Hope Springs   Starring: Alex Kingston, Siân Reeves, Christine Bottomley, Vinette Robinson and Annette Crosbie Acorn Media UK RRP: £24.99 AV9736 Certificate: 15 Available 27 July 2009

Its been a rough life for Ellie, Hannah, Josie and Shoo - all ex-cons with nothing to show for their lives - but not for much longer. Today won't be like any other day. Today they embark on the final stage of their long-held plan. To live out the rest of their lives on a beach in Barbados, courtesy of £3 million stolen from Ellie's lying, cheating, violent gangster husband. If all goes to plan... but it doesn't. A cruel twist of fate, finds them on the run, as the glamourous girls end up in hiding in Hope Springs, a remote Scottish village, without passports, without a plan and more or less without hope. If they can just hide their true identities and keep their heads down long enough to make a break for it - but Hope Springs has other things in store...

Hope Springs consists of 8 x 50 minute episodes spread across three DVDs. The series (originally broadcast on BBC 1 between June and July 2009) follows a group of four women who, after being released from prison, pull off one last job in order to "retire" to Barbados. However, things don't go quite to plan and the gang end up holed up in a dump of a hotel in a remote part of Scotland.

Here, over the course of the series, the gang become an intricate part of the community. If they can keep their heads low and not attract the attention of the law, or the hit man sent to kill them, will they ever want to leave?

The series opens with Ellie Lagden (Alex Kingston), Hannah Temple (Siân Reeves), Shoo Coggan (Christine Bottomley) and Josie Porritt (Vinette Robinson) robbing Ellie's criminal husband of several million pounds. They then travel by car to Scotland and decide, at random, to stop briefly at Hope Springs - hoping to fly abroad once the dust settles. They end up buying the local rundown hotel from the current landlady Sadie Cairncross (Annette Crosbie) in order to have total privacy - closing the hotel under the pretence that it's being renovated/ However, when a fire at the hotel burns almost all of the money, the girls are forced to try and make a go of running the hotel to simply stay financially afloat.

One thing which is interesting about this series is that almost every character has something to hide - secrets which are slowly revealed over the course of the series. These include individuals covering up a murder; someone who is being abused by their husband, someone who is about to get married to a man who may not be the father of her unborn child; and an individual who is desperate to get their hands on the hotel because it is hiding a terrible secret.

Extras are a little on the poor side, all we get are Filmographies and a Photo Gallery, but then the low RRP of £25 reflects this.

9

Darren Rea