Richard.

A name of roy­alty. A name of lead­er­ship. A name used whenever I’m in trouble and my mum phones me up to tell me off. A name, going by the amount of other Richards that I know, had a mini renais­sance between ’78 and ’83.

I never had a prob­lem with my name at school — not as posh as Charles, not as pop­u­lous as Steve. I can, and do, shorten it to ‘Rich’ if I want to (although that pre­cludes being able to intro­duce your­self as you’d wish, for fear of people reply­ing “Really? can I bor­row a ten­ner?”), ‘Rick’ if I want to pre­tend that I’m a 1940’s detective/club owner, or even ‘Rik’ if I were to think I was, well, a twat.

And definately not the ‘D’ name. Never the ‘D’ name.

But I’m waff­ling now. My point is that I like my name, and can’t see any par­tic­u­lar reason why any­one would, or could take excep­tion to it. However, on watch­ing ‘Superman Returns’ the other day (there’s three hours I’m not get­ting back — I’ll talk about that another day) I couldn’t help but notice that once again poor old James Marsden was filling the role of Boyfriend in the Way. That is, the formerly stable rela­tion­ship that the female lead was in before the lead comes along and sweeps her off her feet. He had to watch Jean Grey run off into the arms of Wolverine (albeit posthum­ously) and now it’s just a case of enjoy­ing the time he can with Lios Lane before Superman decided to get his act together and stop act­ing like a Dawson’s Creek wan­nabe. I’m guess­ing in Superman Returns 3.

However, then I star­ted to think about this a little more, and I star­ted to come to an unset­tling con­clu­sion — for­get the Curse of the Star Trek Red Jumper, the Curse of Superman or the Curse of Hello magazine — I present to you: The Curse of Richard!!

Dah da daaaa!

The Curse acts in a simple way. Rather than doom­ing the vic­tim to get killed by an alien, kill them­selves or to end up in a bit­ter and highly pub­li­cised divorce/custody battle, the Curse simply makes it easier for other people to look far bet­ter than said vic­tim. There are no Richards that end a nar­rat­ive in a pos­it­ive pos­i­tion; with a happy end­ing. If you are an actor look­ing for work, and want a good dra­matic part, skip over the roles called Richard — you will even­tu­ally become either an incon­veni­ent obstacle in the path of true love, or a mediocre vil­lain that obstructs the hero, slightly. No, you won’t even get to be the proper bad guy — more the comic relief.

As much as it pains me to say it, it seems that some of the biggest dicks on film are in fact, Richards.

Allow me to present my findings.

1. Richard White — Superman Returns

   Nephew of Perry White, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Planet Newspaper and mar­ried to Lois Lane. Likeable enough per­son, goes out his way to help Superman, even though he knows there’s 1) a good chance that Lois still loves him and 2) their child is prob­ably half Kryptonian. Despite this love­li­ness you’re prob­ably still root­ing for Lois to get back together with the fella in tights.

2. Principal Richard Vernon — The Breakfast Club

   Put all the Breakfast Club into Saturday deten­tion, bring­ing a dis­par­ate group of adoles­cents together to whine about their min­is­cule prob­lems and listen to Simple Minds. Mean bug­ger. Portrayed as the very embod­i­ment of ‘Da man’, oppress­ing youth and wear­ing really bad shirts. The Club leave deten­tion with no sense of remorse about their pun­ish­ment, nor regret their actions, ren­der­ing the deten­tion meas­ures use­less. Probably a very able Principal, but no men­tion of his achieve­ments as an edu­cator is made in this film.

3. Richard Fish — Ally McBeal

   A part­ner in Cage, Fish and Associates law firm. Obnoxious, super­fi­cial, selfish and from what I can tell, not espe­cially pro­fi­cient as a law­yer, but is por­trayed as the ‘shal­low funny’ one. Rather than the ‘twitchy funny’ one, the ‘neur­otic funny’ one, the ‘acerbic funny’ one or ‘the blonde one that looks a bit like Anna Kournikova’. His char­ac­ter seems to be there to make Calista Flockheart rel­at­ively less annoying.

4. Principal Richard Belding — Saved By the Bell

   The second school prin­cipal to be added to the list — but this time he is a love­able and bum­bling head­mas­ter that is always tricked by Zach Morris, the jock, the one from Showgirls, the pretty one, the other pretty one and Screech. The very fact that Screech Powers can out­wit the head­mas­ter each and every time casts ser­i­ous asper­sions on his abil­ity as a role model.

5. Richard Mason — Crocodile Dundee

   The old­est film example I use here, and pos­sibly the tem­plate upon which all sub­sequent Boyfriends in the Way were based. Obnoxious and super­fi­cial, Richard is such a colossal tool in this movie one won­ders what it was that Sue Charlton was think­ing before she had the good luck to hook up with leather­faced anti­podean trog­lod­ite Mick Dundee. Fortunately, his brown-nosing, self serving and gen­er­ally rather “New York in the 80’s” atti­tude soon made sure that we felt no pity when Sue decided to buy Australian.

6. Richard Thornburg — Die Hard

   By far the most evil Richard in our list — reviled by any­one with even an ounce of mor­al­ity in their bones, not only did he inter­view Bruce Willis’ kids live on telly and expose the iden­tity of his wife to evil Alan Rickman, not only did he whine, gib­ber and cower on an aero­plane to the point where he needed to be Tazer’d, not only is he self-serving, arrog­ant and not averse to step­ping on a few people to get to the top, but he also released all the ghosts from the Ghostbusters’ con­tain­ment unit back into New York City. What an utter, utter tool.

I think I’ve chosen a selec­tion of well known Richards purely for illus­tra­tion pur­poses, but pick a chan­nel and watch it for an hour and you are bound to find more examples of Richards, all of whom will, I guar­an­tee fit this for­mula and have all become vicitims of the Curse of Richard.

So what star­ted this trend? Could it date back from Shakespeare? Was Richard III among first lit­er­ary examples of the Curse of Richard? Or was it much more recently with Richard Nixon? Or — and let’s be hon­est about it — just because the dimin­ut­ive name of Richard aids sloppy writers to come up with a quick pun along the lines of ‘Dick by name, Dick by nature’?

I don’t pre­tend to under­stand it — per­haps darker forces are at work here. Either way, I appeal to all writers out there, can someone please write a good Richard, please?