I wouldn’t normally be much interested in seeing the movie version of a TV show – I find they’re usually too much of a good thing – but I was attracted by the premise of Apocalypse: Royston Vasey’s cast of freaks, creeps and weirdos break the fourth wall, crossing over from their fictional universe to “ours”. Their mission: to persuade the League of Gentlemen, their creators, to continue to write about them, thus averting the apocalypse of the title. As a sucker for all things metafictional, that was enough to draw me in, but the film turned out to be a bit of a curate’s egg.

The plot requires the Roystonites to be more than one-dimensional caricatures – but in making them more sympathetic, it also makes them less sinister. Where the TV series frequently curdled the blood, the movie rarely does more than slightly turn the stomach. There’s nothing particularly novel about the handling of the metafictional element, either: a film-within-a-film that doesn’t really add much, the portrayal of the comedians as self-obsessed (seemingly obligatory these days) and a mildly amusing riff about free will. Apocalyptic it may be; definitive, it’s not.