Ian Denyer’s comedy, Rabbit Fever, is a giant one-trick sketch made for Victorian television, but it does grow on you. The title refers to a vibrator called the Rabbit and made famous by Sex in the City. It’s a 6in battery-operated toy that frustrated women everywhere have fallen in lust with. I’m not sure if it really exists, but that’s entirely beside the spoofy point.

The Chris Morris-like thrust of this penetrating documentary is that the addictive dildo is causing mayhem across the globe, and addling the wits of impressionable men. There’s a nationwide clampdown on this amazing tool. Deadpan interviews with a cross-section of users and abusers reveal alarming evidence of a new sexual revolution, and the authorities are clamping down hard.

The film basks in shameless cameos. Tom Conti is wheeled on as a shambolic American academic. Germaine Greer rails (as herself) about how bad men are at giving pleasure, and backs the iconic phallus to the hilt. Richard Branson buys stacks of Rabbits for in-flight entertainment on Virgin Atlantic. And David Gritten, the once venerated chairman of the Film Critics’ Circle, has a lot of explaining to do at our next AGM for managing a punk band called Thumper (or is it Bigwig?) that sings raunchy anthems about this priceless gimmick.

It’s clever fun, blessed with a clever cast: Julian Rhind-Tutt, Stefanie Powers, Sienna Guillory, Tara Summers, Emily Mortimer, Danny Baker, Jim Tavaré, William Boyd and Tom Hollander.

The world would not necessarily be a lesser place without the existence of Rabbit Fever, but I’d hate to be premature in this presumption.

JAMES CHRISTOPHER

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