Tim Burton splutters his British cold into a British handkerchief. He has lived in Hampstead for years, and has a London-based family, so you’d think this LA transplant could lay claim to having “gone native”.

There are still gaps to be plugged in Burton’s local knowledge, though. Did he understand that Sweeney Todd was cockney rhyming slang for Flying Squad? “No, I did not,” he says

The maverick director attends, instead, to the tale of the demon barber of Fleet Street – the dreaded Victorian barnet-buzzer who, according to lore

would slit the throats of his customers without so much as an “Anything for the weekend, sir?”, their carcasses dispatched to the pie shop downstairs to be minced up as filling

Burton, as it happens, doesn’t believe Todd existed – “It’s sort of an urban myth,” he concedes, disappointed

Quite possibly there was some psychotic shaver who inspired the fable

bringing him within an untrimmed whisker of the notoriety of Jack the Ripper

But veracity doesn’t matter