It sure was (in the sense my mother used to use the word). Not only was I 10 steps back to begin with, sitting as I was through a film from the genre I intensely dislike (a musical), narratively it was like a cat that had fallen in a bathtub, screaming and thrashing and sending subplots and motifs in every direction that splattered unceremoniously against the walls instead of landing in a cohesive and nuanced way with the viewer.

How did it become the biggest hit of the year? It must be the number of gay men who work in or are connected to Hollywood, either in studio development or as movie critics.

Based on the (hopefully much better) stageshow, it tells the story of how the Wicked Witch of the West (Elpheba) and the Good Witch of the North (Glinda) came to be where and who they are when we meet them in The Wizard of Oz.

Elpheba (Cynthia Erivo) is immediately rejected by her father when she's born because of her green skin, so she grows up an outcast and a loner, never fitting in but content not to and be left to her own devices. Galinda (Ariana Grande) is like a prototypical Upper East Side American princess – coddled because of her wealth, spoiled, daft, self-deluded and gormless.

When the pair both attend university, they start out disliking each other, then come to be friends, then travel together to the Emerald City to meet the Wizard himself (Jeff Goldblum) because exploits about the strange powers Elpheba has been exhibiting her whole life have caught the attention of the capital.

There's also a anti-Semitic subplot about the ostracising of sentient animals from public life, romantic subplots aplenty involving a handsome prince from some far off land, lots of squealing makeovers and a whole lot of girl power, diversity and inclusion that (to the extent it's transposed from the stageplay) makes it both perfect for the political climate of our time and the perfect foil for the social media right wingers foaming at the mouth over the woke mind virus.

Grande was quoted as calling the infamous press tour 'insufferable' after the fact, but she doesn't realise the movie was the same. In fact, watching two breathlessly indulged brats hold hands, profess their love, cry and coin extremist-inclusion memes in a weeks-long circle jerk with the complicity of several journalists was far more entertaining than anything in the three hour long movie (and now, as I reread the above description of the basic plot, I can't even remember what they filled so much time up with).

The performances were twitchy and irritating, Grande looked dangerously underfed and as usual, the real heroes are the overworked CGI engineers. The single interesting piece of information I got from the entire exercise was that I never knew the stageshow was actually based on a novel. Maybe it would have been better as a more direct adaptation of the book instead of the show tunes-caterwauling of the play.