Kerry Parnell: Nat was not fat – it’s time to love ourselves actually

Love Actually turns 20 in November and, while it is one of the great Christmas movies, the treatment of one character stands out for poor jokes about her weight that even the writer says he would never do again.

Let’s be clear: Love Actually’s Martine McCutcheon was not fat.

I don’t need the benefit of hindsight – we never thought she was, at the time. The classic Christmas movie actually turns 20 in November, despite celebrating its anniversary last year, and creator Richard Curtis says he now regrets his weight jokes.

The hit movie maker recently revealed his daughter Scarlett called him out for his bad fat jokes. “Scarlett said to me, ‘You can never use the word fat again,” he told the Cheltenham Literature Festival, adding he realises many of his jokes aren’t amusing today.

“Those jokes aren’t any longer funny, so I don’t feel I was malicious at the time, but I think I was unobservant and not as, you know, as clever as I should have been,” he said.

To be honest, it was always a strange plot line. And although we laughed along, nobody really thought Martine/Natalie was chubby, even then.

Martine plays the tea lady at Number 10 Downing Street and the running gag is she’s overweight. Her character is dubbed “Plumpy” by her dad – has anyone ever been called

Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon in a scene from Love Actually.

“Plumpy” in the history of nicknames – and she tells the British PM, played by Hugh Grant, that she’s been dumped because, obviously, “no one’s going to fancy a girl with thighs the size of big tree trunks”.

Then, to make sure the joke is truly sledgehammered in, when she jumps into his arms, he comments, “God, you weigh a lot.” Merry Christmas!

However, in 2003, when the movie came out, this was fairly normal. I worked in glossy magazines at the time and weekly celebrity mags dominated. Pre-social media, they were where you would see paparazzi pics of your favourite stars and the worse the better. They would run photos with the dreaded zoom-in circle device, sometimes with arrows, pointing to celebrities’ flaws.

Jessica Simpson was regarded as ‘curvy’ in the noughties.

They particularly liked close-ups of veins on women’s feet – Madonna and Sarah Jessica Parker were perennial targets for their podiatric blood supply. “Stars without make-up!” was another popular coverline, which was really code for shots of spots.

Then there were the stars deemed overweight: In the noughties, there were a lot of them. Jessica Simpson was thought to be enormous, Geri Halliwell and J.Lo, “curvy” and Renée Zellweger gargantuan when she stacked on kilos to play Bridget Jones, but in reality just became average-sized.

A particular favourite is a 2006 cover of Heat magazine, which reveals the results of its body survey – “where 100 blokes tell you what they really think”, including the useful info of just what men’s ideal size is and what they pinpoint is the moment, “when curvy becomes fat”.

So yes, things have changed in the past 20 years. And while I hope Richard Curtis doesn’t judge himself too harshly – after all, his lovely gentle, funny, escapist, life-affirming movies were and are wonderful and I wish we had more of them.

So, whether you believe Love Actually is the best Christmas movie of all-time, or not, one thing we can all agree on, is, Nat was never fat.

Originally published as Kerry Parnell: Nat was not fat – it’s time to love ourselves actually