Christmas movies, like seasonal in-store promotions, really are arriving earlier every year. But despite being released before this month’s Catherine wheels have even started spinning, the new Disney version of A Christmas Carol has about it the desperate whiff of an end-of-line knock-off grabbed from a depleted branch of Argos just as the shutters are falling on Christmas Eve.

Oscar Wilde was once bossing a high-society drawing-room with swishes of his rapier wit when someone else had the temerity to mint an aphorism. “I wish I’d said that,” intoned the great man. Back came the devastating retort: “You will, Oscar, you will.”