Hugh Grant: A Life on Screen, review: so charming, this retrospective was impossible to resist
Hugh Grant: A Life on Screen (BBC Two) was actually annoyingly good. This Bafta-made retrospective rummaged through the archives to trace Grant’s career, including an in-depth interview with the award-winning thesp himself.
He’s certainly a more successful film star than political campaigner. The documentary was replete with delicious clips, both from his Richard Curtis romcom era – Four Weddings, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually – and recent TV hit A Very English Scandal.
Footage from his early days in comedy troupe The Jockeys of Norfolk was less widely seen but equally enjoyable. Such floppy hair! Such sharp cheekbones! When he went up for his breakthrough role in Four Weddings and a Funeral, he told his agent: “I think there’s been a mistake. You sent me a good script.”
His former Hollywood co-stars Andie MacDowell and Sandra Bullock palpably adored the crinkly-eyed cad. We heard time and again how ferociously hard he works: endlessly poring over and annotating scripts, doing in-depth research and creating detailed dossiers on his characters. It takes a lot of hard work to make it look this easy.
Just to top things off and foil any lingering desire to dislike him came the chat with the man himself, during which he proved a natural storyteller with a gift for mimicry and sardonic self-deprecation. He called himself “a pretentious Oxbridge ponce” with a “big ego” which “needs stroking”, dismissed his romcom persona as “Mr Oh-Gosh-I-Love-You” and admitted he often “played the same part”.
When offered his villainous role in Paddington 2 (complete with razzle-dazzle dance sequence choreographed by Strictly’s Craig Revel Horwood, trivia fans), the script came with a note: “The baddie is a washed-up, narcissistic actor and we thought of you.”
This was a luvvie backslapping session, rather than a rigorous journalistic endeavour. Grant’s political activities weren’t mentioned and his notorious 1995 arrest for lewd conduct in a public place was tactfully skipped over. Yet with a back catalogue this beloved and a subject so charming, it was impossible to resist.
