I am happy to admit that I have been a stranger to Bollywood films. I only sought this one out because it was largely filmed at Waterloo Station. I was going into work one weekend last year and the place was full of cameras being packed up. I was told that there had been filming for a Bollywood film and made a mental note to keep an eye out for it.

Through an Indian colleague I found out that the film was Jhoom Barabar Jhoom and borrowed a copy from him, which has turned out to be a real eye-opener for me. I used to turn to the B4U Music channel on Sky/Virgin sometimes just for a change from the same old songs on MTV/VH-1 so I had seen some Indian music videos, but that didn’t really prepare me for what an entire film is like.

As a borderline anorak I found it hard to ignore the major plot point that a main character was waiting in Waterloo station for a train from Birmingham, and had to stifle giggles when a train from Manchester arrived. When the train from Birmingham arrived in full Southwest Trains livery I was rolling in the aisles.

The film started with Amitabh Bachchan dressed as a sort of pied piper with a double-necked guitar leading a major song and dance routine in the station concourse. This routine, and indeed the character, had no connection with the story at all.

After this the star of the film Rikki Thukral, played by Abhisheck Bachchan (son of Amitabh) comes along acting like an Indian version of Del Trotter, in the process ripping off a newspaper seller played by Sanjeev Bhaskar.

He meets up with a girl, played by Preity Zinta, and they get talking about how they are both waiting for their fiancees to arrive by different delayed trains. They tell each other the story of how they met their other halves in a series of flashbacks, with the odd enormous song and dance included.

I started off confused as I had English sub-titles on, but the actors kept swapping between Hindi (I think) and English with the odd bit of French and Urdu thrown in for good measure. I was also a bit confused by Preity Zinta and couldn’t work out if she was Indian or English. She is Indian, although her character was supposed to be a British Pakistani.

I found that Abhisheck Bachchan was extremely likeable, the two main female characters were extremely attractive, and the songs were very catchy indeed. For days afterwards I have been unable to shake Ticket to Hollywood out of my head.

OK, so the production values area bit lower than we are used to (It is not unusual to see ordinary members of the public walking past the filming and staring at the camera like passersby in a news report) and the story was lightweight and increasingly predictable, but that did not stop it being immensely enjoyable.

It even had an intermission in the middle! Really. Halfway through the film a great big ‘intermission’ caption came up.

For me, the worst thing about it all (apart from the terrible disregard for railway routes) was that there were only four songs but about six musical interludes. The title song turned up at least three times throughout the film, mostly with Amithab Bachchan doing his thing, and again over the end credits.

Now I am going to have to borrow a few more of these films to find out whether I really like them or whether I just like this one, because it turns out that a lot of Indians were really disappointed by it for several reasons.

One of the reasons it bombed (relatively) was that Amitrabh Bachchan is one of the biggest Bollywood stars going. There was a documentary about him on TV just last week. Which I missed. Lots of people went along expecting to see him in the film and all they got was a guest appearance in the dance routines. This must be similar to the fuss made about Marlon Brando’s short appearance in Superman.

Friends have also told me that they found the film to be poorly acted and with a weak story. I watched it assuming it was representative and that all Bollywood films were poorly acted and just accepted that. I was also told that the film was a bit too modern in places, with too many hip hop influences in the music, although generally the soundtrack seems to be better received than the film.

So it may be that I only like bad Bollywood movies, but I won’t know until I have borrowed a few which are generally regarded as good.