot of effort must go into every movie, but who could care about a movie like this? It's the usual colorful cast of randy characters (if they were american I'd call them zany) who have somewhat amusing things happen in their lives. This is a movie, this is the basic movie concept, now fill the picture out with a time (the sixties) and place (England) - and for an extra dose of novelty, it's set on one of the boats that broadcast rock music at England from its coastal waters.

The film has a lot of people who are in funny shows, Roy from The IT Crowd, Rhys Darby, whose really funny, is here, and so is the rotund guy from all the Simon Pegg films. Philip Hoffman is here too, presumably because he played Lester Bangs in another rock movie. I find sixties nostalgia to be obnoxious most of the time, with everyone dressed goofy and their floppy hair and groovy talking and the pretense that all those rock songs that people my age have mostly heard in TV commercials and movies all our lives were so magical and dangerous to the establishment. Now, in 2016, the sound of the electric guitar is a basic signifier of youthful rebellion in TV commercials.

So the film shows scenes from the boat, interspersed by the gray offices of anti-rock members of parliament who want the boats shut down. Through most of the movie, the "pirates" aren't breaking the law, and it seems likely to me that the term 'pirate' was applied retrospectively. So that's it, they're shut down, they keep going for a bit but that is pretty much the end of the floating broadcasters. What's interesting is that while this is supposedly the end of the era, rock radio became pretty dominant afterwards (in real life) while London is just one location that continues to have a pirate radio scene with complicated signaling systems. Really what these boats broadcast was a commercially viable alternative to the BBC.

The film shows the impact of the station by showing different people's reactions at different places. A girl in her bedroom listening, a group of people at some work place, some old guy dancing. This is where the difference is most significant from Pump up the Volume, where the radio of happy hard harry is also shown to pierce the community, but its also woven into it.