Flicking around the proverbial '30 channels and nothing on' late the other night, I stumbled across the last few minutes of Richard Curtis's wretched 'Love Actually'. I first saw it a few years ago. I've seen plenty of films in my time which did little for me, but 'Love Actually' is one of very few to make me so angry I wanted to kick the television in. I really, really loathed 'Love Actually', to the extent that even now when I see it in a listings magazine I feel like getting a biro and scribbling over it until the paper gets all mangled and torn. It wasn't just that it was trite, facile, witless, sentimental pap; it was that it was insulting to the viewer to suggest that they were so shallow that they could be emotionally manipulated by stories that were so vacuous and devoid of heart. Seemingly dozens of characters, not one of them fleshed out to the extent that you might genuinely care about them, trotting through a succession of paper-thin romantic plotlines designed to tug at the heartstrings in a manner which even the most compliant Mills and Boon reader would find mechanical.

Having now seen the end of the film again, I have discovered it is possible to hate 'Love Actually' even more than I thought I did.

Goodness knows how I missed it last time - I can only presume that I was by this stage so thoroughly nauseated by the dialogue that my nervous system had opted for temporary deafness - but over the closing montage of all of his characters getting together one final time Curtis chose to play The Beach Boys' 'God Only Knows'. 'God Only Knows' is one of my favourite songs, albeit one to which I listen very rarely because it always - and I mean always - makes me cry. I have no idea why, because it has no specific emotional attachment for me. I think it is simply that it is a song so beautiful in every way that I go through a small breakdown whenever I hear it. And here it was, shamelessly grafted onto the end of one of the most shallow, meaningless excuses for a film ever perpetrated in the name of entertainment. And yes, it did make me cry, and I thanked the stars that nobody was there to wander in and misapprehend the situation by inferring that it was Curtis's abomination that brought me to that state.