Films

Or, as the film producers put it: "Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution is the story of one man's dream of transporting his family from the world of Marks and Spencer to the world of Marx and Lenin."

The Ratcliffes are no ordinary family. Frank Ratcliffe (Iain Glen) is a school teacher but he's also comrade in chief of Bingley Communist Party (membership: 12). Award-winning actor Glenn talks about Frank: " He's a teacher at the school and he has this' you know, communist conviction that's not been bred from experience but he's very attracted to the theory. And he takes his family to live out the theory and he thinks he's going to find a sort of paradise. But in practice it all goes horribly wrong."

The Bingley comrades led by Iain Glen

But make no mistake about it – this is MRS RATCLIFFE's revolution! "I guess Dorothy's the protagonist of the film, really. I wouldn't say she's the centre of her family, not in the beginning of the film but I think in the course of the film she brings the family together and becomes the pivot. I think at the beginning she's trying to hold it together and in the end she is the glue," says TV comedian Catherine Tate who plays Dorothy.

Needless to say, the Ratcliffes find that East Germany (the DDR) is far from being an Earthly paradise. Instead they find bureaucracy, censorship, rationing and discover that almost every other person is a member of the secret police or is being spied upon.

Catherine Tate believes the film has as much to say about Bingley as it does about Berlin: "[Dorothy] starts off in Bingley, geographically. She's resolutely cheerful and I suppose she's the kind of woman who gets sidelined a bit as I imagine quite a lot of women did in the Sixties in Bingley. I think it was a fairly patriarchal society anyway. Not just in Bingley, just generally in the Sixties."

In East Germany Frank's dream eventually sours, younger daughter Mary even becomes a Stasi (secret police) informer and Dorothy befriends a young boy, Otto, who she unwittingly helps escape to the West. And, when the time comes, it is Dorothy who plans the family's departure…

From Bingley to East Germany and a cinema near you

Writers Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan say: "The themes seem very relevant today and the period setting is really just a medium to explore them: the empowerment of women, the relationship between the individual and the state, the struggle for freedom and the loss of political idealism. It's interesting to see how much focus there is currently on life in the GDR and what it is like to live in a police state. Perhaps people see a darker image of the way our societies can go."

And, just in case you're still wondering, Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution is a comedy! Peter and Bridget add: "To be honest the true story was just the inspiration – this was a very fictionalised version of what really happened, so the characters are all more or less invented, and the plot had to go its own way if this was to work as a comedy rather than a documentary account."

But we think it's best to leave the last word to Catherine Tate: "Dorothy is a housewife and ends up as a sort of mini revolutionary or dissident really and she springs her family from Eastern Germany. And they go who knows where because we finish the film in a hot air balloon, sailing out of the GDR. I don't know where they're on their way to. So I don't really know where she'll end up. It'll probably be somewhere where there aren't so many queues to get a loaf of bread."

Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution is on general release from September 28th 2007. And it's being premiered at the Vue Light Cinema in Leeds on Sunday September 23th 2007 from 7pm.