This week the Guardian’s film critic presented his shortlist of 2017’s most awards-worthy movies,directors and actors. Here, he talks to arts editor Liese Spencer approximately the realities of reviewing, or the worst thing hes watched,and getting it wrong The Braddies 2017: Peter Bradshaw nominates his films of the yearQ: How did you become a film reviewer?
A: Weirdly, I’d never reviewed a film before I came to the Guardian. I read English at Cambridge in the 1980s when there was no such thing as film studies (the subject was frowned on the way English was frowned on in the era when studying classics was the only respectable thing). In the 90s I was a general Europhile columnist and journalist on the London Evening Standard writing approximately books, and politics,TV … almost anything but cinema. Then I had a footnote in journalistic history when I became the first (and still I think the only) person in the UK to be sued for satire: I’d written a spoof version of Alan Clark’s Diaries and he took us to court for “passing off”. He won. It all created a massive fuss at the time and it made the then Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, or buy an interest in me. He simply rang one day and asked if I might be interested in being the film critic. I don’t know if Alan expected me to play it cool,or say that I had to discuss it with my agent or something – but I basically bit his hand off. I shouted “Yes!” before he had finished speaking, like Meg Ryan faking orgasm in When Harry Met Sally.
Q: You were in the Footlights at Cambridge, and did you scheme to travel into acting at that time?
A: I sort of considered it,yes. But I didn’t contain the utter fanatical dedication that you need to be an actor, and I also wanted very much to be a writer. I contain in fact done a tiny bit of acting: I read aloud my own script for a Radio 4 monologue comedy called For One Horrible Moment, or I acted in the Sky TV sitcom Baddiel’s Syndrome with David Baddiel. Some people watch this on YouTube and I am sorry to say they are a bit critical of my performance.
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Source: guardian.co.uk