Twenty years since their demise, and The Smiths still ignite enough obsessive fandomania to warrant this: the story of Beaky, Mick and Titch – or Andy Rourke (bass), Mike Joyce (drums) and, in the form of a separate ‘extras’ interview, Craig ‘fifth Smith’ Gannon.

The best thing about Inside The Smiths is Joyce’s buoyant attitude towards his former band. Perched on an assortment of flowery settees, he resembles a likable Coronation Street character on one of those retrospective ‘The Barlow Family Album’ programmes.

But then, if you’d been made stinking rich off the back of your ex-bandmates record royalties (as Joyce is rumoured to have done), you might be a bit chipper too. And here lies the exact reason that Inside The Smiths falls short. There are a series of questions that most Smiths fans would love answering – not least regarding their 1987 split and the subsequent court case that saw a judge label Morrissey as "devious, truculent and unreliable". But we don’t get any answers.

In fact, we don’t get much at all, other than Joyce and Rourke retelling stories about how their bequiffed singer once fell offstage during a gig, or footage of American super fans with stupid haircuts telling us that if The Smiths reformed (never gonna happen, bozo) the world’s axis would thrust us all into a new dimension.  

It’s all very pleasant and well-meaning, but you’re left wondering when exactly the real fun’s going to start. Inevitably, it never does.

You have people talking about Geoff Travis (head of the band’s label, Rough Trade), but no Geoff Travis talking for himself. Same goes for Johnny Marr and Morrissey. Vox-pops come in the form of someone from Suede who isn’t Brett Anderson or Bernard Butler, the standard Manchester musos (was Mani too busy?!) and a 2-4-1 with the The Kaiser Chiefs and Preston from The Ordinary Bores (who just happened to be walking past when the interview was taking place). There’s no Smiths music – thanks to the court case, we’re guessing – so you have to make-do with Doves songs, and Rourke forlornly playing the bassline of ‘This Charming Man’ in what looks like someone’s attic room.  

The depiction of the bassist’s mid-1980s addiction to heroin is just as frustrating. See, according to the film, he kicked this most-torrid of habits mainly because Trevor MacDonald had covered the story of his drug-related arrest on News At Ten. Oh, the embarrassment. Far be it from us to mock addiction, but in a supposedly in-depth retrospective about the most dour band ever, you’d at least hope for a bit more...well, in-depth-ness regarding one of their darkest hours.