Richard Curtis and the G8

Guild member Richard Curtis is one of the guiding lights of Comic Relief, and now he's training his eye on the G8 summit with a new drama for the BBC about poverty and politics, The Girl in the Café.

There's an interview by Adam Sweeting in The Times and interesting analysis from Mark Lawson in Media Guardian (free registration required).

A favourite competition idea in literary magazines is the collaboration between unlikely writers and The Girl in the Café frequently feels as if Richard Curtis has been locked in a room with Trevor Griffiths: a sequence of floppy-haired confusion over the hotel booking for the couple will suddenly give way to a stretch of electrifying dialectic about dirty water supply.