Television - Africa may be saved, but Richard Curtis's blushes aren't, writes Andrew Billen The Girl in the Cafe (BBC1

The lonely old man who works hard offering solutions to world poverty to his boss, the chancellor of the exchequer, snatches a coffee at a Westminster cafe one day and starts talking to a shy but entrancing young woman ("girl"). They meet again, once for lunch, once for dinner. He invites her to the G8 conference in Reykjavik being hosted by his government. He goofs - or does he? - and forgets to book her a separate room. The first night, she sleeps on the sofa, the second with him.

He is tender and true, but she embarrasses him, albeit in a wholesome way. Whenever she bumps into the chancellor, she tells him he is not working hard enough to save Africa. At a formal dinner, she heckles the prime minister to the same effect. She is thrown out. The romance looks doomed. But her plea has melted the heart of the PM, who refuses to let the conference fail. Despite European intransigence and US cynicism, Africa is saved after all - just as surely as the lonely old man has been. Thus it can be demonstrated that love conquers everything (cf: Love Actually, dir. Richard Curtis, 2003).

In the ranks of wish-fulfilment, no story earns so high a place as The Girl in the Cafe (Saturday 25 June, 9.15pm), a film for TV written and co-produced by Richard Curtis. This is a Love Story in which Ali MacGraw lives and Ryan O'Neal stumbles upon the cure for cancer. Even by the standards of the New Year special episode of Curtis's Vicar of Dibley, which at least had the guts to follow its own logic and show starving Africans, The Girl in the Cafe looked naff. Is it tasteful - even possible - to ask an audience to care simultaneously about an old geezer getting his leg over and about debt relief, aid and free trade for Africa? Are the prospects of the former happening in any way comparable to the obstacles lying in the way of the latter?

Given that Curtis is not a stupid writer, I began wondering if The Girl in the Cafe worked on any other level as a metaphor for the relationship between the first and third worlds. I considered whether Lawrence, the drily laconic middle-aged Treasury mandarin played by Bill Nighy, might be an allegory for the west. He is a defeated idealist who has lost touch with his heart. He has a recurring dream of being asked to play with the Rolling Stones and refusing because he is busy. Yet he has become a man of inaction. So too, perhaps, the great powers, their post-Enlightenment optimism worn away by time, their passion for intervention dimmed by experience . . .

Significantly (one might argue), Lawrence meets the holy innocent Gina, played by Kelly MacDonald, in eating houses. On their first encounter, he stirs three spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee - symbolising excessive western consumption? Gina, by contrast, consumes modestly and orders only what he does; it's as if she is unused to eating. Could she be Africa? She is, after all, mysterious (the Dark Continent), Scottish (England's locally oppressed colony) and, like the developing nations, young. "Pretend you're dead. That is my trick in life," she says, which is the sort of thing Africa might say, if it were a troubled female. She has also, it emerges, been to prison - either a metaphor for the chains of poverty or a nudge that we not only neglect but punish the powerless. So can these two parley, the rich and the poor, the sophisticated and the naive, December and May? Yes, they can! And is it mutually beneficial? My word it is! The old world/old man loses its limp and gains a skip in its step.

Is this the metaphor we are meant to read from The Girl in the Cafe? Surely not, but the ineptitude of Curtis's tale gave leave to investigate the parable, if only as a way of passing the time. Admittedly, alternative distractions were on offer. One could admire Ken Stott's portrayal of the tousled, Gordon Brownish chancellor. We might ponder on how MacDonald was persuaded it was necessary to agree to what the censors call "fleeting nudity". The director, David Yates, made Iceland look just about worthy of a dirty weekend (although no more so than Edinburgh, where the real G8 is meeting). A couple of lines made me laugh, yet neither was so memorable as to be worth recording here. The main question remained: where the hell was Hugh Grant when we needed him? We could have bought a boyish 44-year-old aspiring to have it off with a 29-year-old. But Nighy was, and looked, all of 55. Any viewer with Gina's interests at heart would have been shouting at the telly: "No, don't go to bloody Reykjavik." And where would that have left Africa?

Naturally, at this point, a critical reviewer would say that Curtis's heart was in the right place. It was. Broadcasting the facts of African privation to a large audience at peak time was a rare example of the proper use of box-office power. Curtis, like Bob Geldof, has done more than his bit to manipulate public opinion to the tipping point where action on world poverty will become politically unavoidable. The Girl in the Cafe was designed to embarrass the powerful into compassion. It may help do so. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose, it is of little consequence that it also embarrassed its author.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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