The Boat That Rocked

This was an age when pop music was allowed a paltry two hours a day by the BBC, psychedelic flower-power was taking root and DLT could be regarded as a rebel.

Pirate radio wasn’t annoying rappers broadcasting shout-outs to their homies from the top of council blocks but a genuinely popular alternative to the drab conformity of The Light Show.

It's a poptastic location for a comedy - a floating radio station crammed with a cross-section of Sixties-era humanity, well DJs, that are forced to muck in and rock out.

British comedy-writer-in-residence Richard Curtis peoples the fictitious Radio Rock, a rusty tub moored off the Kent coast, with a likeable rogues gallery including Philip Seymour Hoffman's  Emperor Rosko-ish The Count, Nick Frost's lardy loverboy Dave and Rhys Ifans' velvet-clod lothario, er, Gavin.

They're presided over by Bill Nighy playing, well, Bill Nighy in paisley threads, the station manager also keeping an eye on his virginal nephew Carl (Sturridge), who has rather bizarrely been sent to this blokey nest of fizzing libidoes and binge drinking to keep him out of harm's way.

Playing the government bogeyman is Kenneth Branagh, a pinstriped piratefinder general who has seemingly styled himself on a jobsworth out of a 1950s public information film.

Tim Evans