The team that produced the Touching the Void film is being lined up, bizarrely, to create a celluloid version of Kate and Gerry McCann’s ordeal.

The Leicestershire doctors have rarely been off the front pages of the tabloids since the disappearance of their three-year-old daughter Madeleine in May last year. Now, if a report in the Daily Mail is to be believed, entertainment company IMG is looking to the Touching the Void team to bring the tale to the cinema.

Kevin Macdonald picked up a Bafta for his 2004 mix of dramatisation and talking-head monologues from Joe Simpson and Simon Yates after Simpson’s near fatal experience in the Peruvian Andes. It received widespread plaudits for its realistic climbing sequences and poignant recollections from the two climbers.

Just how a similar treatment can be given by production company Darlow Smithson to such a controversial and unresolved case as Madeleine’s disappearance is hard to fathom, given the ever-present possibility of legal developments.

The Mail says that money raised from the production would be used by the McCanns to continue the high-profile search for their daughter.

It all seems far-fetched and it’s possible that the story is just another piece of Daily Mail kite-flying.

Darlow Smithson’s most recent effort was another Joe Simpson collaboration, The Beckoning Silence, in which he charted the ill-fated attempt on the Eiger’s Nordwand by four climbers in 1936.