A 1990s Childhood by Michael Johnson

Author:Michael Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750986533
Publisher: The History Press

Andie MacDowell holding a groundhog. I’m guessing this photo has more to do with her role in Groundhog Day than the part she played in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Throughout the nineties, Hollywood churned out hundreds of comedy movies with something to suit virtually everyone’s taste, from gentle romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998) to the wild and irreverent Wayne’s World (1992) to high-school comedies such as Clueless (1995) and gag-filled spoofs like Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) and, of course, the Naked Gun series, which had begun in 1988 and continued in 1991 with The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear and completed its trilogy in 1993 with Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult.

As well as all the American comedy, our own British film industry contributed a number of outstanding comedy films in the decade, each with that unique and quirky humour that characterises British comedy.

The laughs began in 1990 with Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane dressing up and pretending to be nuns in the somewhat underrated crime caper Nuns on the Run, and continued in 1992 with the end of a thirty-four-year-long era with Carry On Columbus, the last ever (and worst ever) Carry On film.

In 1994, the very British and very smug Hugh Grant smarmily charmed us in his lead role as Charles in the hugely successful Four Weddings and a Funeral, alongside co-stars James Fleet, Simon Callow, John Hannah, Kristin Scott Thomas and Andie MacDowell, the token American in an otherwise all-British cast.

The following year a slightly less smug but equally British Grant starred in the quaint and parochial film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, which was so British it was like having a nice cup of tea and a digestive biscuit inside a red phone box while singing ‘God Save the Queen’. Grant played Reginald Anson, the unfortunate English cartographer who has to break the bad news to a small Welsh village that their mountain is actually only a hill and not technically a mountain after all since it falls slightly short of the 1,000-foot height requirement for a mountain. The local community are so upset that they rally together to build a sort of earthen cairn on top of the hill to raise its height to just over the limit to assure its status as a true mountain.

Only the British film industry could take a gentle story like this and turn it into a worldwide box office success. If Hollywood had tried to make this film, it would have inevitably involved a car chase and a few explosions here and there, but the very subtlety of this film is what gives it its charm.

In 1996 the slightly grittier comedy Brassed Off hit the cinemas, starring Pete Postlethwaite and a young Ewan McGregor. While the film was essentially a romantic comedy with a ‘Romeo and Juliet’-style forbidden romance within a colliery brass band, it was set against the somewhat

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