Miss You Already

Top of anyone's wish-not list is a rom-com about breast cancer. Here is comes, on your plate, at the multiplex, with a title that drops naturally into the yuk pile.

Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore go weepy ha-ha and huggy muggy. There's only one cure. Stop taking the meds.

The actors cannot be blamed. It's not their fault that the squirm count is off the scale. Imagine pitching the idea to a boardroom of studio execs in suits.

"You have two best friends. Girls. They grow up. The sexy one marries a roadie with a rock band who makes a fortune and they have a couple of precocious kids and live in one of those modern houses you see in TV programmes about 21st century architecture.

"The smiley one marries a man with a beard who works on the oil rigs and they live in a houseboat and cannot have children. IVF? After jokes about hand jobs and test tubes they give it a go. Within minutes she's preggers.

"Unexpectedly the sexy one is diagnosed with the Big C. A shock horror I'll-lose-my-looks moment is followed by rumpy pumpy with a barman and introspective 'I've always wanted to be wanted' dialogue."

At this point the execs in suits walk out. Except they don't. Someone says yes. Someone else says, let's get the best of the B-list to head this. Let's take the fear out of dying and have fun with it.

"I really want there to be a heaven," the sexy one says. "Is that pathetic?"

The characters are pathetic. The script is worse. The lives they lead before the surgeon enters with a sharp knife is too superficial to contemplate. It's OK for the rich. The cost of wigs alone would keep 20 Somali families fed for a year and the hospice is like a dower house in the grounds of Blenheim Palace.

The men (Dominic Cooper and Paddy Considine) are part of the decor. The kids are in your face. It's all about the girls, the friends, the women. It's about love and loss, nice hair and tit scars, big teeth and baby bellies.

They take a taxi from London to Yorkshire. And get drunk. And dance with the taxi driver. And...

No! No more.

R.I.P