Stop all the Clocks

20 years ago, a man stood in a church, giving a eulogy about his dead lover. When the focus turned to his own thoughts, the surviving half of the couple had to appeal to the congregation. 'Perhaps you will forgive me if I turn from my own feelings to the words of another splendid bugger.' And then he read W.H. Auden's poem 'Funeral Blues', before one of Richard Rodney Bennett's finest scores kicked in. The man was John Hannah and the film was Four Weddings and a Funeral.

At the age of 13, as I was back then, I watched the relationship between John Hannah and Simon Callow’s characters with amazement. It was said that, to all intents and purposes, they were married. Theirs was the first gay relationship I had seen on screen, perhaps at all. This was before I turned to all things Merchant Ivory or found the Tales of the City series on TV. How prescient Richard Curtis was back then, before he bottled it and failed to give a gay relationship a proper 'outing' in Notting Hill or its woefully uneven successor Love, Actually. In a world of disfunction, the seemingly untraditional relationships within Four Weddings and a Funeral were the most traditional.

The film has since furnished me, my family and my friends with the blueprint for our weddings and civil partnership celebrations. I quoted liberally from the script when I was my brother's best man. When he was mine, he repeated the quotation spree. For beyond Andie MacDowell's leaden delivery, Hugh Grant's curtains and Simon Callow's liberal distributing of Oscar Wilde's fax number is a film with great heart and, for me, essential early insight into the workings of a single sex relationship. So a toast before we go into battle. True love. In whatever shape or form it may come. May we all in our dotage be proud to say, I was adored once too. If you haven't seen the film, change that now by clicking here.

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