A woman's fight to adopt a war baby from the Third World after becoming unable to conceive.
In 1971, fresh-faced, eager for heroics, the young officers arrive in Belfast. Pelted with rocks by kids, sniped at by the IRA, they take refuge in sex, black humour and the weird rituals of the officers' mess.
A Lancashire-born American soap star who, returning to Britain, is reunited on live television with her sister Margaret—a motorway cafeteria waitress.
A repressed anti-porn campaigner meets a glamorous American porn actress who changes her outlook on life.
Charlie Dyce, an ex-young offender, works in a seedy London café and meets Myra, a prostitute. Her pimp begins to cause trouble when she becomes pregnant.
A body is found face down in a tank. Detective Inspector Iverson, investigating what seems like a routine case of suicide, becomes involved with the mesmerizing psychotherapist who was helping the dead woman find her true self. Gradually their roles are reversed as her probing uncovers the detective's own deeper motives and needs, until the knife-edge between suicide and murder is exposed.
The past catches up with an ageing American jazz pianist when he returns to the clubs of Lancashire and Yorkshire that he last visited 10 years previously.