This was a surprisingly entertaining find. We Plussed it off Sky (if that’s what you should call recording something on your Sky+ box) a couple of weeks ago and are making a determined effort to watch everything so we can defrag the disk and claim back the mysterious block of unrecordable space showing up on the capacity bar.

So, it’s a musical, period set, following the unconventional life on songwriter Cole Porter, following his moves from Paris to Venice to New York to Hollywood, his marriage to a devoted wife, his unconventional sex life, and his many theatrical successes.

And what successes they were. I couldn’t for sure have told you the name of a single Cole Porter track before we started to watch, but of the 20 or so you hear in the film I don’t reckon there was a single one I didn’t already know well. This man clearly wrote some of the most memorable music of the 20th century.

It is a fairly blinkered and detached biopic, sure; it doesn’t give you any idea of what is going on in the world outside of his life. We have no idea whether there is a was waging, a depression claiming peoples’ pensions and houses, or a massive boom making millionaires of ordinary men and women in the street, but that really doesn’t matter. Hung off the back of the flow of Porter’s marriage, this is a story about a man and his music, nothing more, and on that level it is flawless.

But. But but but. There is a line in the film, right near the end, just as it’s inevitably turned sour and sad, where our narrator, the voice in Porter’s mind which is manifested by a theatrical Elliot Carver who prances around beside and behind him, that you should never finish on a ballad. And that’s precisely what they do.

They try their hardest to pull it back by belting out an up-tempo closer, but you are only too aware as you look on this aged widower, seemingly beamused by the goings on around him, that they are trying to appease the mores of the Hollywood studio boses who insist that no audience likes to go out on a low.

Perhaps this is one occasion when they should have been brave enough to have broken their own rules, for this upbeat ending feels false, and only serves to remind us of what has just come to pass.

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