‘Do you want to stream something?’ my girlfriend asked me. It was 5 p.m. on a Saturday and I’d had a horrendous week. I’d caught one of those mutant viruses that you learn about in nursery rhymes or at the London Dungeon. The cough was the worst part. It was the sort of cough that evacuates a Tube carriage. It was the sort of cough you hear in a western before the protagonist says: ‘Old Billy Boy got consumption. There ain’t a darn thing we can do ’bout it. Doc says he got weeks. Poor bastard. He ain’t never gon’ make it to Montana.’

In short, I was feeling out of sorts. And as such, I was ready for some mind-numbing television. ‘We can watch something,’ I said. ‘What do you fancy?’

We settled for the straight-to-streaming Prime Video release The Idea of You. The film stars Nicholas Galitzine as an insufferable British boy band frontman. Galitzine is British, which is why I was somewhat taken aback when he appeared on my screen doing a terrible impersonation of a Brit. Perhaps all those months spent in LA confused him. Either that or he just can’t act. Anne Hathaway plays his older (supposedly ‘much older’, though she’d get IDed at my local Sainsbury’s) love interest. The script feels like it was written on a One Direction fan-fiction forum. I was forced to take a break and have a Lemsip when Hathaway’s character made the saddest-looking sandwich I have ever seen. She then divulged the entirety of her depressing back story – in what was a Razzie-worthy use of exposition – before Galitzine turned to her and said: ‘We’re still here… eating great fucking sandwiches.’

Are we? Are you? We finished the film, but I can’t tell you what happens. And that’s because nothing happens. Like many made-for-streaming films, The Idea of You is designed to be put on in the background. You’re not........

© The Spectator