The curse of Cuba Gooding Jr continues with this cloying feelgood yarn that makes The Waltons look like the Krays.

In a career trajectory which arced from from the highs of an Oscar for Jerry Maguire to the sordid lows of Boat Trip this will do little to salvage his profile.

He plays a mentally retarded man nickhamed Radio - thanks to his music obsession - who is cursed to pound the streets of Anderson with the only shopping trolley in South Carolina without a wonky wheel.

Regarded at best with curiosity and at worst with open hostility, he catches the eye of no-nonsense local football trainer Coach Jones (Harris).

Flying in the face of 1970s small-town opinion, Coach Jones takes him under his wing and has soon installed Radio at the local high school as a sort of unofficial mascot.

However, conservative voices feel Coach Jones' preoccupation with the boy is damaging the school team's chances of doing well on the field and his daughter is getting that neglected feeling.

From Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man) to Sean Penn (I Am Sam), Hollywood has always had an obsession verging on the nauseating casting stars as mentally disabled characters.

Here Gooding Jr has a pair of Ken Dodd's gnashers inserted (not a good thing) and been given a handful of lines to grunt (based on recent experience, a good thing).

The result is a mawkish display that may go down well in Guiltsville, Ohio, but to more demanding British audiences looks tacky and exploitative.

Harris lends proceedings a dignity they don't really deserve and the rest of the cast adequately flesh out stereotypes that appear to have been plucked from the Disney lot.

One particularly tedious "American as apple pie" moment is the post mortem of the most recent game carried out in the local barbershop. Hasn't this town got a bar?

The fact the whole thing is based - or "inspired" - by a true story merely compounds the problem - why not tell the story as it really happened?

This is one radio it's a pleasure to switch off.

Tim Evans