VALENTINE’S Day is always rubbish, a consumer festival where folk are persuaded to part with yet more money for goods and services to ‘prove their love’ for their other half, even if they’ve treated them like a doormat for the other 364 days of the year.

But Valentine’s Day 2015 is even worse because this year we have the lovely Fifty Shades of Grey film exploding all over us, like Mr Creosote in the Monty Python movie.

You can’t pick up a paper, go on the internet, watch the TV or even eat your sarnies without seeing a plug for it somewhere.

And that would be fine if it was a smouldering inferno of passion and a thundering tale of true love.

But how can it be when the hero, Christian Grey, is so cardboardy he could be sent for recycling and our heroine, Anastasia Steele, is drippier than a thousand broken taps?

And when the underlying premise of the novel is that women should put up, shut up and tape their mouth up?

And that women are happy to be physically hurt, mentally abused and treated like rubbish.

But only if the bloke in question is drop-dead gorgeous and a billionaire, of course!

Because, no matter what it says, there is no way Ana was going to do all that for a bloke who worked as a bus driver or spent his nights asking ‘would you like fries with that’ was she?

She wasn’t going to be spanked, injured and ordered around all day by a chap who resembled Arthur Mullard.

We’re told the message from this film is that women secretly fantasise about all this stuff, with the implied hint that blokes should get on it.

But that’s because the people who brought you the film want you to invest in their overpriced merchandise and spin-offs to improve your private life.

The REAL fantasy of most women isn’t that they are going to get handcuffed by a good-looking billionaire but that their own husband would actually put his clothes in the laundry bin, rather than chucking them at it, basketball style.

And the fantasy of most men is even simpler – that their partner will just have more sex with them.

But you don’t make millions writing books about that!