Sir Billi, he said, was “woefully anaemic”. He hated its “convoluted series of silly set-pieces”, its “simplistic story and non-sequitur style”. He went on: “Sir Billi lacks the looks or charm of even the most rudimentary CG offerings being made today, as if not only the animation but also the plot and characters were spat out by off-the-shelf software.”

“It was so horrific,” Tessa says. Sir Billi was billed as a landmark, the first computer animated film out of Scotland, and it now stands as the last cinematic work of Sir Sean Connery. 

Debruge’s review was the first of many critics to pull Sir Billi apart. The finale of one of the 20th century’s most enduring stars has become a curio, with a second life as material for YouTubers looking for something to dunk on. “This TERRIBLE Film Got 0 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes…” has 440,000 views. “What the HELL is Sir Billi? (An Inappropriate Kids Movie)” has two million.  

The Hartmanns’ first animation venture was T-Babe, a computer generated pop star the couple launched in 2000 to put a face to Sascha’s dance music. T-Babe’s look was somewhere between Lara Croft and Gwen Stefani, and had a whole backstory: she was 18, the child of a professor and a hippie, single “but lonely”, fluent in Spanish, German, Italian and Japanese, and spent her down-time shopping, competing in athletics and “cybo-funking”. Despite much press attention, T-Babe’s debut single Peter Pumpkineater missed the charts.

After selling the rights to a T-Babe film which didn’t materialise, the Hartmanns put the money into their next idea: an animated children’s TV series. It would be set in the fictional Highland town of Catterness, and follow the exploits of skateboarding octogenarian vet Sir William Sedgewick. It’d be “quintessentially Scottish,” says Tessa. 

Neither were in the film industry – she worked as a strategist for luxury brands, he had studied clinical neuropsychology – but they put together a three-minute teaser, plus storyboards and a plot outline for a short film, and drew up their dream voice cast. Top of the list was Sir Sean Connery.

Then in his late seventies, Connery had been in retirement since The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen took a critical pasting in 2003. “He won’t make another film,” Connery’s friend Sir Michael Caine said in 2011. “The movie business retired him because he didn’t want to play small parts about old men and they weren’t offering him any young parts in romantic leads.”