REVIEWED - THE MAGIC ROUNDABOUT: When Zebedee said 'time for bed', he couldn't have imagined this ghastly nightmare of a movie, writes Donald Clarke

Distressed parents of a certain age who have finally managed to rinse from their mouths the taste of rotting offal that set in when they brought Jack and Chloë to last year's vile Thunderbirds movie will be disturbed to hear that a different gang of Wardour Street fatheads has seen fit to defile another beloved icon of the early 1970s. If Russell T. Davis's upcoming re-invention of Dr Who proves similarly upsetting - thankfully, it actually sounds quite promising - then those of us born between the Kennedy assassinations may as well resign ourselves to a middle age spent cradling bent heads while mouthing the words "How could they?" at our Hush Puppies.

Le Manège Enchanté, as The Magic Roundabout was known in the original French, was devised by advertising executive Serge Danot in 1965, but will be known to most readers in the BBC version translated - though we should perhaps just say written - by Eric Thompson (father of Emma). Thompson paid no attention to the original scripts and simply made up the stories to fit the pictures. The resulting adventures, in which Dougal the lazy dog, Brian the thoughtful snail and Dylan the distracted hippie frolicked beneath the stern, authoritarian gaze of Zebedee the sprung deity, were unlike anything else you had ever encountered. The new version, rendered in the cheap computer graphics that usually fly supermarket logos at us, is like everything else you've encountered since.

Specifically, it is like The Lord of the Rings. The characters - voiced well by Jim Broadbent (Brian) and Bill Nighy (Dylan) and badly by Robbie Williams (Dougal) and Kylie Minogue (Florence) - become distressed when the titular carousel is encased in ice by an evil anti-Zebedee named Zebad. Climbing aboard a red train, they sally forth to a terrifying dark kingdom to retrieve various magic rings, sorry, jewels, which have the power to restore order in the universe.

The nudge-nudge gags about recreational drugs are inappropriate, the backgrounds are garish, the music is horrible and, when the whole ghastly business is over, Zebedee doesn't even have the decency to say "Time for bed!"