Of course, we all know Viz's Fat Slags strip cartoon is an appallingly outdated slice of sexist stereotyping from educated people who should know better.

It's lazy shorthand for a breed of slattern who no longer exists in the hallowed world of the Guardian Women's Page and female corporate high-fliers.

The only flaw in the argument is that if you venture out into Newcastle's Bigg Market or take the Tyneside Metro out to South Shields there they are in all their lager-fuelled glory.

Unabashed, unembarrassable and up for it, they care not one jot about social profiling or cultural pigeon-holing. They just want to get loaded and laid.

Much of the pleasure to be drawn from the Viz cartoon was the wickedly accurate portrayal of the natural habitat from where the Fat Slags thrive.

The greasy, rain-sodden alleys, the malodorous fast-food emporia, the alcopops-powered disco pubs and the pathetic specimen of men ogling the dance floor.

Take them out of it and they whither and die, cut off from their beery reference points and cast adrift from home comforts such as that warm bottle of Red Bull.

So what does director Ed Bye do when charged with making a movie celebrating the cocktail-swilling, kebab-munching maneaters?

Well, he relocates their background to Manchester for a start. And then he shunts them down the M1 to London and plonks them into the vacuous celebrity circuit.

It would help if there were some decent jokes or even a plot. But no. Sandra (Allen) and Tracey (Thompson) are left to thrash around in their fatsuits to no avail.

Faced with a dearth of decent gags, Bye digs out his address book and makes the call to a Chinawhites-worth of D-list celebrities.

So we get Geri Halliwell ironically sending up her eating disorder, Angus Deayon undoing all the good work he did in TV's Nighty Night and Les Denis being...Well, just being Les Dennis.

The plot - such as it is - revolves around a business mogul Sean Cooley (Jerry O'Connell) lusting after the lardbuckets following a blow to the head. That's about it.

Characters flit in and out pointlessly (Kofi Annan anybody?) while Sandra and Tracey live the high life but are unable to function in all their sluttish glory in a foreign land.

You wouldn't think you could impugn the characters of the Fat Slags...but they really should sue.

Tim Evans