David Brent is not just the greatest comic creation of Ricky Gervais’s career, he is the leering, preening poster boy for an entire comedy movement. With The Office, Gervais turned the screws on the humour of discomfort, creating moments so excruciating that you didn’t know whether to laugh or to chew off your own fingers from sheer mortification. This film spin-off, which rejoins an older, sadder Brent, now a salesman of sanitary products, as he is about to embark on a self-funded tour with his band, contains the same fingernails-down-the-blackboard approach to comedy. What remains to be seen is whether the audience still has the stamina for this particularly self-flagellatory form of entertainment. As one character remarks of Brent’s decision to let a camera crew follow him again: “It’s worse, because the world’s worse.”

The David Brent we meet has deflated slightly since his blustering glory days as regional manager at Wernham Hogg. But the fact that he is more of a tragic figure now doesn’t make him a sympathetic one. That wretched, awkward laugh remains, like a cross between a titter and the yelp of a kicked dog. And Gervais deploys it so ruthlessly and frequently, we are too busy squirming to realise that the jokes tied into Foregone Conclusion’s doomed tour start to repeat themselves. While the writing, particularly the off-colour lyrics to Brent’s songs, is frequently painfully sharp, there’s a lack of variation in the jokes which, at feature length, starts to feel a little like torture.