This is the kind of British lottery-funded film you stagger out of almost in shock, as if having witnessed, or been in, a nasty road accident, in need of hot tea and someone from the St John's Ambulance Brigade with a thermal blanket. It is a deeply and insultingly awful comedy, set in the northeast. How do I know that? Not from the accents, which are mostly on a par with Jimmy Carter's "Howay the lads" impression. No, it's because the Tyne bridge or the Millennium bridge or the Angel of the North are pedantically visible in almost every shot.

It is here that two unhappy, infertile couples find their destinies meet: a kitchen fitter and his uptight partner are trying to adopt a child; an Italian footballer is trying to get his young wife pregnant and, incidentally, mixes his native tongue with Geordie - which was funny when Paul Whitehouse did it on Harry Enfield & Chums. Everything about this is cardboard and two-dimensional - it wouldn't pass muster as an episode of Cold Feet.

And the movie ends with a sub-romcom chase sequence and a grotesquely embarrassing "comedy abortion" scene. Can it really be true that this was directed by Simon Cellan Jones, whose debut was the excellent Some Voices? That it was written by Peter Flannery, who has Our Friends in the North on his credits? There's bright young acting talent, too, in the form of Justine Waddell and Jonathan Cake, who deserved a decent script. They didn't get one.