One of the best comic relationship tales I’ve read. Its wacky scenario of an Australian couple (top of the range duplex with pool) swapping their house with a Leicester couple (semi on council estate) as each woman needs to sort out their husbands, is a pure delight. The cultural differences, friends, neighbours – the whole experience – is portrayed with genuine wit which really made me laugh out loud. You’ve got to read this.
When Pauline Watkins wakes up one morning to discover she’s thirty-nine, she decides Something Must Be Done. About her marriage to a partner who thinks that bedtime is just for sleeping, about her routine job – her routine life. An exotic holiday would be a start, and fairexchange.biz offers a solution – swap her council estate semi outside Leicester for a piece of paradise in Australia. Pauline presses Send. On the other side of the world, Lorna Mackenzie has reached a similar conclusion, but for a rather different reason: her sleeping partner is sleeping around. A family wedding provides the excuse for Lorna to sweep her mother and her faithless husband up into Business Class and head chez Watkins. It may be better to travel hopefully than to arrive, but for Pauline and Lorna, a holiday swap turns into the journey of a lifetime.
Born and brought up in Leicester, Lou Wakefield is a writer, director and actor. Highlights of her eclectic career include being in the original cast of TOP GIRLS at the Royal Court and the Public Theatre in New York; playing Janet in the ROCKY HORROR SHOW at the King's Road Theatre in 1975, and Jackie Woodstock in THE ARCHERS. TV appearances include INSIDE OUT, MORSE, THE BILL and CASUALTY. Amongst her many television productions, she has directed CORONATION STREETand BROOKSIDE. She wrote the award winning FIRM FRIENDS for ITV, and co-writes the highly successful Ladies of Letters for BBC Radio 4, which stars Prunella Scales and Patricia Routledge.
