A new British film is causing something of a sensation. The sensation in question is more of the stomach-churning revulsion variety than anything approaching critical acclaim. Sex Lives of the Potato Men — and doesn’t your heart just soar on learning its very title? — is a comedy set around the Walsall chip shop industry (The word “comedy” is being used here only in the very loosest sense).

Its stars are Johnny Vegas, a sweaty-looking chap who talks extremely quickly, and the gangly, goggle-eyed one from The Office. Together they drive around trading profanities. Dog mess, phone sex and copious body fluids prevail. Citizen Kane or Tokyo Story it ain’t.

Our own cinema critic, James Christopher, a famously benevolent and even tolerant man, awarded Potato Men not a single star yesterday. He added, moreover, that it constitutes “a masterclass in film-making ineptitude, a squalid waste of lottery money, and an inexcusable gaffe by the British Film Council”.

Other reviewers were equally damning. Another gifted reviewer in a fellow broadsheet opined: “The Government is being accused of brutal philistinism in withdrawing tax help from British film. Judged by movies like this, they are merely handing extra bullets to a man determined to blow his brains out.” A tabloid labelled it “Spud You Won’t Like”, concluding: “You’d probably have more fun and laughs by going into your kitchen and just staring at an ordinary potato.” But not, clearly, as much fun as mashing it, or eating it fried.

The Brits can be a funny bunch, and not always in a way that they might want. More funny peculiar than funny ha ha. We pride ourselves on our sense of humour, but sometimes this is a phenomenon confined to bottom pinching and lavatorial gags. We berate the Americans for not “getting” irony, and the Germans for not being funny at all. But all the while we are filling our screens with fat men slipping on banana skins and blondes with gargantuan breasts.

The Greeks associated comedy with fertility rites and the worship of Dionysus. British traditions have not really moved on: suffice it to say that a surfeit of wine has been replaced by one pint too many.

Even by the standards of the British film industry this “work” is proving rather a hot potato. It comes to something when a movie can be condemned for selling short an area as underprivileged as Walsall.

Perhaps the secret to its awfulness lies in a Producers-style strategy by its backers to make an unorthodox buck, where fewer bums on seats means drinks all round for the money men. If so, they are to be roundly congratulated on their success.