Sex Lives of the Potato Men

Written and directed by Andy Humphries, a TV producer and one-time Mastermind winner, Sex Lives of the Potato Men is a peculiarly dispiriting comedy starring Johnny Vegas, Mackenzie Crook, Mark Gatiss and Dominic Coleman as a quartet of potato deliverers in a Birmingham suburb whose sole interests are beer and sex. It might well have been called 'Spud You Loathe' and never has a film targeted a common denominator quite so low.

The characters live in a condition of physical, moral and spiritual squalor that would, were they still alive, induce a suicidal despair in British directors like Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and John Schlesinger, who set out in the early 1960s to make honest movies about working-class life. Intentionally or not, Potato Men takes a more unflinching look at the brutalised Britain of today than any movie I've seen.