‘Shaun of the Dead’ has dated far more than its twenty years would suggest, delineating a world where people still communicated by leaving answer phone messages and relying on unreliable friends to jot down the messages on pieces of paper to pass to them when they come home from work. TVs are not (yet) widescreen, people still played cassettes in their car, and when it comes to defeating the zombies who appear in the back garden then nothing beats throwing at them your precious LP collection, leading to one hilarious scene where Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are debating which albums are too precious to aim at the ‘walking dead’ with a view to their decapitation – no to Sade, yes to the Stone Roses.

‘Shaun of the Dead’ is really a paeon to the Ealing comedies of old, though whereas those classics from the 1950s tended to be about eccentric, non-conformist types standing up against the establishment of the day and its petty rules and inhibitions and triumphing against the odds this first feature from Edgar Wright presents a particular set of North London ‘losers’ who are so wrapped up in the ennui and malaise of their lives – grown men reaching 30 who would much rather spend a day in the pub or going down the garden shed to play on their Playstation than make an effort with relationships or their careers – that when the zombies advance into their neighbourhoods they don’t initially notice a thing.

Two stand out scenes are where Pegg heads to the local newsagents in order to buy a Cornetto and doesn’t even notice the living dead staggering around him, and when the TV news starts to report the apocalypse and Pegg just channel hops, his mind elsewhere and where nothing registers. But, the Ealing mentality is preserved, or reinvented, when Pegg, as the epitome of failure and a loser in every aspect of his life inadvertently becomes the saviour of the remnants of the human race and finally does what, if this if were a Billy Wilder comedy, would entail his becoming a ‘mensch’. What is so endearing about ‘Shaun of the Dead’ is that it paints a picture of a certain London mentality whereby the end of the world could come and no one would really notice or care, provided that they can still get down their local pub, The Winchester, for a pint and a nibble.

It’s an endearing inversion of the apocalyptic and disaster genre of films, where the end of the world becomes another bother to contend with in a world where the best way to deal with any sort of crisis is to bury one’s head in the sand and go down the local to put everything right. Ultimately, this is a paeon to love, friendship, community and family, all the more re-enforced because the central characters here are pretty adept at avoiding their responsibilities until it really matters. And then their trajectory is as winning and tender as it is in any of the Ealing comedies of old.