Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's hapless Kazakh reporter, raced straight to the top of the UK box office last weekend, taking an impressive £6.2m to add to his chart-topping Stateside haul of $26.4m (£13.8m).

With this, Cohen has achieved the transatlantic conquest of the filmgoing public that eluded his last comic feature film creation, Ali G in da House, which bombed in the US.

Last week's box office champ Saw III was left trailing far behind, scaring up only £1.4m of business for second place.

Rounding out the top five were dance-romance Step Up, down from second to third with £696,369; Martin Scorsese's The Departed, down from third to fourth with £556,823; and The Devil Wears Prada, unchanged at fifth place, with £460,062. The latter has now grossed £12.7m in five weeks on release.

The only other new entries to trouble the top 10 were the football v bar mitzvah comedy Sixty Six, in at eighth place with £292,295, and the Kate Winslet-starring suburban black comedy Little Children, which snuck in at 10th place with £158,012.