Chick Lit

Norfolk composer/director Tony Britten ventures into the world of "mummy porn" (à la Fifty Shades of Grey), as he revisits the sitcom style of In Love with Alma Cogan (2011) after the higher-brow content of Benjamin Britten: Peace and Conflict (2013) and Draw on Sweet Night (2015). Needing £300,000 to save the village pub, journalist Christian McKay persuades bookseller Miles Jupp, teacher David Troughton and landlord Tom Palmer to co-write a BDSM shocker. But when agents Eileen Atkins and John Hurt find a publisher, McKay has to talk his struggling actress and sister-in-law (Dakota Blue Richards) into posing as the author of Love Let Her. Smoothly played and eminently watchable (for all its contrivances), this rattles through its predictable twists, as Richards gets to star in the film of "her" steamy bestseller and fall for the prudish Palmer. But a resistible chauvinism colours the jokes about female reading habits and, even though the middle-class gents have the tables turned on them, this always feels a touch parochial and smug.