“Be careful what you wish for” is the motto of The Curse, Channel 4’s excellent new retro sitcom/crime caper. Idiots trying to be big time criminals and messing everything up is a long-honoured trope of British comedy, and it has served a very lengthy stretch dating back from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, through Minder and The Italian Job to The Ladykillers and beyond. The Curse is very much in that tradition, and adds a nice, novel twist, in that the rather valuable pile of 7,000 gold bars the thieves stumble upon during a routine warehouse raid carries a deadly curse, on a par with the one that befell Lord Carnarvon, who opened the tomb of Tutankhamun. So, just like with The Ladykillers or Goodfellas, we start making mental bets about who’s going to get whacked first.
It’s fun, then, and you can’t really cast a better group of fools than the crew from People Just Do Nothing, most of whom turn up here. We have Steve Stamp once again as the slow idiot, playing Sidney, the man on the inside in the warehouse; Allan Mustafa, the MC Grindah-style gobby but wimpish idiot; and Hugo Chegwin as the pretentious idiot, Phil, who wears a trilby as some sort of tribute to the Krays’ gang, drives a Ford Consul with an early car phone, and styles himself, absurdly, as “The Captain”.
