Then again, the main creative force here may be screenwriter Simon Farnaby, a Gen Xer who could well have got some youthful amusement out of Flitcroft’s anti-triumphs.

Farnaby has been on the Flitcroft case for a while: the script for Phantom of the Open is adapted from a similarly titled biography which he co-wrote more than a decade ago.

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His other writing credits include the beloved Paddington films, likewise set in a cosy retro Britain with an outsider hero whose good-natured bumbling discomforts the snobs.

There are echoes here of Paddington’s homely magic realism, with Flitcroft fantasising about flying to a golf-ball moon – and Sally Hawkins, who played Paddington’s saintly adoptive mother, returns as the hero’s no less miraculously loyal wife.

Roberts and Farnaby seem bent on reassuring us that they themselves are on Flitcroft’s side, unlike the TV presenters who are shown as holding him up for snobbish ridicule. For the most part, he’s portrayed not as a wilful troublemaker or as someone with a screw loose, but as an innocent sincerely reaching for a dream.

Of course, that viewpoint could itself be taken as a snobbish, patronising one. As if to fend off this charge in turn, we’re regularly reminded that Flitcroft isn’t the simpleton he might initially appear.

The upshot is a character who isn’t entirely easy to swallow, except in the anything-goes terms of a sitcom. We’re asked to believe that he can quote Oscar Wilde and speak passable Spanish, but doesn’t know what “handicap” means in golfing terms till it’s too late.

Beyond this lies the paradox of the casting: the choice to have a notorious incompetent played by an actor who is a virtuoso and never lets us forget it.

Rylance’s performances often have an uncanny quality, suggesting a precise life-size simulation of how an actual person might behave – which is what made him so alarming and hilarious as a calmly unhinged tech zillionaire in the recent Don’t Look Up.

What he gives us as Flitcroft is yet another studied portrait, with every detail under full control: the slow speech, the wandering eyes, the tentative but knowing smile as if he were privy to some folk wisdom beyond words.

This too could be hilarious, if we weren’t being invited to accept the character at face value as the salt of the earth. As things stand, he’s fascinating but not entirely human – at least, not as human as Paddington Bear.

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