Cornish cliches but still good fun
Fisherman’s Friends
For all it probably doesn’t quite have the sparkle the trailer had led us to hope for, Fisherman’s Friends remains a thoroughly likeable film – yet another in the long line of movies which celebrate British quirkiness and eccentricity.
It’s certainly not up there with the likes of The Full Monty and Calendar Girls, but the sheer warmth of the performances make it enjoyable from first to last.
The starting point is that around a decade ago a bunch of Cornish fisher folk were discovered doing what they always do on a Friday night, singing shanties by the sea.
A record company picked them up, they released an album which broke into the top ten and they are still going strong, so much so that the group, still under the name Fisherman’s Friends, plays Worthing’s Pavilion Theatre on Friday, March 29 –a nice enough tale which the film-makers here quite rightly realised needed a fair amount of embroidering if it was going to make it onto the big screens.
Some of the additions seem to have come straight from the I Spy Book of Cornish Cliches. We’ve got the snarly, snappy fisherman who’s got a nasty name for anyone silly enough not to have been born in Cornwall. He broods, he glowers and he exudes suspicion – all the while letting us know he’s actually got a heart of gold.
We’ve also got the dewyeyed one and the young one who’s being priced out of his own business as his pub starts to fail. Among the outsiders, we’ve got a bunch of sneering London yuppies and some kind of nasty property dealer prepared to invest in those nice Cornish people’s misery.
And yet ...
Despite moments which almost take caricature into cartoon, there’s a heart about the whole thing which is hard to resist. Danny Mays is excellent as Danny, the cynical London music executive who finds his cynicism starting to crumble the moment he comes into contact with the sheer decency of ordinary Cornish fishermen ... and the daughter of one of them, in particular, a lovely performance from Tuppence Middleton. Danny thinks he’s offering them everything when he dangles the carrots of fame and fortune; the locals know instinctively that friendship and community will always count for much, much more.
PPP