Tasha (Katie Blake) is a textile design student, doing work experience at Mackintosh. She's a posh girl from a leafy suburb and she doesn't fit in. She desperately wants to but she comes from another world. Mack (Philip Glenister) is feeling his age. Living alone in his suburban family house, his dissatisfaction with life is growing. This is not what he wants, surrounded by housewives driving 4 by 4s, spending his weekends at elderly neighbour's barbecues. There's got to be something more.

Tasha is thrilled when the girls invite her to the pub. Everyone is drinking up and having a good time, when she offers some coke around. They're not shocked, but it highlights the differences - they don't live the life where people can afford to snort coke. Just another thing that marks her out. Mack comes to the pub to get the keys to his filing cabinet but unusually he ends up staying. Normally, he avoids uncomfortable, social situations with his workers but he definitely has things in common with

Julie (Siobhan Finneran) is a Mackintosh old hand. She's a strange girl really - mid thirties, lives at home with her parents, popular, kind and generous but not truly close to anyone. As for a love life: non-existent. She feels a vague emptiness inside, but nothing she's ever dealt with. Life just goes on, day by day, same old thing. Its not as if she's actually unhappy.

Then her brother, Robert (Phil Cornwell), the big success of the family, comes over for a visit from his home in Hong Kong. Julie is over the moon because although he's a bit of a bolshie bloke, she adores him. He's done well - successful job, happy marriage, two beautiful girls. And out of the blue, he offers Julie some of his good fortune: why doesn't she come out to Hong Kong too - they'd be together, she'd see more of her nieces, earn loads of money, make a new start. Back in the bedroom she's had since she was a kid, Julie realises how small her world is. Hong Kong looks tempting - frightening but tempting. Could