This week I finally got round to watching The Boat That Rocked. I like Richard Curtis films, so I was looking forward to this one. I even enjoyed Love Actually, despite that intensely embarrassing speech on the special relationship that Hugh Grant gives. But sadly, I didn’t enjoy The Boat That Rocked.

It wasn’t just that it was bad (although it really, really was), but also that it was annoying. And the reason why it was annoying was instructive.

Most of the film is set on — guess what — a boat, which serves as a pirate radio station. And the drama concerns the antics of the loveable disc jockeys on Radio Rock and the efforts of a very unloveable government minister to shut down the station.

The Boat That Rocked begins by informing viewers that in 1966, with British pop music at its height, the BBC played only 45 minutes of pop a day. The pirates were all that stood between listeners and a stultifying programme of unrelieved dullness.

But their rebellion is not to last. The liberal, sassy station is brought to an end by a stuffy Tory type (moustache, posh accent, butler) played by Kenneth Branagh. He acts because he believes pop is rotting the nation’s morals. After many attempts, he finally puts the rebels out of business with the Marine Offences Act.

All of which would have been sort of all right if the work had been one of pure fiction. But it wasn’t. There really was a Marine Offences Act, and it really did close the pirates, and it really was the culmination of a campaign against the stations. And the bit about the 45 minutes of rock a day was true, too. So this film was a slice of social history as well as a comedy.

Here, however, is what really happened. During the 1959-64 Government, concern grew about the power of the signal of the pirate radio stations. But the Conservatives refused to do anything because, as Tony Benn records in his diary, they “had some sympathy with pirate entrepreneurs”.

When Benn became Minister of Technology after Labour’s election in 1964, he decided to move against the pirates. The main reason, again recorded in his diary, was his opposition to commercial radio stations. He tried a number of measures before putting in place the Marine Offences Act, despite support for the pirates from Conservative MPs led by Sir Ian Gilmour.

And what about the statistic at the beginning of the programme about the 45 minutes of pop music? Well, it’s true. But it wasn’t because the Government thought pop would rot morals. It was because the Musicians’ Union objected to excessive recorded music. The BBC’s needle time was, therefore, limited by union negotiation. And the unions also, for the same reason, opposed pirate radio.

So why do I regard all this as instructive? Because The Boat That Rocked is a classic example of what might be called the Left interpretation of history. In crude terms, this involves twisting events around until the Left finishes on the enlightened side.

In the case of the Sixties, however, the Left interpretation involves something more subtle. The great era of liberation is seen as entirely a cultural event. The role of entrepreneurs and commerce in the revolution is airbrushed out. The Sixties can then be seen as in contradiction to the Thatcher years.

In reality, they were simply its precursor.

The death of Sir Ludovic Kennedy reminded me of an injustice that the great man left still in place.

Kennedy’s magnificent book, 10 Rillington Place, tells the tale of the murder of Timothy Evans’s wife and daughter. Evans was hanged for the killing of his daughter after the chief prosecution witness, John Christie, who shared the house with the Evanses, helped to secure a conviction. But it wasn’t too long before the bodies of Christie’s own wife and a number of other women were discovered on the property.

So strong is the psychological desire not to admit error (what is known technically as the desire to avoid cognitive dissonance) that even though Evans was, eventually, given a posthumous pardon, his conviction has never been overturned.

Wouldn’t it be a fitting tribute to Sir Ludovic if it now was.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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