Robert Kingswell

Victorian England, the late 1800s: Detective Sergeant Daniel Cribb of the newly formed Criminal Investigation Department (CID) is determined to remove crime from the streets of London using the latest detection methods.

Unexpected events occur when Pat, a glamorous British-born star of American soaps, returns home to plug her auto-biography on television and meets, for the first time since they were teenagers, Margaret her plain and frumpy younger sister. The meeting is painful for both women highlighting the vast differences in their lives and resurrecting painful memories of their unhappy childhood with an uncaring, errant mother. The tabloid press smell a juicy story and a race ensues to trace the whereabouts of the long lost parent.

Julie Walters stars as a single mother seemingly haunted by a sinister telephone system that seems to have become an evil intelligence in its own right.