Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution

Another high-concept British comedy from the ‘what the hell were they thinking?’ files, ‘Mrs Ratcliffe’s Revolution’ is a reckless mishmash of featherweight, Ealing-esque farce and ham-fisted political lampooning that comes off like the feature-length mutant offspring of ‘’Allo, ’Allo’. The film opens in Yorkshire during the late 1960s where schoolteacher and budding Communist Frank (Iain Glen) manages to convince his doting wife Dorothy (Catherine Tate) and their two daughters that the only way to safeguard themselves from the creeping capitalist terror would be to hightail it to the GDR. While the quietly fanatical Frank does his best to toe the line, Dorothy soon tires of a society where you’re not allowed to listen to Roy Castle’s records or eat Marmite. For a comedy, it’s light on laughs, and though Tate shows promise in the lead, the film’s blinkered and lazy approximation of far-left politics is enough to have Ken Loach choking on his borscht.