When Yorkshire's Ratcliffe family vote to move east from Bingley it's not to Bradford…it's to the communist people's republic of East Germany.

Dad Frank (Glen) - a died-in-the-wool socialist who believes a teasmade is a "capitalist tool of working class oppression" - accepts a job offer to teach English in the GDR school.

Along with him must go his daughter Mary (Barden), a pocket commie, and the flirtatious Alex (Ashworth), an art student whose just discovered boys.

Bringing up the rear is Mrs Dorothy "I'm just a housewife" Ratcliffe, a dowdy, nervous homekeeper, and her brother Philip (Betts), a confirmed bachelor obsessed with a motorised tie rack.

Heading east in their second-hand Skoda (natch), they are welcomed behind the Iron Curtain to the grimly decaying socialist nirvanha of Asche.

However, while dad and Mary embrace the high-minded ideals of the Soviet model, the rest of the family find it more difficult in a land where Marx and Lenin have replaced Marks & Spencer.

For a start, Mrs R isn't too happy with the draconian manner of the school headmaster and finds her British sense of fair play challenged by a sinister bureaucracy. Revolution is in the air.

There's the kernel of a good idea here but it's let down by weak writing (the occasional sharp line is a welcome relief) and some pretty dire acting (some of the German accents seem to reach Berlin by way of Swansea).

Tate never really plays to her strengths as the timid house-mouse who roared although her subtle characterisation is one of the movie's major pluses.

It's one of those well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual British comedies that seems mired in a desparate parallel universe cursed with endless re-runs of The Good Life.

This revolution never gets off the ground.

Tim Evans