ROYAL JELLY

REVIEWED - THE PRINCESS DIARIES 2: ROYAL ENGAGEMENT: I want to be a princess. I want my own horse and closets full of clothes and drawers full of cool sunglasses and Maria Von Trapp as my Granny and some floppy haired boyfriend who may treat me badly sometimes, but will always say sorry after and kiss me and love me forever.

And I want my bestest friend to be there and I want her to get a boyfriend who is nice, but much less attractive than mine. And I want to be really beautiful and have a mouth so huge you could shove a watermelon into it. And I want to live in a palace that is just like the one in Disneyland and I want, I want, I want . . .

The Princess Diaries, in which Anne Hathaway was turned from a beautiful teenager with glasses into a beautiful teenager with contact lenses by Queen Julie of Andrews, was a pretty terrible film that allowed young girls to live out some of their fantasies vicariously.

The buttock-clenchingly appalling sequel, despite having more subplots than The Brothers Karamazov, is really nothing but teenage wish fulfilment. The plot has something to do with an edict demanding that Princess Bigmouth must wed before she accedes to the throne of Wherever-it-is. This is, however, just an excuse to stage the sort of disgustingly expensive first wedding that many wealthy American women now seem to crave (and often get), but which most bicycling European royals would regard as too vulgar for words.