The Final Curtain (2002)

• 59%
• 2002
• Drama
• Patrick Harkins
• Peter O'Toole
• Aidan Gillen
• Adrian Lester

Jonathan Stitch, having just won a prestigious MacKinlay Award for his first novel, relays how he came to ghost write the memoirs of beloved British game show host JJ Curtis, who worked hard to emerge from a humble background and achieve celebrity status, albeit in what most consider the most lowbrow end of popular culture. Jonathan realizes that he is not the most obvious choice of a writer for this project - it a job he didn't initially want - but he ends up viewing the job as a challenge to make it stand out from all the other minor celebrity memoirs, especially as reading about JJ would generally appeal only to a niche segment of the primarily British population, one that probably doesn't buy many books. Part of JJ's reason for wanting the book written is to increase his profile in order to sell his show to the lucrative US market. Despite being in the twilight of his career, JJ is denying something about his life that would make the sale of the show to a US distributor a moot point. But the biggest issue for JJ, and by association Jonathan, in these two combined projects succeeding is twenty-seven year old Dave Turner, a fellow British game show host. Dave and his show are hipper, edgier, and more vulgar, in addition to Dave being younger and sexier, and is thus the front runner for the Britain to US game show transplant. Despite JJ having given Dave his first big break five years ago, there is now no love lost between the two. They each do whatever they can not only to better the other, but to ruin the other at whatever cost, not really caring about the collateral damage. Through the process, Jonathan has to wade through the rhetoric on both sides for the truth, he somewhat caught in the situation by a momentary encounter he has with someone he will learn is a physician named Dr. Colworth.