NO, there would be no press screening of Sex Lives Of The Potato Men. It was "not a review-driven film", reasoned Entertainment Films, but more of a "Friday night, after-the-pub type comedy, one for the lads".

Such a banning order is always a red rag to a bull; critics smell fear and the chance to hurl rotten tomatoes at the Potato Men. They know there must be something to hide, and indeed there is. Sex Lives Of The Potato Men is every flaccid, flabby inch as ghastly as is always the case when protective barriers shield a film, be it a cheap-as-chips British "ladcom" or a Hollywood folly that cost multi-millions.

These futile games to try to outflank the sharks of the fourth estate are but a minor irritation. The film itself is far more annoying, being both a waste of Arts Council funding and of the comedic talent assembled for this Confessions movie for the post-Viz age. Writer-director Andy Humphries has at his disposal Mackenzie Crook, the stick insect from The Office, Johnny Vegas, the fat Lancashire lad off those monkey adverts, and Mark Gatiss, one of those extraordinary League Of Gentlemen gents.

Together with Dominic Coleman they form the four potato delivery men of the apocalypse, riding around Birmingham in their battered van, dropping off bags of spuds and dropping their trousers at every opportunity in relentless pursuit of carnal gratification.

Playing the lardy layabout booted out of his marital house, fat chip Vegas slobs his unshaven boozy way through a script with none of the pathos of his early days on the stand-up circuit. No-one deserves to be subjected to the sight of him pulling faces and more besides in a spit-roast sex session, but then Humphries has provided plenty of competition for the lowest low in low comedy. Close-ups of dog dirt, even closer-ups of nose pickings, or a granny wanting a feel, take your pick.

Thin chip Crook has located an even worse hair stylist since leaving The Office; Gatiss looks awkward and embarrassed, lumbered with the thankless task of playing a witless stalker; and Coleman suffers even more for his art, cast adrift as an obscene fetishist with a thing for strawberry jam and fishpaste sandwiches.

The British are said to be screwed up about sex, and no wonder if this squalid excuse for a lewd comedy is considered to be any form of entertainment by the Entertainment taste police. Humphries hasn't made a film, but a series of crass vignettes, a sex saga that could have started and stopped at any point. Mercifully it grinds to a halt after 82 minutes, but it should never have been started.

Updated: 09:21 Wednesday, February 25, 2004