Rabbit Fever

This far-fetched British mockumentary strikes an uneasy balance between reality and fantasy as it follows a group of women who have become addicted to the ‘rabbit’ vibrator. While a real-life best-seller, the female-friendly sex toy is hardly believable as the cause of widespread international panic, but in ‘Rabbit Fever’ it causes marriages to break up, airlines to introduce bans and campaigners to protest for ‘rabbit’ breaks at work. It sounds like an unusually bad ‘Brass Eye’ sketch, but it’s far worse than that: a collection of repetitive am-dram talking heads, weak jokes and central characters who are hard to distinguish from one another. Julian Rhind-Tutt and Tara Summers offer occasional respite as a rabbit-plagued couple whose denial is revealed with relative subtlety: elsewhere the humour is unsophisticated and unfunny. The only people wincing more than the audience are likely to be participants such as Germaine Greer, who will surely see the finished product as an utterly wasted opportunity to explore female sexual liberation through humour.