Frank (Mullan) finds himself making the trip from shipyard to scrapheap after he is made redundant from the job that was his life for 55 years.

Without direction or purpose, he find himself cast adrift with only his regular fixture in the week a visit to the local baths to swim.

Joining him are young Danny (Boyd), who also got the sack, and Eddie (Sean McGinley), who only avoided the push by taking a job as a yard cleaner.

As the days blur into weeks, Frank - inspired by the sight of young disabled lad splashing about and a booze cruise to France - decides to pour his untapped energy into swimming the Channel.

His first recruit is coach Chan (Benedict Wong), a fish & chip shop owner preyed on by casual racists, and soon the rest of his buddies are in his back-up team for his cross-channel adventure.

Director Gaby Dellal uses the single-minded pursuit of the big swim as the hook on which to hang Frank's troubled back-story.

Emotionally crippled by the death of a young son years before, he's pushed his other boy Rob (Jamie Sives) away, despite the fact he's now got two kids of his own.

Stripped of the self-worth his job gave him, his dream of swimming to France becomes an obsession, filling in the empty time he now finds on his hands.

It runs the risk of tipping over into easy sentimentality but Dellal steers course with the cast - especially Mullan and Boyd as the impressionable Danny - investing the characters with real substance.

Some of the joshing can get a little bit Last of the Summer Wine and the humour sometimes falters (did his support boat really need to be called La Belle End?) but compassion wins through.

It's a pretty decent crowd-pleaser, the sort of British film we should be able to consistently pull off but never quite seem to do.

Tim Evans