Everything that's wrong with Run For Your Wife

On Friday evening, a group of Twitter chums and I sat down, fired up Netflix, and watch the 2012 alleged comedy Run For Your Wife from beginning to end to see if it really is the worst British film ever made.

Spoiler: It is.

As a student of shit films, I have to tell you that it's not even so-bad-it's-good --- it goes all the way through that territory right into the huge rolling vistas of so-bad-I-want-to-shoot-myself-in-the-brain-with-a-nail-gun. Seriously - we watched (and lived to tell the tale) it so you don't have to.

Here's the trailer as a taste of what we had to endure. Steel yourselves.



So, what's wrong with Run For Your Wife? Let us count the ways. There are a lot.

- It's based on the West End farce celebrating bigamy and casual homophobia that reportedly cost £900,000 to make, but took just £602 on its opening weekend. There was no second weekend. It got 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and I maintain this is still too high.

- Filled to the brim with celebrity cameos, the film's IMDB page is essentially a list of acting talent that died immediately after its making. Almost certainly of shame.

- Richard Briars, Frank Thornton. Donald Sinden. MI6 director 'M'. Rona Anderson. Francis Matthews. Bill Pertwee. There are also many people who you assumed were already dead and probably wished that they were.

- Odeon Cinemas pasted it as their Tuesday morning Pensioners' Club showing with free tea and biscuits, possbily resulting in even more deaths. Trust me, this film is merciless, brutal.

- Rolf Harris cameo in the opening scene. It probably would have had Jimmy Savile if he were still alive.

Oh dear.

That's enough trvia. On to the film itself:

- There are two - TWO - "Whoops there go my trousers" scenes in which leading males lose their trousers at an awkward moment.

- It has a scene where Danny Dyer stands on a rake. ON A RAKE.

- It has a scene where the word "vibrator" is supposed to be funny. It is not.

- It has an entire five minute scene that contists solely of people leaving rooms just as the person looking for them arrives, all in the finest West End stage farce tradition. All it needs is a comedy vicar, but there is not comedy vicar.

- Neil Morrissey plays Dyer's gormless neighbour and foil, continuing his spectacular descent from the glory days of Bob the Builder. This man has has two number one singles. TWO. Now look at him.

"It's your agent. They want to know if you want to do a Foxy Bingo advert."

- The casual homophobia. Oh, the homophobia. According to Run For You Wife, gay men are all mincing poofs with handbags (their own words), and Dyer and Morrissey pretending to be gay lovers is an oh-so-hilarious plot point. Oh, and a whiff of transphobia as well. Hard to believe this was made in 2012, let alonebased on a 1980s stage show, for it could have been at least ten or twenty years older than that. Everybody involved should be ashamed.

- ...Especially Christoper Biggins and Lionel Blair who provide allged comedy relief as (you guesssed it) a gay couple based on 1970s ideas of a pair of queens so camp you could pitch a tent.

- A cake is introduced for the sole reason that somebody will sit on it. That somebody is Neil Morrissey, who then has to pretend he doesn't know he's sat on a cake. How can a man not know he has sat on an entire chocolate cake?

- There are two characters called Dick and Fanny. DICK AND FANNY.

- SPOILER: The bigamist gets away with it at the end.

And let's not lose sight of the utterly realistic premise: Danny Dyer is a London cab driver who goes south of the river.

Finally, if you made it to the very end of the credits, you are faced with this.

Yes, there are plans for a sequel, based on the stage play in which our hero has a teenager by each of his wives, and now he has to stop them from meeting up and falling in love. Yes - it's about bigamy and incest. Our only consolation is that the film will probably never happen because everybody's dead.

I implore you not to watch Run For Your Wife. I don't care if Danny Dyer hunts me down and calls me a slag for telling you this, but it really isn't worth it. If it were the last Siberian Tiger in the world, I've gladly fetch a gun and shoot it into extinction.