This egregious luxury lifestyle romantic comedy made me put my clenched fists up to my cheeks and squeak with horror, as when I first watched Saw. Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen give performances in animatronic soft-focus as four friends – forever uninhibitedly laughing, gossiping, drinking chilled white wine from giant balloon glasses and not touching the plates of food dotted about. They’re not getting much bedroom action these days, but their life-affirming sensuality is reawakened when their book club knuckles down to EL James’s super-saucy S&M romp Fifty Shades of Grey – apparently undeterred by how awful the films were.

James’s novel and its raunchy sequels unlock their dormant passions, a bunch of adorable silver-fox guys show up and soon our mature heroines are banging like outhouse doors in a gale. Some of them, anyway. But there’s no question of any BDSM. Inevitably, EL James herself shows up in a coy cameo as a passerby when one of the leads moans: “I wanna have sex!” It’s a film to remind you that the comedy confectionery of Nora Ephron or perhaps Nancy Meyers is not that easy to replicate, and you can be left with all of the guilt and none of the pleasure. Certainly all four leads are on their worst and horrendously unfunniest form: Diane Keaton is like a Diane Keaton impersonator on YouTube. When Candice Bergen has to get all tangled up while putting on her first ever pair of Spanx, I wanted to blast off into space and live on one of Jupiter’s moons until that scene was over. But however bad the leads are, they are better than the smug men – including Andy García and Don Johnson. If you had any doubt that Fifty Shades was over … here it is.