As ever, anything I write which approaches the category "film review" is completed long after everyone else has seen the film in question.

So I'm more interested in whether you agree or not than I am in providing you with a taster of a film you've doubtless already consumed, digested and, er, removed. If you're Borat, you'll have popped it in a plastic bag and taken it back down to your rather refined hosts. (An eerily similar incident really did happen to a friend of a friend, but I shan't relate it - you might be eating.)

I liked Borat a lot. Not the individual, of course, even allowing for the unrepentant charm of a man who goes swimming with his pet bear, asks women how much sex with them will cost while walking past them in the street, and sings a national anthem pertaining to potassium in front of an angry American rodeo crowd.

This is a knowing film, of course. Many times the punchline hoved into view minutes, hours before Borat finally delivered it, but as with classics of the limb-gnawing genre - think Meet The Parents - it's the agony before the pay-off which hits the mark. The moment Borat is shown meeting a group of American feminists it's not the how, but the how long.

The question mark lingers longest over the length. At the end of the film my companions - all a few years older than me, so perhaps more mature (though I'd argue that point) - seemed to feel Borat had outstayed his dubious welcome. I reckon that, at approaching 90 minutes, he was hardly trying to construct a Kazakh Lord Of The Rings (and heaven knows which rings those would be, given some of the action we see in a hotel room). It was like watching a television special on the big screen. You might not like that idea, but it sat well with me.

The odd thing is, despite the reservations all three fellow Borat voyeurs expressed at the end, I swear none of them stopped laughing right the way through the film. You can't spend the whole movie finding it funny, then pop a straight face on as you emerge and pretend you're above all that puerile nonsense. If you laughed, you laughed - admit it, a man with a chicken in a briefcase burning a copy of an old Baywatch annual made you giggle.

Of course you may not have laughed. I can think of a number of people to whom I'd never show this film. Horses for courses, as they sometimes say. In Borat's case, bears for ice cream vans.