Is there anyone who will take my confession? I have never seen a single episode of television’s Sex and the City. I offer no excuse, beyond my instinctive aversion to shows in which Americans pretend they are or can be sexually liberated. They are always hopeless at it – the Puritan ancestry tells – and so the results are always screamy, garish and winsome.

Guess what? Sex and the City, the movie, is screamy, garish and winsome. So I was right all along. Even so, I had fun even at the packed press show, filled with unknown girl reporters who had marched down Lower Regent Street to the theatre, a whole army, presumably detailed to cover the film’s clothes for fashion-mad freesheets. It is full of frocks. They are all but wired for speech. They walk, talk, giggle, gesticulate and sometimes fling themselves across a room, leaving their owners suddenly pink, startled and exposed. This is in preparation for what passes in America for a sex scene.