Watch a video report from the world premiere

There may be a problem with a film when a narrator constantly tells you the meaning of what you have just seen, gift-wrapping each scene with a moral.

There may be a problem with characters who shop with such conviction while the audience looks up from the trough of a credit crunch.

There may be a problem with stretching Sex and the City into a two hour and twenty minute film - it can feel like a never ending dinner party: however pleasant the courses, after a while you can hardly eat another one.

None of these problems seemed apparent to the women who sat around me in the cinema in Leicester Square, laughing and weeping in quick succession. After a while I began to reason like one of the characters: maybe the problem was me.

Everyone else, being in possession of more than one X chromosome, seemed entirely satisfied by what they were served.

The dialogue was still sharp even if, to an audience now rather more used to women characters talking frankly about sex, it may no longer seem so daring.

There were still attempts to shock. Now they were talking about sex in front of a child, referring to the act euphemistically as “colouring”. How often did Miranda do colouring? Not nearly enough. Samantha, the goddess single of older women, of course liked to use all the crayons, while Carrie Bradshaw, our narrator and lead, said that when Big coloured “he doesn’t always stay inside the lines.”

Perhaps the child was needed to remind us that this was shocking, because since the series began, we have all become a lot more grown up.

If the atmosphere inside the cinema bordered on the devotional and the theatre was filled with the sounds of women emoting, outside the atmosphere was hysterical.

New Line, the studio behind the film, had attempted to pacify critics, curious as to why a film in which a major character is the city of New York, should open first in London.

The company claimed that the event would be “much smaller” than the New York premier, but all four women were there in their heels and dresses, and thousands had arrived to see them and scream their names.

Each in turn diplomatically affirmed their love of the city and denied or brushed aside rumours of tensions between the them during filming.

If none of the four actresses has enjoyed comparable success since the end of the series four years ago, the crowds cheered louder than they have for established film stars. Many felt they were welcoming back friends who had lived on their screens for six years and were returning for one last blast.

It was almost as if the director was feeling the nostalgia. The opening scenes are broken up with musical montages, softly lit like Hallmark adverts.

Carrie Bradshaw, (Sarah Jessica Parker), is finally to marry her Mr Big (Chris Noth). The news features in New York gossip columns, she is the forty-year-old bride featured in a wedding edition of Vogue.

The plot twists and turns like that of a pot boiler. Having inspired an entire genre of ‘chick lit’, Sex and the City the film feeds off its own progeny. Is it a film, one wonders, or an extended soap opera, will any of these crises be resolved and, if they are, will it matter, for they will surely soon plunge themselves into another dilemma, for which the only cure is an expansive shopping trip.

At the last, there is at least a brief concession to the meaner times in which we live now. And at the last, does Carrie finally marry her Mr Big? Well, dear reader, I can tell you that she...

A women’s institution

— Philip Treacy designed the hat worn for last night’s premiere by Sarah Jessica Parker. The eccentric British style icon Isabella Blow helped to make the Irish milliner a household name by stepping out in his outrageous designs for more than a decade

— Six seasons of the original television series of Sex and the City were produced on the HBO network between 1998 and 2004

— It won six Emmy awards and eight Golden Globes

— The final episode on Channel 4 in 2004 drew 4.1 million viewers

— The fifth series was cut to eight episodes after Parker and Cynthia Nixon became pregnant

— A black sequined Chanel dress with a price tag of $5,000 was among items of clothing from the series put up for sale in New York

— A channel in Shanghai produced its own version of the series in 2003 called Hot Ladies

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