William Burroughs isn’t the easiest writer to approach, his cut-up experiments rendering comprehension in the usual manner difficult, and instead offering multiple perspectives on his concerns. Two of his books remain popular for their insight into living as a gay heroin user in the 1950s. The analyses contained in Junky and Queer are timeless. His writings on drugs rival those of Aldous Huxley, whose Doors of Perception was a piercingly intelligent commentary on the hallucinogenic experience.

Part of the reality of those chronicles is how the drug experience affects everything the user does. And it is with this insight in mind that I offer an analysis of the perspective of someone suffering mild flu. True, flu lacks the seedy glamour that the drug user is credited with, but it remains an altered state that affects the sufferer’s whole perceptions.

In particular, the flu sufferer is driven to desire comfort, in the form of hot drinks and fluffy jumpers. And, in my case, I am also eager to experience comfort viewing. At times like this, I have no desire for novelty. No, I desire the tried and tested. In particular, I yearn for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Which, conveniently, is on ITV2 at this very moment.

This is a film I have seen many times, and continue to enjoy. Yes, it’s puerile, relies on some dumb jokes, and is altogether silly. But what else would you expect of a story in which two underperforming high school kids get access to time travel and use the technology to collect historical figures ranging from Napoleon to Socrates, Freud to Billy the Kid, to show off in their class history test?

Besides, that spare account misses out the warmth of the relationship between the protagonists, and the endearing positivity of their worldview. Ultimately, Bill and Ted influence the path of civilisation, the future based on the music and values of the band the two friends start. And it’s that core of enthusiasm and optimism running through the film that I love, and which brings me back to it time and again.

Much of the humour comes from putting historical figures into the contemporary setting of a mall, Bill and Ted’s spiritual home. Seeing Genghis Khan get to grips with toilet cleaning products, Napoleon in a water chute, Beethoven rocking out on a synthesiser…what it lacks in subtlety it regains in its ability to put a big dumb smile on your face and kickstart the production of endorphins. And the more endorphins are swimming round your system, the quicker you’ll recover from flu.

The film’s dialogue is an acquired taste, and one that works for me. Sure, Bill and Ted have a limited vocabulary in which things are ‘bodacious’ and ‘totally excellent’, but in the mouths of Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, it works just fine. Get into the spirit, and you’ll discover this is a buoyant and upbeat tale with a big heart, and more of a brain than you might notice at first sight. Some of the temporal paradoxes that the lads set up to win the day are truly inventive, and its optimistic philosophy wins more points from me than any number of frowny worldviews perpetrated by other filmmakers.

As written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, and directed by Stephen Herek, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is just the kind of feelgood nonsense that I respond to when feeling under the weather. You’ll excuse me if I say goodbye for now before the film reaches its climax, as Bill and Ted round up their historical allies to deliver their school report. Excellent, I can feel myself getting better already…