As someone who spent his formative years involved in FM radio in its glory days — picture, if you will, a scrawnier version of the teen rock-journo in "Almost Famous" — I've always been partial to films about DJs. "Talk Radio," "Play Misty For Me," hell even "It's All Gone, Pete Tong" give me a warm and fuzzy feeling equaled only by the fine bottle of West Coast Shiraz downed prior to viewing this week's film in question.
As such, I was primed to enjoy director Richard Curtis' "The Boat That Rocked" (opening locally as "Pirates Rock"), an ode to the halcyon days of British pirate radio, circa 1966, when the stodgy old BBC dominated the airwaves and mostly refused to recognize the revolution that was happening in pop music. Considering that 1966 saw the release of records like Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe," The Supremes' "You Keep Me Hanging On," The Byrds' "Eight Miles High," Bob Dylan's "Blonde On Blonde," and The Beatles becoming, ahem, "more popular than Jesus," you'd have to have been absolutely bloody-minded, clueless, or a bit of both to ignore what was going on, but the old BBC excelled in that. (As local snooze-fest NHK manages to do even now.)
There were those, however, to whom state control of broadcasting was an insult, for whom radio could be all music, all fresh, and sans lectures, gardening advice, or granny's favorite all-banjo version of "Listen To The Mockingbird." These people, driven by that old entrepreneurial spirit (and, frequently, cash from Britain's former colonies), took advantage of a legal loophole, setting up transmitters offshore on old trawlers and coastal-defense installations, outside the reach of the law, but within broadcasting range of the mainland. Soon more than 20 million U.K. residents were tuning in.