Grow your own

The people behind this harmless comic fable originally set out to make a documentary about a group of asylum seekers and refugees whose efforts at the most English of pursuits - toiling on the allotment - help them find a kind of peace and a measure of assimilation, writes Donald Clarke

Sadly, the subjects were unwilling to be filmed, so the producers hired Frank Cottrell- Boyce, regular screenwriter for Michael Winterbottom, to fashion a fictional tale from the bones of the original idea. What we have ended up with is another contribution to the very tired Kinky-Monty-Calendar genre in which a group of people from some unfashionable part of England gain redemption through an eccentric hobby or recreation.

It's not the worst of its kind. Sound performances from Eddie Marsan and Olivia Colman as sat-upon unfortunates help spread a bit of class about the place. And the rich, saturated photography by David Luther is more idiosyncratic than you would expect. But from the first few frames the progress of the clunky plot is never in serious doubt. If you plant turnip seeds you get turnips. If you sit down in front of a Kinky-Monty- Calendar flick it will, ultimately, seek to warm your heart.

The action takes place on the outskirts of Liverpool. When an assortment of African and Asian asylum seekers are allocated spaces at the back of a collection of allotments, the incumbent gardeners quickly begin using words like "influx" and "invasion".

Help comes in the form of an incredibly evil woman - power suit barely containing corporate breasts - from the phone company who wishes to plant a mast on one allotment. The locals begin planning to sell her of one of the new arrivals' plots.

Well, it hardly need be said that everyone ends up being friends. Nothing wrong with that, but the apparent attempt to use the allotments as a metaphor for England is ultimately misguided. It's too big a metaphor for too small a stretch of earth.