Shane Meadows' new film is entirely funded by Eurostar and comes spiced with a few favourable references to the company's high-speed rail link between London and Paris. At the end of the film, it even takes a trip aboard the train itself and we are treated to a lustrous montage of Montmartre, the Eiffel Tower and the Jardin du Luxembourg. According to its makers, Somers Town is as much a pureblood Shane Meadows film as Dead Man's Shoes or This is England. But CNN describes it as "essentially an advert," while the Wikipedia entry defines it as a "covert advertising campaign."

"People should judge it by the fruits on the tree," Meadows told me when I spoke to him earlier this week. He argues that film-makers should always be prepared to hunt out new avenues of finance and stressing that taking money from a private company is not necessarily any more compromising than taking it from FilmFour or Pathe.

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