With the always fascinating Helen Mirren and Julie Walters heading the superb cast, director Nigel Cole and screenwriter Juliette Towhidi extract much fun at the outset from a series of meetings of the local chapter of the Women's Institute with utterly boring discussion topics. Mirren as Chris and Walters as Annie giggle mockingly. The pattern is shaken up when Chris gets the idea of local women posing nude in hope of making enough money to buy a waiting room sofa in the hospital where Annie's husband John (John Alderton) died of leukemia. Gradually the women reluctantly agree, fortified with John's comparison of women and flowers and his view that women gloriously bloom when they mature.

Trying to find a male photographer adds comedy scenes, and when one is finally chosen, there is an attempt to isolate him from the moment when the women shed their clothes by his first doing the set-up with an array of props and one of the women snapping the shutter. As you may have gathered by now, the film is sort of a female version of "The Full Monty."

As really happened, the publicity turns out to be phenomenal, calendar sales soar, and enough money is raised to buy a lot more than a sofa. The women are invited to Hollywood to be wined and dined and appear on the Jay Leno show. All of this begins to turn heads and the relationship between Chris and Annie is strained. Difficulties also arise between Chris and her husband Rod (Ciaran Hinds), who is ambushed by an unscrupulous journalist and wheedled into complaining about his wife's lack of sexual attention, making for juicy tabloid headlines.