Six years after his last venture into feature-film directing with Love Actually, the reigning Britcom king Richard Curtis returns with another typically sweet but insubstantial ensemble piece. Set in 1966, The Boat That Rocked stars Tom Sturridge as an innocent young pup sent by his bohemian mother to learn some valuable life lessons aboard Radio Rock, a pirate radio vessel moored in the English Channel.
The station's dandyish owner, played with typically louche charm by Bill Nighy, lives on board with a dysfunctional family of disc jockeys including Philip Seymour Hoffman's loudmouth American export, Chris O'Dowd's wholesome Irish romantic and Nick Frost's British prankster. Later, a celebrity DJ played by Rhys Ifans joins this motley gang of music-loving outlaws.
Life at Radio Rock is painted as one long party punctuated by visits from young women and a jaunty soundtrack of 1960s pop classics, from the Rolling Stones to the Beach Boys to Leonard Cohen. But it can't last, of course. Back in London, Kenneth Branagh's fun-hating government minister is plotting to shut down the station, condemning it as a "sewer of dirty and irresponsible commercialism".
Curtis has long nurtured plans to make a film about the golden age of pirate radio, and it is certainly a fertile subject. Even at the height of the Swinging Sixties, Britain's state-controlled BBC networks broadcast just a few hours of pop music a week. As a consequence, wily entrepreneurs exploited growing public demand by setting up unlicensed stations in rusty fishing ships and disused wartime sea forts, most located in international waters just outside UK jurisdiction. Radio Rock is closely modelled on one of the era's most famous real-life pirate stations, Radio Caroline.
The UK government responded with the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act of August 1967, outlawing pirate broadcasters on flimsy pretexts, including the potential risks they allegedly represented to shipping and emergency services. Just weeks later, the BBC purposely killed off the market for illegal stations by launching its own official pop network, Radio 1, largely staffed by former pirate DJs. And thus, in effect, both sides won.
The film presses plenty of familiar buttons for Curtis fans. Nighy, Ifans and Thompson all previously worked with the writer-director on Notting Hill and Love Actually. Like Andie MacDowell and Julia Roberts before him, Hoffman is the obligatory token Hollywood star, acting everyone else off the screen. And Sturridge arguably steps into Hugh Grant's shoes as the shy, posh young hero.
Alas, the film also amplifies many of the classic Curtis flaws that made Love Actually such a lukewarm experience. The episodic plot is painfully slight, built on laboured jokes and contrivances that would barely keep a cheap TV sitcom afloat. The director tries to plug these gaping holes with zany musical montages, most of them uncomfortably akin to Austin Powers-style retro spoofs.
Worse still, the cluttered cast of characters are all thinly drawn, with most reduced to a single cartoonish quality. The heroes are unanimously loveable, romantic clowns. The villains are pantomime-stuffed shirts, pompous and small-minded but essentially benign. Nobody gets hurt. Everybody gets rewarded. Mild, temporary disappointment is about as bad as life gets in Curtisworld.
Sweet, shallow optimism may be a useful stance for breezing through life, but it does not make for great cinema. A recent profile in Britain's Observer newspaper depicted Curtis as the unofficial in-house film director for Tony Blair's New Labour government. Like Blair's Britain, the article claimed, Curtisworld is a semi-mythical kingdom where sunny sound bites mask a squeamish disregard for real problems. Stretching this theory to snapping point, the writer concluded by interpreting The Boat That Rocked as an epitaph for post-Blair Britain, a ship of fools sunk by its own idealism.
Fanciful, perhaps, but the political context behind the film is genuinely fascinating. This fabled battle to rule Britannia's airwaves took place under Harold Wilson's modernising Labour government, an administration obsessed by mass communication and promoting British youth culture as a global brand - another uncanny parallel with the Blair regime.
Alas, Curtis clearly found such real-life ironies and contradictions too messy to make a historically accurate film. Instead, he settles for an infantile, clichéd showdown between the stuffy forces of conservatism and the liberated young groovers of the Swinging Sixties. The Boat That Rocked features a fine cast, but sets them adrift in a waterlogged, rudderless vessel that ultimately sinks under the weight of its own sugar-coated smugness.
NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
England World Cup squad
Eoin Morgan (capt), Moeen Ali, Jofra Archer, Jonny Bairstow, Jos Buttler (wkt), Tom Curran, Liam Dawson, Liam Plunkett, Adil Rashid, Joe Root, Jason Roy, Ben Stokes, James Vince, Chris Woakes, Mark Wood
The White Lotus: Season three
Creator: Mike White
Starring: Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Natasha Rothwell
Rating: 4.5/5
The rules on fostering in the UAE
A foster couple or family must:
- be Muslim, Emirati and be residing in the UAE
- not be younger than 25 years old
- not have been convicted of offences or crimes involving moral turpitude
- be free of infectious diseases or psychological and mental disorders
- have the ability to support its members and the foster child financially
- undertake to treat and raise the child in a proper manner and take care of his or her health and well-being
- A single, divorced or widowed Muslim Emirati female, residing in the UAE may apply to foster a child if she is at least 30 years old and able to support the child financially
Under 19 World Cup
Group A: India, Japan, New Zealand, Sri Lanka
Group B: Australia, England, Nigeria, West Indies
Group C: Bangladesh, Pakistan, Scotland, Zimbabwe
Group D: Afghanistan, Canada, South Africa, UAE
UAE fixtures
Saturday, January 18, v Canada
Wednesday, January 22, v Afghanistan
Saturday, January 25, v South Africa
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Skewed figures
In the village of Mevagissey in southwest England the housing stock has doubled in the last century while the number of residents is half the historic high. The village's Neighbourhood Development Plan states that 26% of homes are holiday retreats. Prices are high, averaging around £300,000, £50,000 more than the Cornish average of £250,000. The local average wage is £15,458.
Tips to avoid getting scammed
1) Beware of cheques presented late on Thursday
2) Visit an RTA centre to change registration only after receiving payment
3) Be aware of people asking to test drive the car alone
4) Try not to close the sale at night
5) Don't be rushed into a sale
6) Call 901 if you see any suspicious behaviour
