Music has charms to soothe the savage breast and also to soften the critical acumen of reviewers, or at least this one. It’s easy to forgive a lot of the narrative slackness when you’re being carried along by tunes from the Who, Cream, Procol Harum, Otis Redding and the Kinks. Pirate Radio can indulge in such wall-to-wall music because it tells the story of outlaw broadcasters playing rock & roll for the British populace in the mid-1960s from the safety of the high seas (Radio stations broadcasting rock really were set up on ships).

Curtis cruises along on a gentle, nostalgic comic vibe, with a series of amusing episodes played out by a ridiculously overqualified cast. It’s as if Curtis had been thinking of a television series but accidentally wrote a film script; confine a bunch of eccentric DJs (Hoffman, Ifans, Frost) on a ship in the North Sea, throw in a naive young newbie (Sturridge, looking as if every scene is a Calvin Klein photo shoot) and comic situations just write themselves. They don’t, really, and Curtis could use a script doctor or perhaps a steely-eyed director to point out where the plot needs tightening. But who can hear that kind of nitpicking over the sound of the Isley Brothers, the Hollies, the Turtles,…?

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