This is an America where no high school kids are fat or anorexic, where they are all smartly dressed and eager fashion beavers, where there are no drugs and sex is limited to a tiny bit of mouth-to-mouth and where the sun always shines on bright new buildings.

This is teen dreamland, folks, and what’s a cynical old critic doing reviewing it at all? What does he know about the flowing talents of the world’s favourite high school students (Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale and Lucas Grabeel among them)?

It can’t be for nothing that Zac won the award for Choice Male Hottie last year and that Ashley was selected as one of the Ten Most Powerful Girls in Hollywood.

Ah well, we can’t all be au fait with such things. But we can look at the film and wonder at the insipid pop songs sprayed around, the acting-by-numbers and the general sense that anything will do by way of a plot, just as long as there’s a school concert at the end. This one wows the parents so much that they keep on jumping from the seats to holler ovations.

Kenny Ortega is the director, and he says: “I just tried to bring it all to life with as much fun and joy and colour and excitement as possible,” later opining that “there’s something about teenage life that is the same all around the world”.

Angst? You’re joking. Pressures about who to take to the prom, final exams, graduation and going away from home to higher education are treated like choosing from a particularly scrumptious box of sweeties. All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

If you like this sort of thing, go see it. It’s getting a bit thin the third time round, but the general effect is the same. This team has made cable TV’s highest rated show, the two highest rated Disney Channel movies, two multi-platinum soundtracks, a concert tour, an ice show and enough awards to fall off the average fireplace shelf.

I cringed for nearly two hours.