If your idea of a comedy is a pig with diarrhoea, then this is unquestionably the film for you. Only a writer of Alan Bennett's talent could come even close to getting fun out of this situation and his script extracts a priceless performance from Maggie Smith, offering purse-lipped perfection as the 1947 north-country housewife who goads her chiropodist husband Michael Palin into stealing a pig to raise their social status. The result is an old-fashioned comedy in the tradition.

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