Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.

• Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert… who accidentally cost Britons billions
• The American woman who ripped the heart out of Cadbury
• The TV genius who turbocharged Trump – and accidentally wrecked Britain

Anyone who only wrote , or , or Four Weddings and a Funeral could die knowing that they had had an unusually successful life. To have written, or co-written, them all — as well as Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary (the film, that is) and The Vicar of Dibley — makes for an exceptional creative life.

Yes, Richard Curtis has been massively successful, and he is both talented and industrious. To claim that is not funny, or that Four Weddings and a Funeral is not moving, would be downright dishonest.

But one almost has to be talented to have an impact on the national psyche – whether or not it is actually positive. It would take a lot of luck to be that influential without being gifted. Curtis, more than any other filmmaker, helped to shape the British sense of itself between the 1980s and the 2010s. His influence, alas, has been a profoundly annoying one.

Perhaps the most persistent criticism of Curtis’s filmography is that it wasn’t diverse enough. True, it was as white and British as the cliffs of Dover. White or not, the artistic problem was that Curtis made his characters seem so tedious and irritating.

Any honest person watching Four Weddings and a Funeral should admit that its parade of charmless dullards makes one wish that the film had been Four Funerals and a Wedding. is populated by such an insufferable pageant of idiots that it almost ruins Christmas and the concept of love. Bridget Jones is a sweet and funny character, but the choice between Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver is surely enough to rationalise lifelong singledom.

But Curtis, inevitably, wasn’t just portraying Britons – he was portraying an image of Britishness. With the country far poorer and weaker than it used to be – at least in relative terms – Curtis framed Britain as a country that somehow got by on its charms. William, in , inexplicably seduces a Hollywood superstar. Mr Bean, in , clumsily, carelessly inflicts chaos on the United States before improbably and undeservedly wriggling out of it. The PM in stands up to a US president by bragging about David Beckham’s attacking prowess (I’m sure that meant a lot to an American).

Curtis, in other words, portrayed a Britain that somehow thrived on the basis of soft power, bumbling humour, decency, and cultural landmarks. What his characters, and his narratives, don’t have is teeth: confidence, ambition, experimentation.

It would of course be stupid to call Curtis an architect of British decline; what he was its enabler. As institutions decayed around them, Curtis’s viewers could wallow in a safe, cosy, utterly un-threatening form of Britishness.

If this sounds hyperbolic, consider the fact that Mark Darcy, the successful love interest in the series, is the cinematic equivalent of Keir Starmer – stiff, awkward, repressed, and a human rights lawyer. Not only did Curtis’s film depict Keir Starmer before Keir Starmer was Keir Starmer but it made him the guy who gets the girl.

In the works of Curtis, British culture orbits the same tropes with a deep yet naive loyalty. It is flattened and sanitised. is an especially airless example. A songwriter is knocked unconscious and wakes up in a world where The Beatles never existed. He becomes one of the most famous singer-songwriters on the planet by acting as if their songs are his own. But the greatness of the songs is doing all the work here amid a reed-thin story – besides which, The Beatles simply would not have succeeded to a comparable extent if their songs were released today, especially if their songs were the sole product of one rather less than interesting man. Insultingly, John Lennon appears in amiable obscurity – mewling clichés about loving people and being honest – when the real John Lennon was an ambitious, hard-edged, uncompromising man (as well as an admitted domestic abuser, though he later expressed his regret).

Curtis has been active in politics – and one must salute his dedication and sincerity. Comic Relief, which he spearheaded along with Lenny Henry, has backed a lot of worthy causes. That said, Curtis’s activism, like his films, too often approaches the world in simple, sentimental terms. Just look at the names of Curtis’s causes: Make Poverty History and Stamp Out Poverty. Eliminating poverty – the underlying thought appears to run – need not take a lot of hard political and economic work. It requires a neat tweak like a “Robin Hood tax” – presented as a tiny tax on banks that could end up, in fact, being a cumulatively big tax on all kinds of people.

With Curtis being decades on from his commercial and creative peak, a lot of this would be ancient history were it not for the wagons-circling bourgeois fever that has gripped Britain’s cultural establishment of late. Much of it is in response to the successes of right-wing populism – from the rise of UKIP to the triumph of the Leave campaign. One anonymous essayist at magazine branded this “the posh turn”.

This phenomenon reacted to the shock upheaval in British politics by blending vintage aesthetics with modern liberal-centrist values, creating something “denatured and ahistorical, though decked out with the appearance of Merry England idyll and rigmarole”. Think of Paddington Bear telling us to wear a mask. Think of the rise of the Centrist Dad. Think of the cloying tone of The Great British Bake Off. This, truly, is Curtisland – a fantasy of old English privilege and New Labour moralism.

I have no desire to sound like a killjoy here. If you love or then that is no bad thing. Again, Curtis is a very talented man, and he has played an integral role in a lot of quality entertainment. But success comes with a price – you are defined by more than you might have intended to be.

Curtis, whether he knew it or not, was sketching out a modern form of Britishness – quirky without being interesting, sentimental without being profound, and earnest without being informed.