One of the key challenges for Frears and his team working on the film are the cycling scenes. David Millar was brought in as a consultant which has clearly worked to a certain extent, as the look is very good. The bikes and kit all fit the era but although the look is well researched, the riders still look like, well, amateurs. They’ve cleverly manoeuvred around this in certain places – such as the Sestriere scene from the 1999 Tour – by using television footage and interspersing it with on-bike shots of Foster, but for fans of the pro sport there’s no denying that the on-screen peloton has none of the dynamism of its real-life counterpart.

In contrast, some of the key scenes are especially effective. When Armstrong admonishes Filippo Simeoni after the Italian rider testifies against Ferrari, Foster’s imitation of the famous ‘zipped lips’ gesture is uncanny, and really adds to the belief of him as Armstrong. Similarly, the scene in the café where Walsh admonishes his fellow journalists, shouting “why are you not obsessed with this?” is realistic enough that Walsh himself told us he was amazed that O’Dowd hadn’t actually been privy to some of the conversations he had at the time.

And the effective casting and characterisation is one of the main reasons the film works. If you can ignore the awful Italian accent, Guillaume Canet as Ferrari definitely manages to capture the portentous and enigmatic side of his character. Everything down to the 1990s dress sense is authentic, and in all honestly if Canet’s Ferrari occasionally feels a bit like a Bond villain it’s because his real-life public persona isn’t all that far from it.

Ben Foster does a good job with his portrayal of Armstrong, although he fails to capture the menace at points, instead coming across as petulant, but the fact that he’s believable in the role is hugely to his credit. Playing real people – especially those who have been so prominent in the comparatively recent past – is never easy.

Similarly, Chris O’Dowd is excellent as Walsh but ultimately it’s the storytelling rather than the performances that let the film down.

And that encapsulates probably the film’s biggest problem: it feels more like a summary than an in-depth feature. For all the scenes of drug use (enough to make screenwriter John Hodge’s 1996 script for Trainspotting feel like a children’s film), and behind the scene imaginations of Armstrong, it often scrapes the surface where a more in-depth examination of the characters and their motivations would have been more fulfilling.

Conclusion

The Program isn’t a bad film by any means, but it does struggle with condensing a long and comparatively complex story into Blockbuster feature length and, as you’d expect, details fall by the wayside as a result. If you’re coming to the story relatively fresh (or as fresh as you can be without having your head buried in the sand for the last five years), you’ll likely enjoy on its own merits and it’s an easy way to spend an hour-and-a-half. But coming from a cycling background, as especially anyone who’s read Walsh’s book, or similar detailed accounts from Tyler Hamilton, Juliet Macur or Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O’Connell will possibly feel frustrated that key parts of the story – particularly Armstrong’s disgraceful treatment of anyone who provided a dissenting voice – have been omitted.