"Charlie boy, you've stitched me up good and proper," newly-wed Lily (Friel) tells her Canadian husband after fetching up in the Alberta wilderness.

And it's a reaction a lot of us would empathise with, after losing a small slice of life sitting through this blandly uninvolving trudge through Lily's ex-pat adventure.

The high-spirited Cockernee geezerette winds up in Canada after a whirlwind romance (13 days) with Allied World War II soldier Charlie (Young).

Married and with a young daughter, she finds herself shipped off across the Atlantic to a shack resembling Bates' Motel - Little Hovel On The Prairie, if you like.

The welcome from Charlie's mum Betty (Fricker) and his sister, Sylvia (Parker), isn't an awful lot warmer than the wind which rattles the shutters.

"We are simple country folk," Betty tells the interloper, more at home with cockles and whelks, Pearly Kings and evenings darn vee old Bull and Bush.

However, the irrepressible Lily embarks on her own war - one of attrition - to wear down her resentful mother-in-law's resistance and Sylvia's outright hostility.

Overnight, she mutates into a combination of Maria Von Trapp and Janet Reger, knocking up cocktail dresses out of curtains and silk teddies for the luxury-starved women of Alberta.

She also does a Nigella in the kitchen, serving up British delights like black pudding, steak and kidney pie and bubble and squeak for the sensation-deprived locals.

It's all pretty harmless stuff and only shifts up a gear when a shell-shocked Charlie returns from the war with a whole new set of priorities.

Friel single-handedly keeps things afloat, with a Mary Poppins part that doesn't really go anywhere, while the rest of the cast struggle with a series of typecasts.

Fricker comes off the worst, with her character's handling of farmyard offal making Bernard Matthews look like a militant vegetarian.

My advice to this particular war bride - find yourself a good divorce lawyer.

Tim Evans