Richard Curtis rarely rewatches Four Weddings and a Funeral. “There isn’t a natural circumstance where I say, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do for the next two hours, see one of my films.’” Partly, it is due to knowing the punchlines. Partly, it is being a bit busy. On the wall of Curtis’s home office in Notting Hill, in London – stucco fireplace, neon art, whopping clock – just out of frame of his laptop camera, are six Post-it reminders of pre-Christmas tasks. Wrap presents? Make pud? Nope: rewrite a film, cast an online panto, appoint a new chief executive for Comic Relief. Etc.
Anyway, for those of us a bit less pressed, things are different. Four Weddings – in which Hugh Grant’s stuttering bachelor, in a series of morning suits, woos Andie MacDowell – was the runaway winner in a new, slightly strange poll to find Britain’s most rewatchable movie. In a list of 50 films drawn up by the British Film Institute and Google Pixel, the tale of Charles and Carrie took 49 per cent of the votes, with the James Bond film Skyfall on 37 per cent and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on 33 per cent.