MAYBE BABY

Directed by Ben Elton. Starring Hugh Laurie, Joely Richardson

Just what the world needs: a movie about affluent English wankers trying to breed (and thankfully failing). More parochial than either Notting Hill or Four Weddings, Maybe Baby must be the most overtly middle-class movie ever to see the light of day, with an unbearably smug air of London-luvviedum: it's directed by solid establishment figure Ben Elton, and with a cast list that includes the likes of Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Rowan Atkinson, Joanna Lumley and Dawn French, you can imagine what horrors lie in store.

It's pitched as a touching human drama about infertility, but I couldn't say it moved me to tears.

The plot: BBC (or 'Beeb') commissioning editor Sam Bell (Laurie) and his theatrical-agent wifey Lucy (Richardson) are blissfully married, the undiluted joy of their lives marred only by their inablity to spawn any offspring. They try IVF as a solution to their predicament, to no avail: at which point Sam goes to work on a comedy script based on their fertility woes. Sensitive soul that he is, he then reads vast chunks of her secret diaries and shamelessly grafts them onto his film-script, prompting the temporary break-up of their marriage...

Maybe Baby's biggest problem is that it tries way too hard to be emotionally affecting, and winds up as one of the least poignant films of all time. The casting doesn't exactly help, either, as a host of over-familiar faces strut their stuff and get to go home all thrilled with themselves: it's not quite Peter's Friends, but it's dangerously close.

In spite of one or two mildly amusing one-liners, it all leaves an extremely sour taste in the mouth.

If you want this kind of thing, you can get it on telly any night of the week. This just does not belong in the cinema. Vote with your feet, and Maybe Baby might disappear nice and quickly.