Unemployed youngsters spend their days at the roller disco, circling round and round, before being called to take up low-paid jobs as they become available. For others, it's a subsistence existence of vending machine food, video games, with sex and drugs freely available as distractions.

At an end-of-term school play, Ozzie and his band join in with a hard rock contribution. However, this leads to the unexpected fame of the schoolboy rock group, and they find that there is a darker down-side to fame and being successful music stars.

"These Indian films. They're done to a formula - songs, dance, routines and a lot of sentimental heavy breathing." When her 17-year-old son Roy falls in love with a Muslim girl, and a Bangladeshi butcher seeks help from her husband Raji, Leela realises that the tears and romance of Indian cinema are closer to her own life than she has ever imagined.

In between working in a supermarket by day and in a cinema by night, Connie caters for her placid Stan and adolescent kids Cheryl and Paul. But slowly she starts to rebel against the traditional women's roles she's been pushed into.