Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a comedy writer, author of some of the nation's

favorite television shows Blackadder, Mr Bean and the vicar of Dibley, and one of its

favorite films for weddings and a funeral, he enjoys success without celebrity.

Educated at Harrow, he got a first from Oxford where he began his writing career.

When he's not writing, he spends his time working on comic relief which he founded more than 10 years ago

or being with his family in Notting Hill, the scene of his next film.

Comedies he says simply will only work if the people writing them find them funny

he is Richard Curtis does it go further than just finding them funny

Richard isn't it also to do with their having to be of you as it were come from the heart.

Well I do, yes I do leave my ideas to stew for years and years to find out whether or not they

actually mean something to me. I remember once thinking of a fantastic idea for a film at a petrol station

and writing it for the next eight weeks and printing it out and then throwing it away

the next day because it actually was a clever thought but it meant nothing to me.

It wouldn't be worth spending the two years making thereafter.

But I'm thinking more than that.

What about the vicar of Diblyf, for example?

Do you care a lot about the ordination of women?

I felt very passionate about it for a while. I don't know why it was that I got so

obsessed by it. I went to a wedding of some friends of mine and a woman was

doing the service and it just

...